Shabana Mahmood has gone to even greater lengths to justify her abhorrent asylum reforms. Just yesterday, the Home Office briefed that the government could go ahead with plans to ‘seize’ jewellery and other valuables from asylum seekers.
Don’t worry, as fucking grim as that sounds, they’ve assured us that they won’t ‘seize’ sentimental jewellery. I don’t know about you, but I definitely trust a government that doesn’t know its arse from its elbow to distinguish between valuable jewellery and sentimental.
Rather than considering the moral depravity of her department’s proposal, Shabana Mahmood dug her heels in:
WATCH: Shabana Mahmood rebuts a Lib Dem MP who accuses her of using divisive rhetoric on the new asylum reforms
“Unlike him, I am the one that is regularly called a fucking Paki and told to go back home” pic.twitter.com/AfhBywBhrL
— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) November 17, 2025
Shabana Mahmood has no shame
The full context of the quote from pound-shop Priti Patel reads as follows:
I have to say to the honourable gentleman, I wish I had the privilege of walking around this country and not seeing the divisions that the issue of migration and asylum system is creating across this country.
First of all, these “divisions” – a watering down of the terrifying racism permeating our streets – are not happening because migration is an issue. They’re happening because politicians like Shabana Mahmood weaponise the very very few people that seek asylum in this country in an effort to appeal to racist voters.
Racists have been regularly showing up every week in my area to shout abuse at passing Black and Brown people. They’ve physically fought residents on the street who are trying to stop them putting up flags. They’ve told people who call this their home to fuck off back where they came from. Basically, they’ve done everything they can to make sure that all people of colour – regardless of immigration status or anything else – know that they are not safe in this country.
They’re not people who are merely ‘concerned’ about “divisions” from migration. Do you think these people give a fuck about the statistics on how few asylum seekers actually come to this country? Do you think they’ll actually vote for Labour politicians desperately trying to court them? Will they fuck.
‘Divisive’ is not the fucking word
Then came Shabana Mahmood’s attempt at being a Confident Little Deporter:
Unlike him, unfortunately I am the one that is regularly called a fucking Paki and told to go back home. It is I who know through my personal experience, and that of my constituents, just how divisive the issue of asylum has become in our country.
She may have been aiming for a punchy soundbite, but it came out sounding like a desperate and deplorable attempt to use her own experiences of racism to justify deporting people desperate for a better life. How many times does someone have to be called a Paki, or be told to go back home, to earn the right to make the lives of Brown people a desperate misery?
Because, let me tell you, I’ve had those slurs hurled at me my entire life, no matter where I live in England. It may be personally sad for Mahmood to be called a Paki – it feels like a rush of dehumanisation come to slap you in the face. It’s a reminder that even if you were born here, your citizenship isn’t the same as that of your white neighbours. It’s a reminder, as if you could ever forget, that you’re not a full person, you’re not ‘from’ here.
And the thing is, Mahmood is taking those feelings and slapping them on top of a Home Office policy which demeans and dehumanises asylum seekers. She’s taking those experiences of racism and using them to fuel media narratives that manufacture consent for deporting people.
So, no, I don’t really give a fuck if she’s being called a Paki. I do give a fuck that she’s weaponising her own identity to prop up a white supremacist system that targets the most vulnerable people in our society.
Who broke the system?
The next set of comments from Shabana Mahmood haven’t garnered as many headlines, but they’re worth a look:
I wish it were possible to say that there isn’t a problem here, that there’s nothing to see, and that it is all in fact extremist right-wing talking points but this system is broken and it is incumbent on all Members of Parliament to acknowledge how badly broken the system is and to make it a moral mission to fix this system so that it stops creating the division that we all see and I do say to him, I do not consider it acceptable or appropriate for people in this place to not acknowledge the real experience of those sitting outside of this House. We are supposed to be in here to reflect that experience in this House and I hope that he will approach the debate that we will no doubt have on all of these measures in that spirit.
Unfortunately for Mahmood, it’s not 2005 and her piss-poor racial analysis isn’t going to fly anymore. She’s specifically refused to connect being called a Paki with anything remotely resembling a system of racist oppression. It would be far more useful to have a conversation about how having brown faces in high places is no substitute for actual change.
What difference does it make if the person spitting abuse at you on the street, or the border officer kicking your door down in a dawn raid, or the racist emboldened by politicians paved the path to their actions via a brown face? Whether it’s Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, or Shabana Mahmood, the end result is the same.
Brown people can work in service of racism and white supremacy as much as anyone white can. I don’t give a fuck if Shabana Mahmood was called a Paki when she’s heading a system that destroys the lives of Black and Brown people who are trying to survive this nationalist racist hellscape we all live in.
Being aware of a highly educated and powerful Brown woman’s experiences of racism shouldn’t inform this ‘debate.’ Liberal white people might be shamed into silence by Shabana Mahmood’s recounting of racism, but I see her actions for what they are: a desperate attempt to justify the cruelty and violence the Home Office are unleashing on asylum seekers.
Featured image via X/Politics UK
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