Gimmicks only get in the way of Shabana Mahmood’s migrant arrest record

How did home secretary Shabana Mahmood choose to blow her own trumpet at a record number of illegal worker arrests and raids since Labour came to power?

To hammer home that, over the past 18 months, more than 17,400 raids have been carried out on nail bars, car washes and high-street barbershops by the Home Office‘s immigration enforcement teams, Mahmood’s predecessors in the role might have called up a friendly camera crew and gone on an early morning immigration enforcement raid themselves.

Mahmood left that to Mike Tapp, a junior minister in the Home Office. Instead, she launched a new Home Office TikTok account, with a video (singular, so far) showing migrants being detained.

It took me back to her Conservative predecessor, Priti Patel. Five years ago, Patel, dressed in a black jacket with the words “Home Secretary” on the front, attended a raid on a house in east London to arrest the suspected ringleaders of a people-smuggling gang.

It was a performance designed to provide the visuals to reinforce the message: that she was tough, and that she was personally overseeing the deployment of that toughness.

But that is all it was. While Patel was home secretary, most of the indicators went in the wrong direction, including the number of people working illegally and the number of those removed.

This gap between tough talk and feeble action opened up across Patel’s brief. There was talk of building a wave machine in the Channel when the small boats started coming across in large numbers. Ideas were floated of sending uninvited migrants to St Helena or Ascension Island, and several other places that sounded like the kingdom of Far Far Away in Shrek. Nothing came of any of them.

Eventually, Patel signed an unexpected deal with Rwanda, which prompted liberal outrage and legal challenge, but nothing came of that either.

All the while, Patel presided over the quadrupling of legal immigration – a fundamental betrayal of the Brexit promise that neither she nor Boris Johnson seemed to know anything about until the figures were published after they had both left office.

Plainly, Mahmood is doing better than Patel in meeting the voters’ demand for lower immigration and stricter enforcement of immigration rules. Legal immigration is coming down, thanks mainly to belated and desperate changes made by James Cleverly, who was left holding the Home Office parcel when the music stopped for the Tories.

Indeed, legal immigration might even come down to net zero – a net zero Nigel Farage could support – according to Fraser Nelson, the former editor of The Spectator who is rather better at counting than Patel and Johnson ever were.

That would be a useful achievement for which Mahmood, with her socially conservative “Blue Labour” pitch, would be happy to take the credit – even if Rachel Reeves at the Treasury might worry about the constricting effect it has on economic growth.

Except that Labour is unlikely to be granted much credit for cutting legal immigration as long as the boats keep coming, visibly reminding people that their government cannot control who comes into the country.

Hence, the nail bars. Mahmood needs visual imagery to counter the lifejacketed disembarkers at Dover, and to try to dramatise the statistics for raids, arrests and removals, which show how much more seriously the Labour government is than its Tory predecessor at the nuts and bolts of immigration law enforcement.

Hence, the Home Office launching a new TikTok account today, called Secure Borders UK, straplined “Restoring order and control to our borders”, to try to get the message across – including to potential migrants themselves.

But low legal immigration and better enforcement are not going to be enough. Mahmood has done better than her disastrous Tory predecessors, and she has contradicted many assumptions about Labour being soft on immigration. But she has not yet stopped the boats.

The pilot scheme to return migrants to France in exchange for an equal number of vetted refugees has sent about 200 back in its first three months. This is significantly more than anything the Tories managed, but it is nowhere near enough to deter new arrivals, who came at a rate of 800 a week last year.

As much as Shabana Mahmood is so much better than her predecessors, she is still in danger of the Priti Patel trap of overpromising and underdelivering on the one part of her brief that matters most.