Shabana Mahmood is about to discover something every Home Secretary learns sooner or later – you can’t fix Britain’s asylum system without upsetting the people in your own party who think the last decade never happened. The moment she so much as hinted at going “full Danish”, Labour’s backbenchers responded exactly as expected. Not with a sober conversation about the scale of illegal migration – or the reality facing local councils and communities – but with a meltdown that suggests many of them still live in a moral universe completely adrift from voters.

If Mahmood’s reforms are blocked, Labour will deserve to lose every seat they have. Because at some point, you cannot keep telling the country its concerns are invalid while performing political theatre about ‘compassion’ from the safety of leafy constituencies.

The public can see the gap between rhetoric and reality. They also know that the same MPs who love a “refugees welcome” placard are mysteriously absent when asylum accommodation is proposed anywhere near their own patch. It’s always someone else who should take responsibility. Someone poorer. Someone without the luxury of pretending this is all harmless.

This is what Mahmood is up against. She is proposing things that should have been done years ago: ending automatic routes to settlement, regular reviews of asylum status, tightening the rules around family reunion, and closing loopholes that allow people to drag cases out indefinitely. None of it is radical. Much of Europe already operates this way.

Denmark has gone further and is now recording some of the lowest asylum numbers in its modern history. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because politicians decided the stability of the nation mattered more than virtue signalling.

Britain is in a similar position, but with a political class considerably more squeamish. Mahmood’s critics have branded her proposals “performatively cruel”, “divisive” and “straight from the far-right playbook”. The idea that reviewing someone’s status every 30 months or restricting last-minute appeals is ‘far right’ is laughable.

It’s also deeply insulting to Mahmood herself. She is not some frothing ideologue. She’s a British-Pakistani woman who has been on the receiving end of racial abuse for most of her adult life. She stood up in the Commons this week and told Lib Dem MP Max Wilkinson that, unlike him, she’s the one called a “f***ing Paki” on her way to work. You don’t have to agree with every detail but to smear her as a foot soldier of extremism is grotesque.

The real problem isn’t Mahmood’s plan. It’s whether she’ll be allowed to deliver it. Labour is sleepwalking into the same trap they accused the Tories of falling into – talking tough while doing nothing. And this time they won’t be able to blame conservative chaos.

If these reforms collapse under pressure from Labour’s own MPs, Keir Starmer will own the fallout entirely. And he’ll have gifted Nigel Farage the simplest message imaginable: “I told you Labour wouldn’t fix this.”

The country already knows the asylum system is broken. It is the Government that must prove it intends to repair it. Yet some Labour MPs are so determined to posture that they can’t see the wider picture. Communities that have dealt with rapid inflows of asylum seekers, often housed in hotels for years on end, are exhausted. They want a system that distinguishes between genuine refugees and people who think Britain is a soft touch. And yes, they want illegal entrants removed. Not after endless appeals. Not after a decade of court battles.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Leftie politicians have spent years presenting themselves as moral arbiters on migration. Yet when asylum accommodation is proposed in their own constituencies, they scrambled to block planning permissions. Green MP Carla Denyer looked ready to explode this week when Mahmood pointed this out.

But these are luxury beliefs dressed up as compassion – and voters know it.

Mahmood knows the numbers, the costs, and the pressures on housing, social care and policing. She also knows that if Labour fails, the window for a sensible, centre-left solution closes entirely. The next government won’t be arguing about review periods and visa restrictions. They’ll be arguing about leaving the ECHR, naval pushbacks and blanket bans on asylum claims. The public mood is shifting. Mahmood is trying to catch it before it hardens into something more unforgiving.

If Labour MPs truly care, they need to stop the theatrics and look their own voters in the eye. The choice isn’t between “compassion” and Mahmood’s plan. It’s between Mahmood’s plan and handing No10 to Nigel Farage.