What changes will be part of the UK’s asylum reform?

Ten weeks ago Sir Keir Starmer sent Shabana Mahmood to lead the Home Office to take the radical step of overhauling the UK’s immigration system.

Mahmood’s new policy announcements in recent days are certainly very bold: from limiting the temporary stay of refugees to overhauling human rights laws to help increase deportations and threatening countries with visa bans if they do not accept the return of criminals and illegal immigrants.

But the plans are also controversial. The Refugee Council, which supports asylum seekers, says making refugee status temporary is both “extremely impractical” and “inhumane”.

The interior minister’s team is happy to see their recent announcements making headlines and TV coverage, but they know that’s the easy part.

Convincing Labor MPs from all wings of the party to vote for the plans en masse is a much bigger challenge.

Backbench frustration over winter fuel payments and welfare reform led to embarrassing government U-turns. Will disgruntled Labor MPs try to change government policy once again?

This may depend on whether a politician’s constituency is threatened by Reform UK and the Conservatives on the right, or by the Liberal Democrats and Greens on the left.

Some ministers are already expressing concern privately about Mahmood’s proposals, and skeptical MPs have begun speaking out publicly.

Rachael Maskell, a leading critic of the government’s failed welfare reforms, told me that many of her colleagues were “gravely concerned”.

He said the government was going “completely in the wrong direction” on immigration and that plans to change the way human rights law is applied in the UK were “a step too far”.

Another skeptical Labor MP, Brian Leishman, told me he had “major reservations” about the proposals and warned ministers “not to try to copy Farage and Reform, who only want to demonize people”.

To minimize the prospect of parliamentary opposition, Mahmood has been meeting with groups of Labor MPs in recent weeks to make what his allies call a “persuasive moral case for reform”.

But privately they acknowledge it will be a difficult balance.

Partly because many in the Labor Party are uncomfortable with both these policies and the accompanying rhetoric.

Both the Conservatives and the Reform can sense these tensions, and both seek to exploit them.

UK Reform leader Nigel Farage even made a statement saying something he knew Labor MPs wouldn’t like: “The home secretary appears to be a Reform supporter”.

Farage and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch doubt these plans will even pass the House of Commons.

The government is declaring these changes as the most significant reforms to the asylum system since the Second World War.

Oxford University’s Migration Observatory says Mahmood’s overhaul would make the UK’s immigration system among the strictest in Europe.

However, this does not mean that the number of people coming by small boats will decrease.

“It’s not going to be a silver bullet, and I think the government recognizes that,” says Dr Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the organisation.

“A broader approach is being taken, focusing on enforcement and extradition agreements. Will people know enough about the restrictions to deter them? We’ll have to wait and see.”

Reducing “pull” factors and making the UK less attractive to immigrants is a major long-term challenge.

In this fight, the government is facing sophisticated human trafficking rings that have shown they can adapt quickly.

The Home Secretary hopes a “throw the kitchen sink at him” approach will gradually reduce arrivals and increase deportations.

Mahmood believes that social harmony across the country depends on this.

But so is the future of him and his government.