The comparison is well-chosen. Like Gloriana, Mahmood is unmarried; she gives the impression of being singularly devoted to her country. In her manner and speech, she is plus anglais que les anglais. What should they know of England who only England know? Mahmood, the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan, spent some of her formative years in Taif, in Saudi Arabia, where her father was a civil engineer. Prior to 2013, women in Saudi Arabia were prohibited from practicing law. Had she remained there, she would not have been able to fulfill her ambitions. But while Mahmood was in Taif, the United Kingdom, her native country, was governed by a woman — and a woman barrister, to boot. That may explain why Mahmood, unlike her new boss and most of her comrades on the government benches, venerates Margaret Thatcher as a personal heroine.

After returning from Saudi Arabia to Birmingham, Mahmood went up to Oxford to read law. At Lincoln College she was the year below noted PPE-ist Rishi Sunak, who apparently voted for her in a JCR election. Then she went to the Bar, which performed its traditional function of inculcating her with a certain identity and worldview. Her Englishness, like that of many English lawyers, is shaped by an appreciation of the common law. “My parents weren’t steeped in Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and the Bill of Rights”, she said on being sworn in as Lord Chancellor in 2024; but “they did have a strong sense, arriving here in the UK from rural Kashmir, that this country was different: that there are rules, some written and some not, that we abide by”. Her national identity is made of stronger stuff than Sir Keir Starmer’s “cutting the half-time orange”. Nor is it the watery “values” kind propounded by the Labour Home Secretaries of yore, which strung together a sequence of abstract nouns. Those “British values” of “fairness” and the “rule of law”, Mahmood was saying, are products of a particular culture and history, things that make the country “different”.

Mahmood’s robust civic nationalism means that she passes the “Tebbit test”: in the cricket, she supports England over Pakistan “all the way”. At the last Labour conference she spoke of a “patriotism that speaks, but does not feel the need to shout”, one that “embraces those who trace their roots back in this country over a thousand years, and also those who look like me”. She drew a distinction between her own sense of Englishness and Britishness and a “smaller, more divisive ethnonationalism”. When Zarah Sultana compared her views with those of another Midlands politician with a strong feeling for English history, Enoch Powell, Mahmood reacted with fury. Sultana’s remarks, the Home Secretary thundered, were “beneath contempt”.

More from this author

Why Andy Burnham won’t Rejoin

By Samuel Rubinstein

Mahmood characterizes her position as “the patriotism of Orwell”, and she shares Orwell’s disdain for those English elites and intellectuals who “would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than stealing from a poor box”. She therefore takes her patriotic fight to the real enemy, as her friends in Blue Labour see it: metropolitan liberals. Here it helps that she is from an ethnic and religious minority, and that she represents a constituency where problems involving immigration and demographics cannot be brushed aside. Her finest hour as Justice Secretary was her showdown with the Sentencing Council, where she prevented explicit discrimination in favor of ethnic minorities. Her finest hour as Starmer’s Home Secretary was, similarly, a sparring match with Max Wilkinson, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham. Wilkinson made a conventional hand-wringing rebuke of her “cruel” approach to immigration. Mahmood sarcastically expressed envy at his “privilege” for “walking around this country” — his posh, leafy neck of the woods — and “not seeing the division that the issue of migration and the asylum system is creating”.

Then she went in for the kill: “Unlike the Honourable Gentleman, I am the one who is regularly called a ‘fucking Paki’ and told to ‘Go back home’”. She was chided by the Deputy Speaker for her unparliamentary language; that, of course, only added to its effect. It was a fine piece of theater, consummating a long-standing Blue Labour fantasy: a tough-talking, small-c conservative Muslim woman, a “Somewhere” rather than an “Anywhere”, putting the clueless liberal elites in their place. For too long, in the view of Lord Glasman and his ilk, the Labour Party had been in tow to those who dismiss the entire subject of immigration as befitting only bigots. By repudiating Max Wilkinson, Shabana Mahmood was returning the party to its roots. She was Gillian Duffy’s revenge.

All this has, of course, come at some cost on the Left. Mahmood is the least popular cabinet minister among Labour members — a fact which ought to keep in check any leadership ambitions. Her activities as Home Secretary have caused anguish among Labour’s third-sector clientele. The anti-slavery commissioner expressed “deep concern” over Mahmood’s suggestion that modern slavery legislation can give cover to vexatious asylum claims. The Bishop of Edmonton claimed to be “shaken to the core” by some of her proposals. Zack Polanski, who hopes to make inroads among these voters, is licking his lips at the prospect of making her his principal target. Aside from her immigration reforms and rhetoric, the Greens can tap into anger over her perceived betrayal on Palestine — the same anger that slashed her majority at the last election. On the other side of the aisle, though, she has become something of a cult figure. Sir Edward Leigh, the Tory Father of the House, joked that she is “one of the best Conservative Home Secretaries we have ever had”. Danny Kruger invited her to defect to Reform. Michael Gove even confessed to harboring a small crush. Like Elizabeth I, she finds herself swarmed by suitors.

Suggested reading

Burnham faces an insurgent Britain

By Aris Roussinos

And like Elizabeth I, Mahmood is a political survivor. Reeves is out and Yvette Cooper demoted; of the three women who woke up on the morning of 20 July 2026 occupying a Great Office of State, by the evening only Mahmood was left standing. Despite Burnham’s decision to keep her on, Labour backbenchers will continue to conspire against her immigration reforms. They no doubt hope that Burnham, the mushy people-pleaser, can be easily manipulated. Angela Rayner has described Mahmood’s reforms to indefinite leave to remain as “un-British” — an audacious attempt to beat the Blue Labourites at their own game. Mahmood’s commitment to her immigration plans is undoubtedly sincere, and she wants to see them come to fruition; presumably Burnham has made some assurances to this effect. But it seems quite likely that, sooner or later, she and Burnham will be at loggerheads — if, that is, the parliamentary party doesn’t erupt in outright revolt against one of them first.

Mahmood might therefore be a political liability for Burnham. Why, then, has he decided to retain her? It was reported that he intended to promote her to Number 11, perhaps even as a means of getting her out of the Home Office. If that was his plan, it didn’t work. Mahmood might not have given him the choice: she was adamant throughout that she would prefer to remain in post. It could be that Burnham recognizes — or his new constituents in Makerfield have forced him to recognize — that the immigration issue can’t be ignored. If that is the case, then it helps him to have someone else do the dirty work — and someone who got the ball rolling under a previous administration. If Mahmood’s reforms ultimately prove to be too much for Labour MPs and members to swallow, he has the option of pinning the blame squarely on her, and even on his own predecessor.

