The British Home Secretary’s Reforms to Match Reform UK and Anti-Albanian Sentiment
The Home Secretary’s asylum overhaul plans to shift the UK from protection to probation: tightening rights, extending precarity, and echoing Farage’s hard-line framing and the British media’s use of Albanians as racialised political foil. As Labour triangulates and Reform surges, migration politics are collapsing toward an increasingly punitive centre.
When Shabana Mahmood assumed the role of Home Secretary in the UK, she inherited one of Westminster’s most enduring and polarising political dossiers: migration and asylum. In November 2025, the British Government again rehearsed its anxieties about identity, security and belonging, unveiling one of the most far-reaching overhauls of the asylum and migration system in decades. Beneath the language of ‘fairness,’ ‘contribution,’ and ‘restoring control’ lies a potential punitive recalibration of refugee rights that aligns with the rhetoric of the political actors Mahmood claims to oppose. The result is a political moment defined by opportunistic repackaging of long-standing hostilities.
The Architecture of the New Asylum Policy
Mahmood’s proposed Home Office reforms can be seen as a shift from protection to probation. Refugee status under the government’s proposals is set to be granted in 30-month renewable blocks, subject to continual review with some facing 20-year minimum residency before reaching an indefinite leave to remain. Government consultations indicate that in some cases this route could be stretched to as long as 30 years, particularly for those who entered illegally or spend extended periods on income-replacement benefits. The general qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain will be extended from five to 10 years, extending to the 2.6 million who have arrived since 2021. What was a humanitarian commitment as well as a route to stability has been recast as a rolling test of worthiness; the proposed removal of automatic housing and financial assistance for those deemed “able to work” embeds a disciplinary logic into the asylum system: the state extends safety insofar as the refugee evidences economic utility. Those who fail to integrate into the labour market, with unemployment hovering around 5%, are exposed to renewed precarity, even after a successful protection claim. When Mahmood set out the reforms in the Commons, Reform MP Danny Kruger rose to praise her “rhetoric” on asylum and, half-jokingly but tellingly, invited her to put in an application to join Reform’s benches.
This is less a bureaucratic adjustment than an ideological repositioning. The system now seeks to codify a hierarchy of rights in which “high-value” migrants like professionals, graduates, high earners, may access accelerated settlement routes, while those arriving via irregular channels or from poorer backgrounds remain suspended for decades in a form of semi-legality.
The tone surrounding these reforms is integral to their operation. The Home Secretary has repeatedly argued that illegal migration is fuelling division and undermining social cohesion, casting asylum not as a manageable administrative pressure but as an existential threat to national cohesion. The social fabric, in this narrative, is not being torn by chronic under-investment, stagnant wages or a structural housing shortage, but by the presence of migrants themselves. This rhetorical template mirrors a wider tradition in British politics in which greater political failures like rentier housing markets, austerity-hollowed local services, uneven regional development are displaced onto refugees and recent arrivals. In that move, the structural problems are left intact, while the blame is shifted onto the stranger at the margins.
Here, Mahmood’s language converges with that of former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. As Home Secretary, Braverman described small-boat arrivals as an “invasion” and labelled “pro-Palestine demonstrations as “hate marches“, before comparing them with sectarian parades in Northern Ireland – comments that drew sharp criticism from Irish and Northern Irish politicians for their historical ignorance and perceived anti-Irish undertones. Recently, she has also condemned efforts to prosecute soldiers involved in the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings as “hounding veterans”, a stance widely seen in Derry and beyond as minimising state violence against civil rights demonstrators rather than as a neutral comment on due process.
Mahmood has not adopted Braverman’s vocabulary wholesale, but the thematic structure is strikingly similar: a beleaguered nation, a generosity allegedly abused, and a fragile order requiring firmer lines and fewer rights. Where Braverman’s policies were framed as unapologetically right-wing, Mahmood’s are presented as a moral mission to save the asylum system from collapse. The substance, however, leans on many of the same tropes.
