If there’s one type of compatriot I love, it’s an ungrateful descendant of immigrants – ungrateful to the would-be White Saviour Left, that is. Those who believe that anyone on the darker side of beige must forever show fealty to the crazed communist-gone-cuckoo ideas of no borders and let ’em all in.
Thus the left’s reaction to Shabana Mahmood’s radical new plans to stop the massive influx of illegal migrants – in fearful flight from France and its admittedly overwhelming choice of over one thousand cheeses – has been predictably racist, even if expressed in a right-on tone. ‘But your parents were immigrants from Pakistan who worked around the clock setting up and maintaining a corner shop! Look how much in common you’ve got with a criminally inclined sex pest illegally arriving on a beach in Kent who will immediately disappear into the black economy!’, they’ve wailed in unison. It’s a modern version of the old right-wing, racist ‘they all look the same to me’ trope. Apparently, any woman who can trace an immigrant ancestor back a few generations must thereafter feel comradeship with every chancer on a small boat trying his luck.
In the past, the horribly racist word ‘coconut’ (brown on the outside, white on the inside) has been used by the left to describe people of colour who dare to tear out their Labour-chip and join the Tories. (With the women getting it especially viciously for not being happy with their prescribed tradwife role of supporting the men-folk, for let us remember that Labour is still the only British party never to have had a female leader.)
In the recent past, it’s been applied to ethnic-minority mavericks such as Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch. Even though lefties have learnt that such blatant racist bullying is no longer an acceptable look, you can tell it’s driving them nuts – their Twitter-fingers itching like they’ve got a bad case of scabies – that they can’t throw their dodgy metaphor with all the force of an actual coconut at a fairground shy at the latest name to be added to this roll of honour. Indeed, this one has been extra audacious in that she has stayed firmly in the Labour Party while totally changing her mind. I refer, of course, to UK home secretary Shabana Mahmood who, with her recent statement that ‘illegal migration is tearing Britain apart’, not only waved her Union Jack for all to see, but also planted it firmly in her boss’s backyard.
The statement was Mahmood’s final step in her ‘Blue Labour’ journey – towards that section of the party who want to make it clear to the electorate that they have no truck with some of the wilder flights of fancy of their colleagues on the government benches, on topics as various as Net Zero and ‘trans rights’. That she is a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants – who just a few years ago was herself calling for an amnesty for illegal migrants – only makes her current position more admirable.
Mahmood’s migration announcement wasn’t even the first time she has been found listening to the populace rather than lecturing them, unlike a lot of her comrades. Unlike many Labour women, she has never drunk the Transmaid Kool-Aid. In 2019, the perennially shocked tweeter Owen Jones called her comments on ‘age appropriateness’ when it came to teaching LGBTQ content during school-sex education ‘shocking’. He even claimed somewhat hysterically that she supported ‘trying to stop lessons educating pupils about the existence of gay people’, to which Mahmood replied quite rightly that she had never advocated any such thing.
Last year, talking to the Telegraph, Mahmood expressed concern over the treatment of gender-realist women. ‘Many women have had to go to court, usually in employment tribunals, in order to clarify… their right to say that biological sex is real and is immutable – a position that I also agree with.’ She went on – the shameless hussy! – to state that she ‘agrees with JK’ that ‘biological sex is real and immutable’ is a fact – and that Rowling was ‘leading the fight’ for women’s rights.
And now she has brought her commonsensical attitude to immigration, making herself Public Enemy No1 with the loony likes of commentators such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who took to The Jeremy Vine Show to give an extraordinarily condescending and oddly over-personal attack on Mahmood:
‘Her heritage is Mirpuri, which is a branch of Pakistan from where many immigrants came… Mirpuris are among the people who most abused the migration system through marriage… It includes forcing their young people to marry a relative in Mirpur so that relatives can come here – I want Shabana to deal with that!’
YAB then added darkly: ‘They never talk about anything that affects them…’
The petulance and failed ‘Gotcha!’ here typify the unbalanced way Mahmood’s cry-bully critics are reacting to her refreshing openness in committing the heinous crime of listening to the voters. This includes many in her own party, who are planning to rebel against her asylum reforms.
Once again, our wretched prime minister only has himself to blame for the civil war breaking out on his benches. Mahmood was hiding in plain sight all the time, as choosing Margaret Thatcher as a political heroine was probably a bit of a clue that she wouldn’t be happy with being the token frontbench Muslim. It’s telling that Starmer is so out of touch with the electorate that the only statement he has ever retracted – saying that mass immigration has created ‘an island of strangers’ – is the one the electorate most agreed with. When Mahmood stated at the despatch box yesterday that immigration is ‘dividing people and making them estranged’, she was surely talking to him as much as the voters.
It’s a relief to see Labour women politicians finally emerging from their ‘all immigration good’ trance, even if they are only doing it after sitting on the world’s biggest whoopee cushion, placed under their stuck-up bums by that naughty Reform crew. For some time we’ve had great (and gorgeous) women of colour as political commentators, like Nana Akua, Esther Krakue, Inaya Folarin Iman, Khadija Khan and Nervana Mahmoud. Now we have Laila Cunningham, who is every lefty’s nightmare – the Muslim mother of seven children, born of Egyptian immigrant parents, with the looks of a Cindy Crawford-era supermodel. She’s both a Reform councillor and seemingly semi-permanent performer on TV politics programmes. She is an extraordinarily tough and self-possessed woman, who has said that she receives Islamophobic abuse, but would only report it if it posed a literal threat to her. She has added that she does not even blame people for holding anti-Muslim views, that alleged ‘Islamophobia’ should not be a criminal offence, and that Muslims must accept being offended or move to another country.
Such a flagrantly superior human in every way is Ms Cunningham that one can imagine the bed-wetting cry-bullies of the left-wing commentariat barely able to compute her, their primitive circuit boards breaking down in sheer incomprehension at her splendour. Watching her in a Newsnight ‘debate’ last night with Green leader Zack Polanski seemed almost cruel – though tremendous fun – as if some evil genius had created a right-wing woman with the latest upgrade in both brains and beauty for the sole purpose of making left-wing men look as thick and unattractive as possible. He certainly wasn’t going to offer Ms Cunningham any snake-oil hypnosis to make her more attractive!
As spiked’s Joanna Williams has pointed out, Labour has become ‘the party of the posh’, as ‘only former private school pupils come out swinging for Labour’. She dissected a recent poll thus:
‘The only group more likely to back Labour than any other party is those who attended private, fee-paying schools. An astonishing 38 per cent of former private-school pupils say they would vote Labour if an election were called tomorrow, compared with 25 per cent who would back Reform and only 17 per cent would vote for the Conservative Party. This is in almost complete contrast to the views of the majority of the population.’
Hopefully, that horrible word ‘coconut’ has now been put to bed by a left once so fond of flinging it around. However, thinking logically, if it ever returned, the new meaning would now have to be a person of colour who persists in holding supposedly ‘progressive’ views, which have become the property of the white elite. One of the most cheering reasons to value our legal and loyal immigrants – as opposed to the kind who are more interested in Gaza than Grimsby – is that they have little truck with modish silliness, from green issues to trans ones. Indeed, whenever one sees footage of a bunch of woke showers having one of their periodic tantrums, one recalls the 2019 Jon Snow line about the Brexit march, that he had ‘never seen so many white people’. Or to bring the comparison bang up to date, whiter than a Bob Vylan audience, bro!
Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, Notes from the Naughty Step, here.