In any case, it makes good sense for there to be a “Blue Labour” presence in Burnham’s Number 10 — whether the one in Westminster, or the one Up North. “Manchesterism”, Burnham grandly declared in the Makerfield campaign, “is the end of neoliberalism”. Nobody is quite sure what this means, if it means anything at all; but “neoliberalism” is a long-standing Blue Labour bugbear, and Burnham’s idea of somehow defeating it with localism, community, and civic pride could just as well have sprung from the mind of Lord Glasman.

Mahmood hails from Birmingham, and represents the Birmingham seat once held by Neville Chamberlain. It is tempting, therefore, to summon the ghost of Neville’s father Joseph. The comparison has been drawn before: Mahmood, like the elder Chamberlain, seems to transcend the usual political divides. The 19th-century Mayor of Birmingham was the great opponent of free trade, the determined champion of protection. Chamberlain-style, community-oriented, interventionist “Birminghamism” seems to suit Burnham’s vision better than “Manchesterism”, which of course referred originally to laissez-faire. In Burnham’s crusade against London and the South-East, it seems only fair for England’s other second city to get its place in the sun.

Mahmood is probably the only Labour politician with a serious chance of carrying out the public will on immigration. Burnham seems, for now, to recognize as much. Mahmood’s task is simple enough: to act unsentimentally while the Prime Minister does his grinning footie lad act, and to absorb all the resultant anger from the Labour Left. He can speak, in his anodyne way, about values, respect, and even half-time oranges. And she can present a more satisfying answer to the question, in law and in culture, of what it means to be British.

It means we should now be asking the question: what if the UK reaches Net Zero immigration before the next election? This seemingly outlandish suggestion could well dictate the future of British politics. The Boriswave is over; might the political ripples it caused (including the meteoric rise of Reform) now lose their momentum?

The Right-leaning media’s reaction to the ONS report, somewhat ironically since their paramount complaint is that immigration is too high, was to downplay the reduction and instead focus on a new panic about the higher levels of emigration of British nationals. Isn’t it time to cut through the “cope” and examine the facts?

More from this author

Britain doesn't want to go to war

By Freddie Sayers

This alleged “exodus” of British nationals certainly merits closer inspection. The Telegraph in their splash, claimed that the ONS data revealed young British workers were fleeing Labour’s high-tax regime. These youngsters, they speculated, have been “flocking to Australia” and to the “Middle East, where remote working is allowed”. For their part, the online Right asserted that the data laid bare the ongoing replacement of highly skilled white British workers with low-skilled foreigners from incompatible, faraway cultures.

Both narratives are precarious, to put it politely. There is no doubt that some skilled professionals are leaving — wealthy lawyers and bankers are constantly tempted by Abu Dhabi; ambitious entrepreneurs will obviously want to take their startup to the US, if it is doing well; and our junior doctors have long been swapping the grinding NHS for a better-paid stint in Australia. The competitiveness of our economy is a serious cause for concern; but these professional emigrants do not amount to hundreds of thousands in a year. Let’s be serious: 18-year-olds  from post-industrial British towns aren’t leaving in their droves for Abu Dhabi to become digital nomads.

The ONS emigration statistics are, to be frank, pretty sketchy. Emigration is far harder to measure accurately than immigration — mainly because British passport-holders don’t need a visa to leave. In years gone by, the ONS would have used something called the “International Passenger Survey” to account for those departing the country, but it was notoriously unreliable. So now instead they scan the population for people who have gone dark and ceased to have any contact with the state — if, after a year, there is still no sign of them, the presumption is that they have emigrated. Since this new methodology was introduced in 2021, there actually hasn’t been much fluctuation in numbers: there has been no sudden surge in emigrating Britons. Complicating accurate measurements are the ‘Neets” who have simply disappeared from the states radar. It can be hard to tell the difference between them and those people who have actually left and as a result all sorts of guessed adjustments come into play: some of these presumed emigrants may just be people lost to the system; others will be young people going abroad to study, and who will return.

Most significantly, though, what everyone does seem to have ignored is the fact that many of the emigrating “British Nationals” will be immigrants or children of immigrants who have acquired British citizenship but have decided to return home. We know the main reason emigration numbers are so high in 2025 is that a chunk of the Boriswave migrants are choosing not to stay — 286,000 immigrants from outside Europe permanently left the UK in the past year alone — and, in addition, Europeans who settled in the UK pre-Brexit are still leaving in large numbers. If an immigrant has acquired citizenship and then chooses to go back to their country of origin, they are still counted as one of The Telegraph’s “exodus of young British workers”.

While the ONS does not provide details of what portion of the emigrating Britons are naturalized citizens or children of immigrants, thankfully there is another migration dataset we can look at, compiled every four years at enormous expense by the United Nations. If you look at their 2024 Global Migration Database and compare that census of British migrants around the world with the 2020 figures, you can see more clearly what is happening: 72,000 more British nationals have settled in Poland (an increase of nearly 40%) and 23,000 more British nationals have settled in Romania since 2020. It seems quite reasonable to conclude that these are Polish and Romanian immigrants to the UK who have returned home along with a British passport and in some cases a British family. The next big hotspot for emigrating Britons is… Bangladesh! Nearly 13,000 Brits have moved there in the past four years. Unless young Billy from Kent has decided, along with thousands of his friends, that Bangladesh is the new land of economic opportunity, these emigrants will be naturalized British citizens with Bangladeshi ties. By contrast, only 3,259 more Brits are living in the UAE than four years ago, and the numbers moving to America are up by only 1%.

Suggested Reading

Blue Labour has come too late

By David Littlefair

The reality is: not all immigrants want to stay in Britain forever. Last week’s report from the ONS made that clearer than ever. And this underlying level of emigration will continue to affect net immigration numbers in the coming years right through 2029. It is hard to think of a single metric that could be more important at the next election.