The Home Secretary’s record on protest illustrates the continuity. In the wake of a deadly attack on a Manchester synagogue, she urged organisers to “step back” from Palestine-related demonstrations, describing them as “un-British” and “dishonourable” in that context, and later set out plans to amend protest law so that police could restrict repeat protests based on their cumulative disruptive impact, including by rerouting or rescheduling marches.
Naming and Shaming: Albanians as a Political Foil
A particularly contentious aspect of Mahmood’s discourse has been her singling out of Albanian nationals. While discussing new enforcement drives, she cited Albanian families and “Albanian criminal gangs” as emblematic of systemic abuse, prompting a direct intervention from Prime Minister Edi Rama, who accused her of ethnic stereotyping and echoing “far-right populist rhetoric.”
This is not an isolated episode. Over the past decade, British tabloids and ministers have steadily constructed the “Albanian migrant” as shorthand for trafficking, drugs and deception. Mahmood’s choice to foreground Albanian cases – even when presented as “illustrative” – does not arise in a vacuum; it rests on an already racialised script. Not only does this selective invocation reinforce existing racialised associations, it signals to domestic audiences that particular groups are inherently non-compliant, but also provides political cover for the Reform party by implying an underlying pattern of national misbehaviour.
The Home Secretary’s current posture has invited accusations of political and moral inconsistency as well as opportunism. In opposition, she consistently supported motions condemning the hostile environment and criticised the Conservatives for weaponizing migration. In government, she is advancing a framework that retains many of its core logics, repackaged in the language of responsibility and renewal.
Reform UK
The collapse of Conservative authority between 2020 and the 2024 election created the structural opening into which Reform stepped. A party that had won an 80-seat majority in 2019 was, by July 2024, exhausted: discredited by its pandemic mismanagement, the chaos of Johnson and Truss, and a grinding cost-of-living crisis it could neither resolve nor convincingly narrate. Rishi Sunak’s rain-soaked announcement of a snap election was less an act of strategy than an early ejection from a doomed aircraft. Inflation and interest rates had begun to ease, but not in a way that translated into legitimacy. Reform arrived in this context not as a prospective party of government, but as a vehicle through which a section of the media and business could fracture the Conservative vote and discipline the political field.
Following this, the electoral outcome was paradoxical: Labour secured a landslide majority of more than 400 seats on barely a third of the popular vote and a turnout under 60%. Reform’s surge, drawing millions of votes from disaffected Conservative supporters was decisive in transforming Conservative losses into routs in seat after seat. Labour’s dominance was, as many observers noted, “a mile wide and an inch deep“: it reflected not a genuine ideological realignment, but the arithmetic consequences of a split right-wing electorate in an increasingly hollowed-out democracy. Within a year, Labour’s own fiscal plans, including moves to restrict what had been a universal Winter Fuel Payment and proposals to phase out long-standing inheritance-tax reliefs for agricultural land – had further eroded its claim to represent a broad social mandate.
As past governments have supplied much of the ideological grammar, Reform UK has supplied the electoral pressure. Under Nigel Farage’s leadership, Reform has capitalised on discontent with both Conservative and Labour migration policies, framing itself as the only force prepared to “close the borders” and “take back control” in practice rather than slogan. Polls in late 2025 have, at points, placed Reform ahead of the Conservatives and competitive among working-class voters in deindustrialised regions that once formed Labour’s core.
Reform’s programme on migration is maximalist: its 2024 manifesto called for withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, scrapping the standard five-year route to indefinite leave to remain, and the mass detention and deportation of all unauthorised arrivals, including families, with a blanket ban on ever settling in the UK. Senior figures have floated deportation numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The distinction between illegal and legal is frequently blurred, with legal pathways also described as a threat to national cohesion.
In this context, Mahmood’s reforms can be read as an attempt to occupy a narrowing political middle ground: harsher than the status quo ante, but less openly draconian than Reform’s blueprint. Yet the logic of this triangulation is inherently unstable. By echoing Reform’s framing: migration as crisis, asylum as abuse, specific groups as emblematic threats, the Home Office normalises the very worldview that sustains Reform’s electoral appeal. Conceding the narrative while hoping to undercut the party that owns it is a high-risk strategy.
