Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, has removed a large cache of material from her personal website. This included a significant number of pro-asylum posts just in the last month alone. The deleted posts, alongside other long-forgotten articles and videos, show that Mahmood took a considerably different line on immigration and asylum to the hardline approach she has adopted since being appointed Home Secretary in September this year.

Shabana Mahmood: erasing her history?

The now-deleted materials show that in 2017, Shabana Mahmood even attempted to convince the then-Tory Minister for Children and Families, Edward Timpson, to allow unaccompanied child asylum seekers to sponsor settlement visas for their families – a move that would have significantly expanded the scope of the asylum regime and the UK’s approach to family reunification. Mahmood’s recent reforms have scrapped automatic family reunification rights for asylum seekers.

Mahmood also previously implored the government in 2015 to double the number of asylum seekers it accepted in the face of global unrest, ‘if not more.’ Her proposals would have resulted in 40,000 asylum seekers being accepted over five years. The proposal stands in stark contrast to Mahmood’s newly introduced ‘capped’ safe and legal routes, which would only permit a ‘few hundred’ asylum seekers to settle in Britain per year.

A Home Office spokesperson told the Canary that Mahmood’s website was updated ‘last month’ – so about the time Mahmood announced her crackdown on asylum seekers. They said that this update:

automatically archived all articles that were written before November 2022… so there was no decision made here to archive any previous content.

However, the Home Office did not answer questions as to whether Mahmood would restore the old content, including the pro-asylum posts, and why not.

Punitive policies

In November this year, two months after her appointment as Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood announced wide-ranging and punitive reforms to the UK’s immigration and asylum system.

The reforms are designed to make the UK a more hostile place for asylum seekers to reduce the ‘pull’ factors she claims incentivise asylum seekers to travel to the UK. The measures include significantly reducing settlement rights and slashing the ability of settled asylum seekers to sponsor visas for spouses or children under 18 years of age.

Mahmood earned the nickname ‘the new hard woman of British politics’ for her reforms, which were widely seen as a striking move to the right for the Labour Party on immigration and asylum. Mahmood is a close ally of Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, who is said to have been critical to her appointment as Home Secretary and has urged Labour to go harder on immigration and asylum to see off the electoral threat of Reform.

The Labour Party went into overdrive to paint Mahmood as having a long-held belief in the need to crack down on the asylum system. But archived version of Mahmood’s website, alongside other long-forgotten articles, tell a different story.

Shabana Mahmood’s previous stance

In 2015, Shabana Mahmood set out her stall as an advocate for asylum rights in response to the surge in small boats carrying refugees to Greece.

Most of the refugees were fleeing conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan and disorder in Iraq via Turkey. Mahmood travelled to three camps that accepted asylum seekers and sang the praises of volunteers and aid workers who were offered refugees dry clothes and food. She recorded short videos telling the stories of asylum seekers and aid workers, which were then subject to extensive coverage in the Birmingham Mail.

Mahmood also wrote an impassioned piece about her experiences at the camps for the New Statesman, defending asylum seekers and attacking the then-government’s talk of ‘push-pull’ factors as ignoring a more pressing reality. ‘[The] Home Secretary is not entirely wrong when she says that we have to be mindful of push and pull factors,’ Mahmood wrote;

But she does again entirely miss the point. Because the push factor is either death or the slow torture of a temporary life in a camp which amounts to no kind of life at all. If that is what they face then they are going to run. … You would run. I would run. They are running. We must do our part to help them.

Mahmood notably also demanded that the government not only increase the number of safe and legal routes for asylum seekers but also double the number of refugees that it accepted. ‘Unless there is coordinated action across Europe it won’t be long before we see pictures of refugees who have died from the cold on our TV screens,’ Mahmood argued:

That is why I believe the government should go beyond its current commitment and agree to resettle at least 10,000 refugees over the next year. And the number of 20,000 over five years currently agreed to by the government is clearly inadequate – we need to be willing to at least double that, if not more.

Clive Lewis: Labour now fears Reform

The Labour MP for Norwich South, Clive Lewis, suggested to the Canary that Shabana Mahmood needed to properly explain how she had shifted from her previous position on asylum to her more hardline approach:

On the substance, the reforms Mahmood is now advancing represent one of the most restrictive moves in decades,’ Lewis explained. ‘They sit uncomfortably beside a record of arguing for expanded safe routes, family reunification, and higher asylum intake. That inconsistency matters because people can see a political class that adapts not out of conviction but out of fear – fear of Reform, fear of headlines, fear of an honest conversation with the public.

Zoe Gardner, an independent researcher on immigration and asylum policy, was fiercely critical when the Canary told her of Mahmood’s pro-asylum history:

Mahmood, like so many other Labour politicians, has completely sold out,’ Gardner said. ‘It reinforces distrust in politics to see how cheap and meaningless our leaders’ principles really are. I hope that she feels thoroughly ashamed of herself for her duplicity and willingness to step on the backs of vulnerable people on her climb to power.

‘She believes it will consolidate her rise to power and might even enable her to become Prime Minister… It is a straightforward calculation about gaining power, and she evidently has no true political beliefs whatsoever that she won’t throw away in that pursuit.

Lewis echoed Gardner’s concerns.

