THE IMAGE WHICH HAUNTS British politics is not Keir Starmer at a lectern. It is the rubber dinghy in the Channel, packed with young men, sliding past a distracted state. For a generation that grew up with stories of Dunkirk and the White Cliffs as a line of defence, the small boat has become a symbol of something else entirely: a Britain that no longer believes it has the right, or even the capacity, to guard its own borders. The question “Is Labour dead?” begins here, in the gap between a governing party that insists it is serious about control and a public that reads those boats as proof that politics no longer works.
Labour has formally won the argument about competence. The Conservative Party that presided over austerity, Brexit turmoil and serial scandal has exhausted the benefit of the doubt. Yet the deeper settlement that ran from Blair through Cameron to May remains largely intact. That settlement treated globalisation, frictionless borders and the free flow of capital and labour as an almost natural law. Labour, as much as its Conservative rivals, helped build a model in which the state outsourced power upwards to international markets and sideways to quangos, NGOs and the courts. The party that was once a vehicle for democratic self-assertion became, instead, an administrator of a post-democratic order.
Shabana Mahmood’s sudden prominence exposes that contradiction. As Home Secretary, she presents herself as a politician who actually believes in what she is doing, determined to stop the boats and radically reduce immigration, legal and illegal. Her rhetoric is about re-establishing sovereign authority over citizenship and borders, and she speaks with the urgency of someone whose own family history has taught her that weak borders and a failing state are a mortal danger to minorities. “Mahmoodism” is being sold as Labour’s answer to national-populist insurgency, a conservative left pivot that promises to restore order without surrendering the economic state to the right.
Yet the very need for Mahmoodism is a symptom of Labour’s decay. A party that once drew confidence from its industrial roots and union base now tiptoes around the language of nation, border and belonging. It relies on a Muslim woman, a second-generation migrant, to say what many of its leaders privately know but fear to articulate: that an asylum and immigration system which appears broken, abused, expensive and out of control will destroy the party’s legitimacy in the eyes of the very voters it needs most. The moral authority to talk about control has been subcontracted because Labour is no longer sure it has the right to speak as a national party at all.
“Labour has won the argument about competence but lost the argument about who the country is for.”
The New Statesman text that celebrates Mahmood also names the enemy: the Professional and Managerial Class that came to dominate Labour’s institutions and cultural world. This class, clustered in media, universities, NGOs, the civil service and the arts, is liberal, credentialed and often insulated from the material shocks of deindustrialisation. For them, the small boats signify vulnerable people seeking sanctuary. For those who lost out from globalisation, they signify something closer to invasion, a visible reminder that borders, like wages and social norms, are no longer defended. Labour’s tragedy is that it spent a quarter century talking almost exclusively to the former while taking the latter for granted.
The Blairite and Cameroon consensus turned national politics into a polite condominium of elites. Sovereignty was pooled in Brussels, economic strategy was outsourced to markets, and large-scale immigration was treated as an unqualified social good rather than a political choice with winners and losers. Under this settlement, older communal ways of life in towns and smaller cities were quietly unravelled. Secure work gave way to precarity, and the moral prestige of contribution was replaced by an abstract language of diversity and mobility. When the reckoning came in 2016 with the Brexit vote, Labour discovered that the country it claimed to represent no longer saw itself reflected in its priorities.
In the years since, Labour has often responded to this revolt by treating it as a misunderstanding. The party’s liberal wing refused to acknowledge that its own taboos around discussing immigration, crime, community and cultural change had deepened the divide. Concerns were moralised as bigotry, and anger was pathologised as populism. In that world, to say the asylum system is broken is to invite accusations of cruelty. Mahmood’s project is therefore not simply a policy change; it is an implicit rebuke to a generation of Labour politicians who preferred to govern over the heads of the electorate rather than engage with their fears.
The internal reaction to Mahmood shows how fragile this turn is. Critics within Labour accuse her of engaging in “performative cruelty”, of fuelling racism, of misunderstanding economics. NGOs speak as if tougher border enforcement is a prelude to historical atrocity. Green and liberal voices decry dystopian plans and warn of moral collapse. The party is pulled between a networked moral aristocracy that sees itself as guardian of humanitarian norms and a provincial, often poorer electorate that experiences the same policies as abandonment. Labour’s downfall is not a sudden collapse, but a long erosion of trust between those two worlds.
“When the reckoning came with Brexit, Labour discovered that the country it claimed to represent no longer saw itself reflected in its priorities.”
Mahmoodism offers one possible route out. The argument is that a conservative left politics which defends borders, insists on contribution, and takes seriously the vocabulary of nation and order can build a cross-class coalition strong enough to marginalise the populist right and win the space for radical economic reform. Stop the boats, the logic runs, and you remove the most potent symbol of state failure. Reassure voters that the “key to England” has not been lost, and they may be willing to entertain higher public investment, tighter regulation of capital and a more demanding social contract.
But this strategy depends on Labour being willing to sacrifice some of its most cherished illusions. It would mean accepting that not all criticism of immigration is xenophobic, that not all NGO campaigns speak for the people, and that Democratic politics requires visible lines of obligation, not just rights. It would mean confronting the Professional and Managerial Class that currently sets the tone for Labour’s cultural life and telling them that their cosmopolitan world-view is itself a sectional interest, not a universal morality. Without that reckoning, Mahmoodism risks becoming a brief spectacle, a harsh-sounding veneer on an essentially unchanged project.
There is also the danger that Labour tries to have it both ways. The party could bank the immediate electoral benefit of sounding tough on borders while quietly reassuring its liberal institutional allies that little of substance will change. Symbolic crackdowns, rearranged bureaucracies, a new slogan here and there, but the same structural reluctance to enforce limits that might provoke confrontation with courts, NGOs, corporate lobbies or supranational norms. If that is what Mahmoodism becomes, then Labour will find that the populist right only grows stronger, able to point to yet another broken promise as proof that the system is rigged.
“If Mahmoodism becomes only a harsh-sounding veneer on an unchanged project, the populist right will grow stronger on yet another broken promise.”
So, is Labour dead? Not in the narrow sense. It is in government, it passes legislation, it manages crises, it fills the offices of state. The party is alive as a machine. What is in question is whether it is alive as a national project. A party that cannot tell a convincing story about who “the people” are, where authority lies, and what borders are for, is a party that has evacuated the core of democratic politics. Without that core, economic radicalism will always look like technocratic tinkering, and moral language will sound like scolding from above.
Mahmoodism is best understood as a test of whether Labour can be reborn or whether it merely staggers on as custodian of a settlement it no longer quite believes in. If the party allows Mahmood’s break with the old consensus to widen into a genuine rethinking of sovereignty, class and nation, then Labour may yet become again what it once was: a vehicle for the majority to assert control over their collective life. If it retreats instead into familiar habits of evasion and disdain, then the answer to the question “Is Labour dead?” will be brutally simple. It will be alive only long enough to midwife whatever comes next.
