As of last week, Britain has a new Home Secretary, this time in the form of Shabana Mahmood. Her appointment is perhaps unremarkable, given that politicians trade positions more frequently than a game of musical chairs.
But dig a little into who she is, who she was, and what the Home Office represents, and a disturbing reality in our political system is laid bare.
Over the last decade, Britain has had eight Home Secretaries, only three of them white. You might be tempted to see this as a feat of diversity and inclusion, evidence of Britain’s multicultural melting pot at work.
Little black and brown children across the nation are meant to look up to the likes of Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverley, and now Shabana Mahmood, and remind themselves that they too can one day occupy one of the highest political offices in the land, even if it means deporting vulnerable asylum seekers and branding anti-genocide protestors as terrorists.
But the statistical overrepresentation of people of colour as Home Secretary is neither a coincidence nor proof of wokeness gone awry. If anything, it is the opposite.
Anyone whose ancestry cannot be traced to the Anglo-Saxons will know the concept of the “acceptable” migrant or foreigner.
Even if we are born here, we are condemned to prove, again and again, that we are one of the good ones. We shorten our names (or have them shortened for us) so as not to offend. We alter our dress, our accents, our beliefs to fit into institutions, companies, and a society interested only in surface, box-tick diversity. We hide who we are and what we think, so we are not dismissed with whatever stereotype keeps us in a box.
When ethnic minority politicians inhabit the office of Home Secretary, it feels like the “good migrant” theory taken to the extreme: a test of how many people like them and their families they can deport and vilify, ban and imprison, to prove they are one of the good ones and placate the growing far right.
We have seen recent ethnic minority Home Secretaries spew more offensive vitriol than even their white counterparts, consider Suella Braverman’s remarks about “groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values,” or Priti Patel’s ill-fated Rwanda plan.
And it is those of us vulnerable to these policies who face the brunt of the aftermath, whether literally watching our loved ones battle through the immigration system or finding ourselves targeted by a climate increasingly hostile to anyone not white. What difference does it make if a brown face is fronting policies that criminalise, malign, and subjugate us?
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The position of Home Secretary sits at the centre of Britain’s paranoia, from Theresa May’s “hostile environment” with its “GO HOME” vans and expansion of Prevent to Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action as terrorists.
By design, the Home Office demands and perpetuates a politics of division and hatred, and has become a petri dish for the most vitriolic, antagonistic strain of politics.
It is, by nature, incompatible with the kind of representation and liberation politics we expect from those who claim to be like us. If anything, a brown Home Secretary poses more direct danger to those racialised and maligned in Britain. In a national climate where political freedoms are curtailed and anti-migrant sentiment dominates the narrative, Shabana Mahmood’s appointment feels especially insidious.
Her trajectory on Palestine seems no coincidence at a time when criticism of Israel is effectively criminalised. Once a vocal advocate for the Palestinian cause, joining a protest a decade ago against Sainsbury’s sale of Israeli goods, photographed at rallies, waving placards, she shifted course.
In November 2023, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza escalated, she abstained on a key ceasefire vote and stayed loyal to Labour’s leadership instead. Many of her Muslim constituents responded by backing a pro-Gaza independent in the 2024 General Election, cutting her majority from 28,582 to just 3,421. A site called MP War Crimes, which rates British politicians on Palestine, now categorises Mahmood as “Clearly Anti-Palestinian.”
If it was a bad look for a white, blonde Home Secretary like Yvette Cooper to condemn anti-genocide protesters as terrorists, Labour has now found its perfect solution: a brown, Muslim woman conveniently aligned with Labour Friends of Palestine yet unwilling to use her political power to advocate for the cause.
With such a figure overseeing proscription, Prevent, and deportations, who can ever say Labour is anti-Muslim again? And all the while, supporters of Palestine will likely face harsher repercussions under a Home Secretary whose own career has depended on abandoning the Palestinian cause.
It is not just about what Home Secretaries have come to represent. The very practice of placing an ethnic minority politician in the Home Office is a shameless attempt to sanitise hostile, divisive policies and deflect accusations of racism.
After all, how can it be racist if a brown person is closing borders or condemning citizens as terrorists? The reality is that ethnic minorities in Britain never truly belong.
Even when we adopt the politics of those who despise us, taken to the extremes of Suella Braverman or Priti Patel, we remain nothing more than a convenient scapegoat, a black or brown mask used to disguise extreme, racist nationalism.
Shabana Mahmood is the first Muslim woman to lead one of the four great offices of state, a catchy statistic destined to be paraded as proof of Labour’s diversity and tolerance under Starmer.
At some point, no doubt, Muslim women like me will be told to look up to her, to find her promotion inspiring.
But the sobering truth is that she would never have been made Home Secretary if she were interested in a politics that genuinely advocates for Muslim women or ethnic minorities at large. In today’s political climate, there is no such thing as a good Home Secretary.
Nadeine Asbali is a freelance writer and secondary school teacher based in London. She is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain
Follow her on X: @nadeinewrites
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.