‘I do not believe most of these changes come from deep conviction,’ he told the Canary in relation to Mahmood’s recent hardline reforms:

Nothing in Mahmood’s previous public record suggests she has long held these views. What is clear is the enormous pressure inside Labour to chase the political right, to “take the issue off the table” by mirroring the rhetoric and logic of Reform UK. But copying the far right has never defeated the far right. It simply legitimises their worldview and drives the political centre of gravity further toward punitive, exclusionary politics.

My bigger worry is this: when people see senior politicians erasing their past positions to fit the current party line, they conclude the entire system is performative. And that disillusionment is exactly the oxygen on which the authoritarian right thrives.

A very different Shabana Mahmood

Certainly, deleted materials from Shabana Mahmood’s website showed that she made asylum and refugee rights central to her public persona. Between 2016 and 2019, the front-page of Mahmood’s website listed the ‘campaigns’ on which she was working. The website prominently listed a ‘campaign for refugees’ as one of several campaigns, alongside campaigns on ‘burial and death’ and ‘car insurance prices.’

The ‘campaign for refugees’ page aggregated news and update posts on the topic of refugees and asylum seekers. An analysis of ‘grabs’ of Mahmood’s website shows that some of the posts were hosted on her website as recently as February 2025. This would have meant that anyone searching Mahmood’s website against keywords like ‘asylum’ would have found the pages – until they were recently removed.

The focus of Mahmood’s ‘campaign for refugees’ was on both small boat arrivals in Greece and child refugees arriving in the UK.  The now-deleted ‘campaign for refugees’ page included YouTube clips of Mahmood’s visits to asylum camps in Greece in 2015, which Mahmood hosted on a now-defunct YouTube account, @shabanamahmoodmp.

It is not known when this YouTube account was deleted, although a capture of the account was taken in July 2024 by the Wayback Machine, suggesting it was deleted after the 2024 General Election. Mahmood’s current official YouTube account, @shabanamahmoodvideos, does not feature any of the Greece asylum videos; it’s oldest content is a ‘short’ video from June 2024. Most of it now features videos of Mahmood announcing and defending her crackdown on asylum seekers.

Demands

A post from October 2016 – the first saved under the ‘campaign for refugees’ tag – was headlined ‘fighting for a better life for child asylum seekers.’

The post explained that Shabana Mahmood had three goals in her campaign. The first was to push the government to publish a strategy for how to manage the influx of unaccompanied child asylum seekers to the UK. The second was to ‘ensure local authorities are equipped to care for unaccompanied child asylum-seekers.’ The third was to ‘ensure speedy reunification of lone asylum seekers by allowing unaccompanied refugee [sic] to act as sponsors for their parents.’

The last demand was the specific focus of a letter that Mahmood wrote to the Under-Secretary for Children and Families, Edward Timpson, in January 2017. Mahmood asked Timpson to consider two proposals to help protect unaccompanied child refugees, including introducing a system where independent guardians would be appointed for every unaccompanied minor.

The most notable proposal, however, was to ‘provide refugee children with family reunion rights.’ She believed that child asylum seekers should be allowed to sponsor visas for family members still abroad. Mahmood argued passionately that ‘surely it would be far better for that child, and the care system, to have their parents in the UK to support them.’

Mahmood further explained that her proposal:

would bring us in line with other European Union (with the exception of Denmark) countries so would not markedly create a “pull” factor. The UK would simply be coming into line with other EU nations.

The UK has never allowed unaccompanied child refugees to sponsor family reunification efforts, even when part of the EU. Mahmood’s 2017 proposals, if adopted, would thus have marked a major liberalisation in the UK’s asylum system.

What happened to Shabana Mahmood?

Gardner told the Canary:

The only family reunification that has ever been open to recognised refugees is to sponsor their spouse/partner and children under 18, and even this has now been disgracefully stripped away by Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary. Her previous position was far more reasonable and humane.

Shabana Mahmood’s proposal to adopt the EU model in defiance of the Danish approach is also notable. Mahmood’s recent reforms have widely been briefed to have been inspired by the Danish model, which controversially strips asylum seekers of many rights they enjoy in neighbouring EU countries.

Timson responded to her letter in February 2017, rejecting the call for unaccompanied children to act as sponsors. Timson argued that:

allowing children the right to sponsor parents would create perverse incentives for them to be encouraged, or even forced, to leave their family and risk hazardous journeys to the UK. This plays into the hands of criminal gangs who exploit vulnerable people and goes against our safeguarding responsibilities.

A month after Timson’s response, Mahmood launched an attack on the Tory government’s announcement that it would accept no more than 350 unaccompanied minors into the UK via the ‘Dubs Amendment.’ The ‘Dubs Amendment’ was introduced as an amendment to the UK’s 2016 Immigration Act. It was named for the Jewish Lord Alf Dubs, who fled to the UK aged six from Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia.

Under the heading ‘Government letting down unaccompanied child refugees’, Mahmood wrote that she was:

deeply disappointed that the Government is taking this lifeline away from some of the most vulnerable children in our society. The Government said we would do the right thing and fully support the efforts to protect these children. Today, however we are slamming the door in their faces and putting the burden on other countries.

But Mahmood’s anger at the limited numbers let in by the Tories under the Dubs amendment somewhat ironic as Dubs has been critical of Mahmood’s most recent reforms. Dubs called Mahmood’s proposals ‘shabby’, noting that they ‘use children as a weapon.’ Dubs told BBC Radio 4 that he was ‘depressed’ by Mahmood’s proposals, saying that;

on the whole I think we’re going in the wrong direction…. We need a bit of compassion in our politics.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

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