Has the Labour party finally found its answer to Margaret Thatcher? Shabana Mahmood’s withering response to Lib Dem MP Max Wilkinson’s po-faced complaint about her language in the asylum debate this week must rank as the most devastating, and justified, playing of the race card in recent parliamentary history. Opposition to using every legal means to stop the boats, she implied, is a kind of luxury belief enjoyed only by those who aren’t at risk of being called a ‘F***ing P***’ in the street.

Has the Labour party finally found its answer to Margaret Thatcher?

Turning the tables on the racial justice panjandrums on her own side by citing her personal experience of racial abuse felt very Thatcher vs the wets. So, too, did Mahmood’s combination of personal conviction and plain, jargon-free, language.

Like Thatcher, Mahmood comes from a religiously devout political family. Indeed, Mahmood (like several of her Labour colleagues) is rather more of a nepo-baby than Thatcher: her father was chairman of the Birmingham Labour party, which surely trumps being alderman of Grantham.

Thatcher in her time was more of an outsider in the Westminster club as a woman than Mahmood is now as a British Pakistani. Nevertheless the latter’s religiosity and conservatism on many matters, including illegal immigration, sets her apart from most people in the modern Labour party which has been partly defined by openness to immigration.

As the country’s centre of gravity has shifted from metropolitan openness in the heyday of New Labour to provincial insecurity in more recent years, Labour leaders have struggled to authentically embody the new mood, despite wrapping themselves in rhetorical union flags. The public can sense it. In case there was any doubt about it, Keir Starmer reminded them with his ridiculous apology for using the term ‘island of strangers’ when introducing Labour’s new hardline policies on legal immigration back in May.

By contrast, Mahmood feels no white liberal squeamishness about a hardline approach to boatloads of black........

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