Mahmood says nearly all women crossing Channel in small boats have been raped

Shabana Mahmood said nearly all women who try to reach the UK in small boats from northern France have been raped along the way, during an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast. The home secretary told former Tory minister Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell that the criminal gangs who also work as people traffickers decide who ends up in northern France and boards a dinghy. She said that process should not determine who is allowed to come to the UK and make it their place of sanctuary.

Mahmood said the UK is not in control of its border, describing the sorting of people waiting to cross as the work of gangs. She said it could almost be guaranteed that every woman in northern France had probably been raped during the journey, adding that some men had also been abused and threatened.

Asked about balaclava-wearing protesters who shut down ports while praising her policies, Mahmood told them to sod off. She called them troublemakers, saying they would kill her in a minute if they could and would definitely kick her out of her own country. She added that they do not consider her a true Brit and hate that she is a Muslim.

Mahmood also said she considers herself part of the pro-Palestinian cause and feels very uncomfortable about the arrests of activists opposing the ban on Palestine Action. Merseyside police arrested 82 people on Monday at the Labour party conference on suspicion of wearing or carrying articles supporting a proscribed organisation, during a protest organised by Defend Our Juries outside the conference centre in Liverpool. She defended enforcing the ban regardless of her personal views, citing section 13 of the Terrorism Act.

Imran Hussain, a director at the Refugee Council, welcomed the home secretary's acknowledgment of widespread sexual violence but questioned why the government had closed safe and legal routes that could keep asylum seekers away from predators. He said women and girls fleeing war and persecution face sexual violence in the conflicts they escape and on the journeys they are forced to make, and called for new safe routes announced last week not to be limited to a few hundred people. He noted that family reunion, a safe route that overwhelmingly benefits women and children, was closed last year, arguing that protecting women means more safe routes, not fewer.

Separately, authorities were preparing on Sunday for the arrival of a migrant dinghy heading for the south coast, shadowed by French coastguard and rescue vessels and moving toward the Channel boundary line, according to ship tracking data. The boat appeared to have set off from near the Utah Beach area of Normandy on Sunday morning. Caroline Dinenage, the Conservative MP for Gosport in Hampshire, said there was nothing to suggest the boat would land on the county's coast but police were making preparations should that change. A government spokesperson said the Border Security Command works around the clock to monitor the Channel and that it is vital every small boat arrival is detained, checked and processed.