Political pressure will persist, even with net migration at this lower level. Right-wing commentators are correct to observe that 900,000 arrivals in a year, notwithstanding 700,000 departures, is still much too high for most voters to bear. It was partly anxiety about a roughly similar level of immigration that led to the Brexit result in 2016. A figure of 200,000 net still means an additional one million people every five years — and our current mix of immigrants is now dominated by those from outside Europe, whereas pre-Brexit it was mainly Europeans. Asylum seekers are also at an all-time high of over 100,000 (nearly half of whom arrived on small boats) and are still hard to expel once they’re here. Anxieties about assimilation are well-founded. So, for now, there is still plenty for Reform UK to campaign on. But if the downward trend were to continue, things might start to look very different.

Reducing immigration is like fixing a roof with multiple leaks: each entrypoint is a distinct challenge, and the biggest entry-points are the legal ones. It was, after all, Boris Johnson’s relaxing of rules around care home workers and international students bringing over family members that led to the huge rise in numbers in 2022-2024, and credit for addressing this should go, unfashionably enough, to Rishi Sunak. His government’s changes to the rules concerning care workers, in October 2023, and international students, in January 2024, are the single biggest reasons for the end of the Boriswave. Further restrictions introduced in March and April 2024 are now having an effect: the key long-term visa grants in the latest quarter are down more than 50% since Q1 2024. Consider it Sunak’s parting gift to Keir Starmer.

The Labour government has continued the tightening, raising the minimum skills and salary thresholds for skilled worker visas — and this also is having an effect. Home Office data show that applications for skilled-worker and health-and-care visas are down to a new low. In October 2025, there were only 600 health-and-care visa applications, compared with a high of 18,300 in February 2022. In January 2026, there will be a further tightening, paired with a much longer 10-year wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), which is expected to further discourage applications.

Data analyst James Bowes, from the University of Warwick, now forecasts that these shifts, combined with the long-tail effects of earlier waves of immigrants now leaving, could push the UK into overall net negative immigration by as early as this time next year. Madeline Sumption, director of the Oxford Migration Observatory, is more skeptical, and tends to think that the net figure is more likely to rise gently as the boomerang from the Boriswave settles down. In any case, if Keir Starmer has any desire for a surprise comeback, he should be obsessed with this goal — and be fully supportive of his Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.

Many things could yet derail this trend — chief among them a panic lurch to the Left by Labour after the May elections— but it is clear what the game-changer now looks like. For Nigel Farage and Reform UK there is now the chilling possibility of another Pyrrhic victory — just like the Brexit campaign before it — in which the change to national policy they campaigned for so effectively takes place, and that success removes the principal reason for their existence.

Later that year, Mahmood stood on a podium at the Labour Party conference and excoriated “pale, male and stale” politicians. As an opposition MP, she was often seen holding “Free Palestine” placards. But now, as Home Secretary, Mahmood is the politician who must grasp the nettle of Britain’s asylum reforms. She is the minister Keir Starmer has chosen to implement the “Denmark-style” reforms he hopes will restore public faith in the collapsing system: making it harder for refugees to settle, and foregrounding the expectation that receiving asylum is a temporary measure.

At first, this seems an odd mix of task and person. Mahmood’s detractors, especially those on the Left, might call her a hypocrite. Her cheerleaders, especially those on the Right, have hailed her as a realist and a strident moral decision-maker.

But it is clear that Labour sees her as the only politician capable of delivering these changes and averting a post-budget electoral collapse next May. In this respect, she is really the consummate “Blue Labour” politician — a perfect example of the strange, shadowy and seemingly contradictory impulses on her wing of the party: namely the “Politics of Paradox”.

The paradox here is that to save the overall moral legitimacy of the asylum system, the Government must implement a series of changes that make it seem less compassionate. Changes that are by turns symbolic, well-intentioned, unrealistic or inhumane will hopefully restore trust in the system with the public: and allow things to carry on more or less as they were. This is what the Danish center-left have achieved, so why wouldn’t it work in Britain?

The “Politics of Paradox” was coined back in 2011, when Blue Labour founders Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford collected together a series of seminars under the title The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. It was part of a spirited attempt to give the party an intellectual framework that could help it understand Gordon Brown’s defeat in 2010 — an attempt to return Labour to the history of class politics from which it had come unmoored.

Even then, years before Brexit, Labour was becoming a political party run by and for globalization’s winners — progressive activists and the aspirational social elite. This was the paradox: Labour presented itself as the party of affluent urbanites and the information economy, when it was really a party of ex-mineworkers with broken lungs.

The Labour leadership of the time were alive to these apparent contradictions. The foreword to The Labour Tradition, written by then-leader Ed Miliband, emphasized the “need to rediscover the tradition of Labour as a grassroots community movement”. The essays demonstrated that close social ties and bonds, family, and a concept of place were central to working-class identity and key parts of the Labour tradition. The authors evoked proud traditions of ground-up politics that could stretch back through the artist and socialist William Morris, through the 19th-century founders of the Labour Representation Committee, to the democratic activists murdered at the Peterloo Massacre and beyond — all the way to the proto-socialist Levellers and Diggers from the English Civil War. These traditions disdained elitism, metropolitanism and hierarchy. Instead, they celebrated ordinary family life. That was what Labour should pin to its mast. That, so the theory went, was its real identity.

But here was another paradox. To proclaim this turn against elite metropolitanism, lifelong professional politician Ed invited his brother and fellow Oxford University graduate David Miliband to donate an essay. Editors Marc Stears (Oxford University) and Stuart White (Oxford University) invited extra contributors, adding to content taken from the seminars held at Oxford University. These included the privately educated think-tank director Philip Collins (Cambridge), and the now former minister James Purnell (who had at this point returned to the think-tank career he had held between his spell at Oxford and his period as a Labour minister). These were the people — all members of the intellectual elite — who became the scions of Labour’s working-class voice and identity, warning against the gentrification of the party. But remember, this wasn’t hypocrisy. It was paradox.

It didn’t immediately change the party. The General Election of 2015 found Ed Miliband’s Labour embracing the paradoxical politics of radical timidity and slumping to defeat. Under Momentum’s influence, Labour offered a radically outstretched middle finger to the working class and lost twice, in 2017 and 2019. But the pendulum has now swung back again. The paradox-handling technicians are back behind the steering wheel.

