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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Zoe Williams

Is Shabana Mahmood’s plan to seize the jewels of asylum seekers a joke?

Shabana Mahmood surrounded by darkness on stage at the Labour Party  conference in September with a sign at her lectern reading 'Renew Britain'.
Shabana Mahmood on stage at the Labour Party conference in September. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

You can’t react to every piece of flotsam on the unending tide of nastiness that emanates from Westminster on the subject of immigration, or you’ll start to feel like you’re the idiot. Are we surprised that a Labour home secretary would want to remove any prospect of permanent citizenship for all refugees, thereby ending Britain’s standing as a place of sanctuary? Petty, vindictive, counterproductive, narrow-minded, yes, but you could hardly call this surprising.

But, finally, a policy arrived that was so out of the normal run of things that I assumed it was a joke – a piece of satire, floated on X by some member of the wokerati, to make Shabana Mahmood sound truly heinous. Apparently, she wanted to seize the jewellery and other valuables to pay for their accommodation.Deploying exaggeration to underscore how much like a cartoon villain a politician sounds is a little bit sixth form and so far hasn’t been effective. And yet it couldn’t possibly be real, right? Because it sounds like a cartoon villain.

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