“As a Labour backbencher, I do support a general amnesty for all people who are already in the country so they can regularise their status,” said Shabana Mahmood to an interviewer back in 2021. “It’s not official Labour Party policy but myself and a group of other Labour politicians continue to make the argument.”
Later that year, Mahmood stood on a podium at the Labour Party conference and excoriated “pale, male and stale” politicians. As an opposition MP, she was often seen holding “Free Palestine” placards. But now, as Home Secretary, Mahmood is the politician who must grasp the nettle of Britain’s asylum reforms. She is the minister Keir Starmer has chosen to implement the “Denmark-style” reforms he hopes will restore public faith in the collapsing system: making it harder for refugees to settle, and foregrounding the expectation that receiving asylum is a temporary measure.
At first, this seems an odd mix of task and person. Mahmood’s detractors, especially those on the Left, might call her a hypocrite. Her cheerleaders, especially those on the Right, have hailed her as a realist and a strident moral decision-maker.
But it is clear that Labour sees her as the only politician capable of delivering these changes and averting a post-budget electoral collapse next May. In this respect, she is really the consummate “Blue Labour” politician — a perfect example of the strange, shadowy and seemingly contradictory impulses on her wing of the party: namely the “Politics of Paradox”.
The paradox here is that to save the overall moral legitimacy of the asylum system, the Government must implement a series of changes that make it seem less compassionate. Changes that are by turns symbolic, well-intentioned, unrealistic or inhumane will hopefully restore trust in the system with the public: and allow things to carry on more or less as they were. This is what the Danish centre-left have achieved, so why wouldn’t it work in Britain?
The “Politics of Paradox” was coined back in 2011, when Blue Labour founders Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford collected together a series of seminars under the title The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. It was part of a spirited attempt to give the party an intellectual framework that could help it understand Gordon Brown’s defeat in 2010 — an attempt to return Labour to the history of class politics from which it had come unmoored.
“This is what the Danish centre-left have achieved, so why wouldn’t it work in Britain?”
Even then, years before Brexit, Labour was becoming a political party run by and for globalisation’s winners — progressive activists and the aspirational social elite. This was the paradox: Labour presented itself as the party of affluent urbanites and the information economy, when it was really a party of ex-mineworkers with broken lungs.
The Labour leadership of the time were alive to these apparent contradictions. The foreword to The Labour Tradition, written by then-leader Ed Miliband, emphasised the “need to rediscover the tradition of Labour as a grassroots community movement”. The essays demonstrated that close social ties and bonds, family, and a concept of place were central to working-class identity and key parts of the Labour tradition. The authors evoked proud traditions of ground-up politics that could stretch back through the artist and socialist William Morris, through the 19th-century founders of the Labour Representation Committee, to the democratic activists murdered at the Peterloo Massacre and beyond — all the way to the proto-socialist Levellers and Diggers from the English Civil War. These traditions disdained elitism, metropolitanism and hierarchy. Instead, they celebrated ordinary family life. That was what Labour should pin to its mast. That, so the theory went, was its real identity.
But here was another paradox. To proclaim this turn against elite metropolitanism, lifelong professional politician Ed invited his brother and fellow Oxford University graduate David Miliband to donate an essay. Editors Marc Stears (Oxford University) and Stuart White (Oxford University) invited extra contributors, adding to content taken from the seminars held at Oxford University. These included the privately educated think-tank director Philip Collins (Cambridge), and the now former minister James Purnell (who had at this point returned to the think-tank career he had held between his spell at Oxford and his period as a Labour minister). These were the people — all members of the intellectual elite — who became the scions of Labour’s working-class voice and identity, warning against the gentrification of the party. But remember, this wasn’t hypocrisy. It was paradox.
It didn’t immediately change the party. The General Election of 2015 found Ed Miliband’s Labour embracing the paradoxical politics of radical timidity and slumping to defeat. Under Momentum’s influence, Labour offered a radically outstretched middle finger to the working class and lost twice, in 2017 and 2019. But the pendulum has now swung back again. The paradox-handling technicians are back behind the steering wheel.
For this, they have Morgan McSweeney to thank — the Labour fixer who cut his political teeth battling the BNP in Barking and Dagenham, and said to be a long-term Blue Labour acolyte. McSweeney reached the top of Labour democracy through the think-tank-cum-organising-project, Labour Together. The initiative was set up to try and tie Labour’s dysfunctional factions together through the difficult Jeremy Corbyn era and its aftermath.
But what started as a grassroots project later became a sink for big donor funds. The organisation jettisoned any staff who bought into its original mission of unity — and instead became oriented around breaking up the Labour family rather than keeping it together.
Paradoxically, however, this was the only realistic way to get a class politics that didn’t completely neglect non-metropolitan England back into the Labour Party. Polling showed Labour members far from the general public on almost every issue. Any Labour member on the ground understood that the party had become utterly dominated by graduates in large cities, particularly London. These were people whose politics were representative of their insular social milieu. People from places that applaud themselves for processing asylum seekers, before shipping them off to post-industrial England’s poverty hotspots.