Suggested reading

Blokeism won’t save Starmer

By Josiah Gogarty

For this, they have Morgan McSweeney to thank — the Labour fixer who cut his political teeth battling the BNP in Barking and Dagenham, and said to be a long-term Blue Labour acolyte. McSweeney reached the top of Labour democracy through the think-tank-cum-organizing-project, Labour Together. The initiative was set up to try and tie Labour’s dysfunctional factions together through the difficult Jeremy Corbyn era and its aftermath.

But what started as a grassroots project later became a sink for big donor funds. The organization jettisoned any staff who bought into its original mission of unity — and instead became oriented around breaking up the Labour family rather than keeping it together.

Paradoxically, however, this was the only realistic way to get a class politics that didn’t completely neglect non-metropolitan England back into the Labour Party. Polling showed Labour members far from the general public on almost every issue. Any Labour member on the ground understood that the party had become utterly dominated by graduates in large cities, particularly London. These were people whose politics were representative of their insular social milieu. People from places that applaud themselves for processing asylum seekers, before shipping them off to post-industrial England’s poverty hotspots.

So a platform of pledges was developed to present the Starmer leadership as “Corbyn in a suit” — and therefore amenable to the arty member selectorate. It included a pledge for “Full voting rights for EU nationals”, as well as promises to “Defend free movement” and to “End indefinite detention and call for the closure of centers such as Yarl’s Wood”.

The platform was then quietly discarded in its entirety. Keir Starmer took over Labour and nobody got what they voted for. Selections for Labour’s parliamentary candidates in 2024 produced a party more packed with professional politicians, lobbyists, Spads and elite professionals than any Labour government in history. You might think this cohort would have the decency to be the quiet foot soldiers they were selected to be, chosen over binmen and bus drivers and nurses with more “challenging” affiliations to trade unions — but they aren’t playing ball. They seem angry. They were never told this was going to happen.

What would the Chartists referenced in The Labour Tradition think of this strategy? Maybe they’d shrug: “It’s a paradox”.

As for McSweeney, he no doubt understands, in light of these asylum reforms, that the Danish Social Democrats are the only Left-affiliated party in Europe to have won back working-class voters from the populist Right. However, it’s not clear if he has read the details of Mette Fredericksen’s party’s success. Fredericksen led the change from the front, and did so for years. Her changes were not carried out behind closed doors — but were done with conviction and consent.

After the working class abandoned the Danish Left, the Social Democrats rigorously re-assessed its attitudes and biases. They produced a pamphlet called “Just And Realistic” (Retfærdig og Realistisk) that was distributed to members. Frederiksen led a debate that scrutinized her party’s losses: heavily and transparently. This produced a new strategic, moral message: “You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.” And she made sure to deliver on the second part of that message.

In government, the Danish Social Democrats practiced some of the most aggressive tax-and-spend policy in the world. Their returning working-class voters at the next election prioritized welfare, the economy and the environment. Immigration and asylum issues became a much less salient electoral issue for every party voter, save the now irrelevant populist Right. With these issues off the table, the focus landed on the economic policy that is the neglected pillar of Blue Labour thought — indeed, which is so far almost completely absent from Labour’s governance.

Instead, we have an approach that’s more “Blue Labour on immigration, Tony Blair Institute Labour on economics”. It has produced an industrial strategy that ignores Britain’s neglected towns and struggling heavy industry, ignores the mutual ownership models that are a socialist tradition, and instead favors cash bungs to American AI industries located in major cities. Having carried its “Ming vase” over the electoral finish line, pledging almost nothing, Starmer’s Government has found itself with no mandate to raise tax — and unable to raise money from the ever-fewer winners that characterize the most regionally unequal, unmeritocratic economy in the developed world.

Suggested reading

How Labour lost the Welsh Valleys

By Brad Evans

In Denmark, Frederiksen’s party had one of the most egalitarian, socially mobile, secure and radical societies in the world to fight for after the debate on asylum. What will Labour have, besides the prospect of calmed markets?

The victory of soft Left candidate Lucy Powell in Labour’s deputy leadership election shows that the party’s infrastructure isn’t really able to manage the kind of paradox it is being asked to tolerate. The current administration is on notice. The lack of effort to convince its internal structures has come back to haunt Starmer. The local elections in 2026 will be a day of reckoning.

The Labour leader’s only real attempt to develop a rhetoric vaguely similar in tone to the Danish Social Democrats in his “Island Of Strangers” speech was excoriated by the party’s members and voters, and later rescinded. He has never understood, let alone made, an authentic Left-wing argument against an asylum system that drains a foreign aid budget intended to save children from malaria. This is money that instead now lines the pockets of corporate behemoths like Serco. Starmer is now the least-popular prime minister, among pollsters, since records began. Most of Labour’s members want him to leave.

Mahmood may represent Labour’s last attempt to magic back those voters they claim to represent: the angry, disempowered and downwardly mobile, living in areas that have been neglected for a generation. People who should be on Labour’s team but are on Reform’s. Certainly, in this world of paradox, where class politics is imposed by Oxford PPE graduates, those voters haven’t been given their own voice in the party machinery. Since Angela Rayner’s departure, there is no prominent Labour politician that has had a “real” job.

If this last conjuring trick fails, it might well be that Labour’s only option is to concede that its working class traditions are dead. To beat Reform now may mean trying to ditch First Past The Post, to run another Brexit referendum alliance of educated urban graduates and middle-class professionals, absorbing Lib Dem and Green votes.

The middle class graduates that Labour came to depend on know the Labour they want — and they are annoyed. As it is, Labour has begun to resemble a scene in Armando Ianucci’s In The Loop, where James Gandolfini’s military general remarks that if you fight a war and have no soldiers left “it looks like you’ve lost”. If you claim a politics based around class relations, and working class people aren’t part of it — but a lot of the elite are — well, you know the rest. The next Labour leader will need to figure out what in this project, a battle against the odds for the party’s soul, is worth saving.

“The Government is shifting,” Blue Labour founder Maurice Glasman agrees. With the Labour brand “very toxic” — particularly among the staunchly proletarian and provincial petty-bourgeois voters attracted to the populist iconoclasm of the New Right — not changing course would consign Labour to a future as one half of a despised duopoly. Yet, Glasman adds, things can change fast. Mahmood is trying her best to make sure of that. But in doing so she is engaging in a dangerous game, less “ming vase” and more bull in a China shop — decisively alienating one half of Labour’s base while desperately chasing the other.

Labour’s base has, of course, evolved over time, alongside the contours of Britain’s shifting class dynamics. In the interwar period, George Orwell identified a strand of middle-class, radical intellectualism resolutely detached from the culture of the broader labor movement, one that displayed a proud antipathy towards the quotidian culture of the nation at large. “England is perhaps the only great country,” he said, “whose intellectuals
 are ashamed of their own nationality.” The bourgeois radicals, Orwell added, “always 
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings”.

In a similar vein, the pre-war dockers’ leader Ben Tillett drew a distinction between “matter-of-fact, fighting trades unionism of England” on the one hand — and “the hare-brained chatterers and magpies” on the other. Such divides die hard. In his novel The Night-Soil Men, the recent fictionalized tale of Labour’s foundation, Bill Broady has the salt-of-the-earth Bradfordian and early Labour minister Fred Jowett lament the presence of a “raffish metropolitan crowd” in his fledgling proletarian party. The intellectuals, for their part, could dish it out too. In the Sixties, Tom Nairn, a thinker of the Marxist New Left, happily bemoaned the conservatism of an organization that brought together two late-Victorian traditions: Fabian bourgeois liberalism and stolid trade unionism, the latter influenced by religious non-conformity and primarily concerned not with world revolution but the protection of its crafts.

More from this author

Who comes after Starmer?

By Jonny Ball

This friction, then, between an effete elite and the mass membership of the broad labor movement, has always existed. And indeed it’s a dynamic that has arguably made Labour a more malleable, pragmatic socialist party than its Marxist continental cousins. After all, Labour’s postwar governments combined economic radicalism, nationalization, and trade union power with a respect for The Crown and the House of Lords. As Clement Attlee observed, it was in the constitutional monarchies of Britain and Scandinavia that the greatest advances towards democratic socialism had been achieved, not least because of the continuities of symbolic power and national representation that remained amid class struggle. Yet as the influence of trade unionism and the old, grassroots cultures of the organized working-class has declined precipitously, so Labour has morphed into a thoroughly liberal-progressive party, with an often toxic brand, redolent of all the hectoring, right-on, detached habits of modern managerial officialdom.

In Mahmood and Blue Labour’s reading, a primary source of this toxicity is down to what the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has called a trahison des clercs — a treason of the Left-wing intellectuals, especially regarding the fraught politics of migration. Labour, in this telling, has abandoned the labor interest, leaving aside the working class as its primary political agents. Instead, it has embraced what Marxism Today used to call “a rainbow coalition” of different interest groups: students, public-sector workers and identitarian socio-cultural tribes. Since declaring “the forward march of labor halted” in the late Seventies, during a period of steep deindustrialization, the Left’s leading theorists claimed there was no alternative but to seek new electoral alliances by “hegemonizing” ethnic minorities, the feminist movement, LGBT activists and the counter-cultural youth, all under the benevolent leadership of bourgeois-bohemians.

Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council was the living embodiment of this shift. It signaled, he said, the arrival of “the post-1968 generation” into a dominant position in Left politics. His first tenure in the capital saw County Hall “swarmed with young punks, skinheads, Rastafarians and a host of other Londoners”, according to one of his thoroughly New Left contemporaries. While these developments enraged a Labour leadership focused on persuading working-class Thatcherites back into the Labour family, they also found critics among the far Left. The “Mersey Militants” who controlled the Liverpool Labour Party at the time accused the London crowd of being “loony” “middle-class intellectuals”, in the words of their most prominent spokesperson, Derek Hatton.

The contemporary Labour Party, as part of these transformations, has adopted what Streeck calls a “cosmoliberalism” not shared by large swathes of the public. “Modernization” turned it from a part of the demos to a party of Davos. Most of its MPs have followed the same familiar path: university; a think tank, corporate consultancy, law, or public affairs; and onwards to Westminster. That’s why they all sound like they work for Deloitte — because many of them really did. And, for Streeck, it’s the Davos-style “cosmoliberal” mindset that sees working-class skepticism of free movement of labor and capital as a kind of betrayal of “international solidarity”. Indeed, the progressive activists who dominate the institutions of the modern Left are the only social segment who appear unconcerned with the recent historically unprecedented waves of mass migration, or with the “woke turn” of the last decade. Brexit, in their reading, is a racist project. Restrictionism on migration is always more-or-less Powellite. Opposition to unfettered globalization, or support for a return to a more national economy, is horribly passé, or maybe even Trumpian.

Suggested reading

What does Blue Labour stand for?

By Samuel Rubinstein

Mahmood is trying to put paid to all that. Last week, I described her speaking style as “tepid”. The Birmingham MP is barely known outside the party, and as one of the mooted contenders in the unofficial race to succeed Keir Starmer, I found her previous media performances unconvincing. But, on Monday, setting out plans to emulate key aspects of the Danish Social Democrats’ hardline approach on migration, she was anything but. This was a cabinet minister in command of the House, more authoritative at the despatch box than any politician so far this Parliament. The Home Secretary is on a self-proclaimed “moral mission” to restore faith in a broken system: and, from her rhetoric at least, it’s hard to doubt her.

But she will struggle, and faces three major impediments. The first are the legal challenges her plans will likely provoke, not least at the European Court of Human Rights. That is a body which has rigorously applied its expansive interpretations of what it calls a “living document” to prevent convicted paedophiles from being deported lest it disrupt their “right to a family life”. Our own domestic legislation, the Human Rights Act, buttresses this lopsided liberal legalism. And that brings us on to the second impediment — the Prime Minister. After all, it was a fastidious application of exactly that kind of legalism that gave Keir Starmer a high-flying career at the bar. For all his lack of a grand meta-narrative, he remains at heart a vaguely progressive North London lawyer. More than that, he lacks focus. One can never be certain which particular Starmerism we’ll be offered on any given day. Possessing no vision of his own, his politics seemingly depends on whoever he’s just spoken to.

And yet Mahmood’s third impediment is perhaps the strongest: the Labour Party itself. Many of its parliamentarians, its activists, and its supporters will be bitterly opposed. This isn’t surprising, for Mahmood has merely fired the starting gun on Labour’s latest round of internecine civil war, an endless conflict centered on divergent conceptions of the very soul of the party, about who Labour is ultimately for.