So a platform of pledges was developed to present the Starmer leadership as “Corbyn in a suit” — and therefore amenable to the arty member selectorate. It included a pledge for “Full voting rights for EU nationals”, as well as promises to “Defend free movement” and to “End indefinite detention and call for the closure of centres such as Yarl’s Wood”.
The platform was then quietly discarded in its entirety. Keir Starmer took over Labour and nobody got what they voted for. Selections for Labour’s parliamentary candidates in 2024 produced a party more packed with professional politicians, lobbyists, Spads and elite professionals than any Labour government in history. You might think this cohort would have the decency to be the quiet foot soldiers they were selected to be, chosen over binmen and bus drivers and nurses with more “challenging” affiliations to trade unions — but they aren’t playing ball. They seem angry. They were never told this was going to happen.
What would the Chartists referenced in The Labour Tradition think of this strategy? Maybe they’d shrug: “It’s a paradox”.
As for McSweeney, he no doubt understands, in light of these asylum reforms, that the Danish Social Democrats are the only Left-affiliated party in Europe to have won back working-class voters from the populist Right. However, it’s not clear if he has read the details of Mette Fredericksen’s party’s success. Fredericksen led the change from the front, and did so for years. Her changes were not carried out behind closed doors — but were done with conviction and consent.
After the working class abandoned the Danish Left, the Social Democrats rigorously re-assessed its attitudes and biases. They produced a pamphlet called “Just And Realistic” (Retfærdig og Realistisk) that was distributed to members. Frederiksen led a debate that scrutinised her party’s losses: heavily and transparently. This produced a new strategic, moral message: “You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.” And she made sure to deliver on the second part of that message.
In government, the Danish Social Democrats practiced some of the most aggressive tax-and-spend policy in the world. Their returning working-class voters at the next election prioritised welfare, the economy and the environment. Immigration and asylum issues became a much less salient electoral issue for every party voter, save the now irrelevant populist Right. With these issues off the table, the focus landed on the economic policy that is the neglected pillar of Blue Labour thought — indeed, which is so far almost completely absent from Labour’s governance.
Instead, we have an approach that’s more “Blue Labour on immigration, Tony Blair Institute Labour on economics”. It has produced an industrial strategy that ignores Britain’s neglected towns and struggling heavy industry, ignores the mutual ownership models that are a socialist tradition, and instead favours cash bungs to American AI industries located in major cities. Having carried its “Ming vase” over the electoral finish line, pledging almost nothing, Starmer’s Government has found itself with no mandate to raise tax — and unable to raise money from the ever-fewer winners that characterise the most regionally unequal, unmeritocratic economy in the developed world.
In Denmark, Frederiksen’s party had one of the most egalitarian, socially mobile, secure and radical societies in the world to fight for after the debate on asylum. What will Labour have, besides the prospect of calmed markets?
The victory of soft Left candidate Lucy Powell in Labour’s deputy leadership election shows that the party’s infrastructure isn’t really able to manage the kind of paradox it is being asked to tolerate. The current administration is on notice. The lack of effort to convince its internal structures has come back to haunt Starmer. The local elections in 2026 will be a day of reckoning.
The Labour leader’s only real attempt to develop a rhetoric vaguely similar in tone to the Danish Social Democrats in his “Island Of Strangers” speech was excoriated by the party’s members and voters, and later rescinded. He has never understood, let alone made, an authentic Left-wing argument against an asylum system that drains a foreign aid budget intended to save children from malaria. This is money that instead now lines the pockets of corporate behemoths like Serco. Starmer is now the least-popular prime minister, among pollsters, since records began. Most of Labour’s members want him to leave.
Mahmood may represent Labour’s last attempt to magic back those voters they claim to represent: the angry, disempowered and downwardly mobile, living in areas that have been neglected for a generation. People who should be on Labour’s team but are on Reform’s. Certainly, in this world of paradox, where class politics is imposed by Oxford PPE graduates, those voters haven’t been given their own voice in the party machinery. Since Angela Rayner’s departure, there is no prominent Labour politician that has had a “real” job.
If this last conjuring trick fails, it might well be that Labour’s only option is to concede that its working class traditions are dead. To beat Reform now may mean trying to ditch First Past The Post, to run another Brexit referendum alliance of educated urban graduates and middle-class professionals, absorbing Lib Dem and Green votes.
The middle class graduates that Labour came to depend on know the Labour they want — and they are annoyed. As it is, Labour has begun to resemble a scene in Armando Ianucci’s In The Loop, where James Gandolfini’s military general remarks that if you fight a war and have no soldiers left “it looks like you’ve lost”. If you claim a politics based around class relations, and working class people aren’t part of it — but a lot of the elite are — well, you know the rest. The next Labour leader will need to figure out what in this project, a battle against the odds for the party’s soul, is worth saving.