Today’s polling shows the party way behind among almost every demographic except one — the privately educated. Labour’s safest seats are now, in reality, not in the so-called “heartlands”, or “left behind” Britain, but in the dynamic metropoles. Here, the rainbow coalition lives on. But the cities operate on what Glasman calls “the Deliveroo economy”. A salaried “creative class” are all-too-comfortable with unskilled mass migration, for the abundance of cheap workers it provides to drop off their takeout, or staff their care homes — a permanent, affordable service class, whose presence can be celebrated as a marker of superior virtue and liberal tolerance.

For Labour’s romantics, the fact that the party has been captured by that particular urban milieu is a source of profound shame. To quote Clause Four, after all, Labour was founded “to secure for the workers, by hand and by brain, the full fruits of their industry”. But we have passed from an industrial past, through to a grimly post-industrial present. When Labour was founded, Britain made around a third of the world’s steel. Now we make around 0.3%. Instead, we send emails, sell coffees, pump our housing market. Service work dominates. Almost half of school-leavers go on to university. The economists refer to this model as “cognitive-cultural capitalism”, and a smug generation of Third-Way politicians promoted it as something they called “the knowledge economy”.

But Labour, say the romantics again, shouldn’t exist for graduate professionals, but for genuine workers. The mass production and assembly lines may have receded into memory, or at least been offshored to the Far East. Yet the armies of non-graduate workers remain, only now in warehouses, retail, call centers — all in aggregate as estranged from the modern party as ever. To that extent, then, Mahmood’s immigration plans represent a real, decisive shift aimed at recapturing Labour’s putative real people. Glasman tells me that, in addition to her plans on immigration, Mahmood “is strong on the Left flank”. She’s “an economic nationalist, basically”, he says. “She wants to see the primacy of the national economy, and serious reindustrialization.” This is about a fundamental restoration of secure, unionized work in domestic industries located outside the unaffordable, service-dominated urban centers.

Unfortunately, such a politics has not yet been much in evidence from either Labour in general, or from Mahmood in particular — though it is sorely needed. There has been no per capita or real wage growth in almost a generation. It’s clear, today, that the knowledge economy and John Prescott’s refrain that “we’re all middle class now” was a chimera, built on credit and unsustainable financialization. University no longer offers a pathway to bourgeois respectability. The downwardly mobile graduates are themselves revolting, hurtling towards the alluring purities of “eco-populism”. As for the desperate post-industrial proletariat, it’s increasingly flirting with the populist Right. Is it any wonder, given all this, that Labour is in a near-constant state of identity crisis? The awkward reality is that its original class base, with which it has formed a nostalgic attachment, in fact no longer exists, or at least not in the way it once did. Rather than appealing to a cultural imaginary gleaned from an LS Lowry print, or a Ken Loach film, Labour must therefore relearn how to speak to the average man and woman in non-metropolitan, new-build Britain.

Could it look overseas for help? The Danish Left’s clampdown on asylum and migration has been credited with seeing off the threat from the Right. Its message to working-class Danes was conciliatory. “You didn’t leave us, we left you,” said the slogan. But it hasn’t been plain-sailing. The Social Democrats have just lost control of Copenhagen for the first time in over a century, ceding power to an eco-socialist outfit — and portending, perhaps, the fate of Labour’s equivalent cosmopolitan tribe abandoning it for radical-liberal pastures. If Denmark is what success looks like, then, there’s a serious trade-off. Mahmood’s gamble is based on the hope that she can reconnect her party with its working-class roots, wooing them back into the fold. If that means sacrificing the trendy, gentrified parts of the big cities, then so be it. A calculation has been made that most urban Labour constituencies are still classed as “safe”, whereas Reform-leaning seats tend to be more marginal. Glasman tells me that “the key feature of this era that we’re in now” — a period of deglobalization, economic upheaval and populist revolts — “is that the working-class vote is decisive”.

Not everyone is convinced. Even a sympathetic MP tells me that “our electoral coalition is so upside-down that maybe a Blue Labour pivot is impossible”. But Mahmood’s wager is brutally simple: that Labour can no longer claim to be the party of workers while treating the politics of borders with liberal disdain, all while viewing the nation-state as an anachronism. She is betting that the people Labour was built to serve still want a government that protects them — not a globalized free market that dissolves them. If she is right, she may yet drag her party back into congruence with one side of its base. But that comes at the price: the hemorrhaging of votes in the citadels. The stakes of the game are existential, as the soul of the party is up for grabs yet again. And this time, it may be the last chance anyone gets to claim it.

You see, Mahmood isn’t just Home Secretary: as she was so keen to remind conference-goers, she’s a Labour home secretary. Twice during her speech she put special emphasis on her party’s name, lest anyone close their eyes and think they were listening to Theresa May or Suella Braverman. And, by the standards of a senior Labour politician, this was a surprising speech. 

The main focus was the Government’s changes to “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR) rules for migrants, the qualifying period for which will now be increased from five years to 10. Earlier this month, Reform UK pledged, if elected, to scrap ILR entirely, forcing migrants to re-apply for visas every five years. The radicalism of this proposal allowed Keir Starmer — himself compared to Enoch Powell by portions of the British Left — to cast Farage as “racist” and “immoral”. During a separate fringe event last night, Mahmood referred to the policy as “much worse than racism”. Indeed, Reform’s announcement was in some ways a gift to the Home Secretary, who could outline a Labour policy which is certainly robust, but which nonetheless takes a more humane approach to questions of migration.

“Open, tolerant, generous”: that was the Home Secretary’s pitch for what the UK has to offer newcomers, and that is only possible if stronger policies are introduced for protecting the country’s borders. Thanks to Conservative policies, she said, “the scale and the speed of change as well as the nature of [immigration] has frayed trust and eroded public confidence”. She added: “We need a system that is fair to people who are already here. That means cracking down on illegal working that undercuts British workers.”

But this outwardly nationalist rhetoric had its limits. If she fails in her task to stop the boats and bring down net migration, Mahmood’s Liverpool address may come to be remembered as the “Little England” speech. Surveying the crowd, she expressed her “belief in a greater Britain, not a littler England”, a line which received the heartiest round of applause of the whole speech. That response from the audience — which also cheered Mahmood’s references to her second-generation immigrant background, as well her drive-by attacks on the open-borders maniacs of the last Tory ministry — showed an enthusiasm for immigration hawkishness only if it was tempered by liberal caveats. The crowd held its collective breath when she began to criticize migrant hotels, then exhaled when she described them as “that totem of the Tory legacy”. Clearly, Labour’s conference-goers may not be ready for full-fat Mahmood. 

Suggested reading

Morgan McSweeney’s moment of truth

By Jonny Ball

Labour insiders had tipped Mahmood for the Home Office for several months before her elevation was hastened by Angela Rayner’s resignation from the Deputy Leadership. That reshuffle, early in September, gave Starmer an opportunity to bring in a tough minister to bring down both legal and illegal immigration — a task which successive governments have made seem impossible. Mahmood doesn’t deal in half measures. Last summer, in the wake of rioting across Britain, the then-Justice Secretary warned that “thugs and hooligans” would “feel the full force of the law”. A fortnight ago, she made the very same threat to Unite the Kingdom protestors who used violence against police officers. Speaking yesterday, she vowed to go after shoplifters in a vaguely Bolshevik-sounding “winter of action”.  And after she oversaw, as justice secretary, the early release of thousands of prisoners, which might have led to the resignation of a less capable minister, she turned it into an opportunity to abolish shorter sentences.

In doing so, she aimed to strengthen Labour’s appeal to the voters who are deserting the party. British electoral politics, across the spectrum, typically functions as a quest to win over swing voters who are in parts economically Left-wing, socially conservative, patriotic, and tough on crime. In its pithiest form, this worldview is summarized as: “Hang the paedos, fund the NHS.” Many of the Britons occupying this sweet spot would once have voted for Labour, but are now drawn to a Reform UK message which is tailored towards the disaffected working class. Mahmood, who settled for merely chemically castrating sex offenders during her time in the Justice Department, is viewed by prominent figures within Labour as the party’s best answer to this conundrum. Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour and an influence on Government strategists including Morgan McSweeney, has labeled Mahmood as “clearly the leader of our part of the party”.

Conscious of her role in the fight against Reform, Mahmood argued in her Liverpool speech that “working people will turn away from us — the party that for over a hundred years has been their party — and seek solace in the false promises of Farage”. The Right-wingers in teal aren’t even the most serious threat to national stability, in her eyes: at the beginning of her address she highlighted that when 150,000 people marched through London earlier this month, “they did so under the banner of a convicted criminal and a former BNP member”. In other words, this wasn’t an attempt to “unite the Kingdom” but the desperate howl of the Little Englander. 

There was once a time, as recently as the mid-20th century, when to be a “Little Englander” was not a sign of xenophobic small-mindedness but instead of progressive opposition to the British Empire. That it is now a universal term of derision is reflective of how thoroughly more middle-class, metropolitan sections of the center-left have come to dominate the Labour Party. In her speech, Mahmood stated that hers is “a patriotism that speaks but does not feel the need to shout”. That may well be true of many Britons of all political stripes, but the fact remains that Labour is now well behind in the polls to an insurgent movement which is only too happy to shout its patriotism from the rafters. 

Rather than drawing distinctions between its national plan and the pitfalls of being a Little Englander, Starmer’s party should do more to appeal to this group, which is still resolutely insular. Mahmood said in Liverpool that “where a nation is fearful, it turns inwards. When we feel safe, we can look outwards” — yet her speech was still given with one eye firmly on the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), whose range of views on immigration tends to be narrower than that of voters. In response, a Reform press release stated that “her speechwriters may have toughened her rhetoric, but the Home Secretary’s speech won’t wash with the public”.

There are other issues where the position of Labour MPs and members is out of kilter with the public as a whole. Though a small majority of Britons support remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), there are more who think that the treaty should be reformed (35%) than left as it is (28%). Yet while the Home Secretary has made positive noises about reforming the ECHR, Attorney General Richard Hermer has suggested that any such move would amount to a “political trick”. Wanting to leave it altogether is a positively fringe position among MPs, and this summer’s welfare bill debacle demonstrates how hard it can be to get legislation past intransigent members of the PLP. Be that as it may, drastic legal changes may be the only way to actually remove failed asylum seekers in considerable numbers, as the steady stream of disrupted deportations implies. 

For all her strong rhetoric, then, Mahmood still needs to convince a party which, since the time of Tony Blair, has wedded itself to the cult of human rights, not to mention a Prime Minister who has become an emblem of this legalistic mindset. And the Prime Minister is likely to remain in situ. Andy Burnham Autumn has now run its course after barely a week, with the Greater Manchester Mayor telling a fringe event in Liverpool on Monday that he would not be challenging Starmer for the leadership. With the internal threat defused, the Prime Minister can focus his efforts on the Faragist menace, while Mahmood can worry less about trying to win over the Left of the party.

Despite the best efforts of Rachel Reeves, Labour is still trusted more than Reform when it comes to managing the economy. Its immigration policy, however, is a tougher sell, not least if the Chancellor pushes through a migration deal for young EU workers to boost public finances. And though Mahmood used her speech to praise the “one in, one out” deal negotiated with France by her predecessor Yvette Cooper, doubts remain about whether this ratio will hold firm in practice — and whether, more fundamentally, Starmer and his parliamentary colleagues have any desire to undertake the legal reforms that would enable Mahmood to do her job effectively. 

More from this author

Corbyn’s revenge

By Rob Lownie

“The story of who we are is contested,” Mahmood claimed in Liverpool yesterday. She was talking about Britain, and about the new class of ethnonationalists who have seized the previously unifying language of patriotism and twisted it into something darker. Yet she could just as easily have been describing her own party. As Labour’s conference moves towards its conclusion, Starmer’s assertions that he has planted his flag and made clear what he stands for are hardly convincing. Mahmood has put forward a more persuasive assertion of her personal beliefs. But she won’t win over any Reform voters by accusing their leader of racism, while Left-wingers, many of whom are presently beguiled by Jeremy Corbyn or the Greens, may be put off by her self-presentation as “a patriot, proudly so”. This Gordian Knot applies to pretty much everything Starmer does on domestic policy, and his home secretary should prepare to have her hands tied just as often. 

This hints at an even broader problem for Labour. Whatever the glamour of the conference, the fact remains that neither Starmer nor his Cabinet is currently guiding British public opinion. The Overton window is moving markedly to the Right, evidenced by the very real prospect of a governing party at the end of this decade with a plan for mass deportations. Given all this, even relative radicals like Mahmood risk being stranded as the liberal consensus folds and a political revolution rages around them. But at least she’s trying. Jonathan Rutherford, a political adviser who is another influential Blue Labour figure, has — somewhat grandiosely — hailed Mahmood as “perhaps the most astute and able politician of her generation”. She isn’t, but she may still be Labour’s best hope of stopping the more likely holder of that title from capturing Number 10 in 2029. If, that is, her party can hold its nose.

To be gay would have been unthinkable. Indeed, ‘gay’ was the go-to insult thrown at any boy thought to be even slightly effeminate. Section 28 – a law enacted to prohibit the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools – contributed to this oppressive climate. The notion that children had to be protected from the promotion of ‘gay lifestyles’ fed into a malicious conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia, as well as the erroneous concept of homosexuality as a frivolous choice (as opposed to an expression of love).

In fact, Section 28 legislation never directly affected schools, but rather local authorities, and local authorities had no influence over the teaching of sex and relationships education. But what Section 28 did was contribute to an atmosphere in which to be gay was to be perverted, weird and fundamentally abnormal.

Suggested reading

Questioning the misogynistic veil isn't racist

By Jo Bartosch

There were no gay kids or teachers in my school. Of course, there were – statistically speaking there were lots of them – but everyone had to keep up appearances in order to appease those grey-suited ‘family values’ politicians who, at the time, seemed to be ubiquitous. (Though, as we gleaned from the newspapers that our parents read, it was those given to moralizing about sex that you had to watch out for).

During the 1990s, more liberal winds swept the land. Section 28 was abolished, the age of consent for gay people lowered to 16 and same-sex civil partnerships recognised by the law. Soon enough, politicians on both sides of the house were disowning their previous support for Section 28.

Yet debates around the promotion of homosexuality in schools have re-emerged in recent weeks. In a reprisal of some of the arguments of the past, Muslim parents have pulled hundreds of children out of a school in Birmingham in protest at what they see as the promotion of “homosexual lifestyles”. As a result, Parkfield community school in Saltley, Birmingham, has dropped its ‘No Outsiders’ lessons in which children from reception to year six were taught five sessions a year about homosexuality. The school, rated “outstanding” by Ofsted, is situated in a predominantly Muslim area.

Suggested reading

The Muslim veil of silence on mental health

By Rabbil Skidar

Bigotry today has become adept at draping itself in the garb of victimhood. Thus the wilier parents at Parkfield school have been careful to direct their ire not at gay rights per se, but at the supposed age-appropriateness of sex and relationships lessons at Parkfield. “Stop exploiting children’s innocence”, read one of the signs at a recent protest.

Fatima Shah, an unofficial leader of the protests, pleaded to the Guardian that she was not a bigot. “We are not a bunch of homophobic mothers,” Shah said. “We just feel that some of these lessons are inappropriate. Some of the themes being discussed are very adult and complex and the children are getting confused.”

Adult life is complex, and one of the purposes of an education is to equip children to deal with these complexities. Life is certainly not the black and white morality tale portrayed in certain religious and ideological texts. Leaflets rammed through letter boxes near Parkfield school reprise some of the old – homophobic – arguments used to defend Section 28. “There is a general policy to push gay and lesbian values to children in our schools,” one leaflet reads.

Some of the children at Parkfield school will invariably grow up and discover that they are gay. Those insistent that parents should have absolute dominion over the things their children are taught by the education system miss the obvious point that we have very little dominion over our sexuality. Gay and lesbian ‘values’ do not exist. Attraction is not a choice. Homosexuality is as ‘legitimate’ and natural as heterosexual love. “Some people are gay, get over it”, as a campaign by the LGBT charity Stonewall put it.

Suggested reading

Why are so many left-wing progressives silent about Islam's totalitarian tendencies?

By Julie Bindel

Judging by the evidence, there is a pressing need for inclusive sex education in Birmingham’s schools, despite the protestations of some parents. According to the Prevalence of Homophobia Survey, 93% of Birmingham’s teachers have witnessed a homophobic incident, while a quarter have been on the receiving end of homophobic behaviour. Society has advanced, but residual prejudice lives on.

Andrew Moffat, the assistant headteacher at Parkfield, was driven out of another Birmingham school in 2014 after parents complained that they did not want their children to “learn that it’s OK to be gay”. Moffat says he has received threatening emails from parents at Parkfield since the protests started. Parkfield school has insisted that its No Outsider lessons will continue next term, but only after a consultation with parents has taken place.

Responding to the protests, the local Labour Party has gotten itself into a mess trying to square an impossible circle. Birmingham Labour MP Shabana Mahmood urged schools to take “proper consideration for pupils’ religion and background”.

More from this author

Corbyn's intolerant populism

By James Bloodworth

Mahmood, who voted in favour of same-sex marriage in 2013, has since rowed back on her initial comments after criticism from LGBT groups. In a blog post, Mahmood wrote that she does not back the “terrible homophobic banners and hostile protests at Parkfield school in Birmingham”. Tellingly, however, the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood used her blog post to question the “age appropriateness of conversations with young children in the context of religious backgrounds”.

This suggests that special consideration ought to be given to parents whose views about homosexuality – owing to their ‘religious backgrounds’ – are not as accepting as we might like. It is a wretched statement that is imprecise enough, like so many such utterances nowadays, to get a free pass among the slovenly-minded.

It simply won’t do ­– sometimes it is necessary in politics to inform one group of people that they are wrong. This is true even when it means upsetting constituents who may then refuse to vote for you. On some questions there can be no triangulation, equivocation or, indeed, weasel words.

Indeed, much of the conversation – as with Section 28 when I was a kid – is framed back to front. Those of us who wish to see children taught about the full spectrum of human sexuality are not seeking to impose anything on anyone. Rather, we are trying to chip away at, and mitigate, the religiously-mandated stigma that still surrounds homosexuality – a stigma which is more keenly felt today in minority communities.

Liberals must stand firm against bigotry and insist that people are free to live out their lives as they wish. Parental pressure like that being applied in Birmingham must not be allowed to prevail. Our commitment to equality – backed up by law – is also a deeply held belief, and we have a right to demand that our point of view is respected, even if we don’t take our principles from a holy book.