Mahmood set to gut immigration crackdown after Labour Left revolt

Shabana Mahmood is about to blink. The Home Secretary's plan to make low-skilled foreign migrants wait far longer for settled status has been rewritten after a bruising internal battle inside Labour, according to politico.eu. The full extent of the climbdown lands in a Commons statement on Monday afternoon.

The numbers she's walking back are hefty. Right now, most migrants can qualify for settlement — indefinite leave to remain — after five years in the UK legally. Her original blueprint would have doubled that baseline to ten years, with low-skilled workers and anyone leaning on welfare pushed further back: 15 years for those who claimed benefits for up to 12 months, 20 years for longer stretches, and as much as 25 years for people who entered Britain illegally, such as by small boat. Doctors, nurses and other senior public sector staff would have kept a five-year route.

The crackdown was designed to blunt the impact of between 1.3 million and 2.2 million foreign nationals due to qualify for ILR between this year and 2030. That pool includes 463,000 people who arrived on the foreign care worker visa, a route widely abused with fraudulent applications.

Mahmood did not go quietly. She warned that failing to implement her blueprint in full would cost taxpayers £10 billion, called diluting it 'an affront to the idea of fairness within our society,' and admitted a weaker plan would put further strain on public services like housing and healthcare. Now she is widely expected to capitulate anyway.

The heat came from her own side. Angela Rayner castigated the proposals as 'un-British' in March, back when she was a backbencher — she has since been reappointed to the Cabinet by PM Andy Burnham. Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, seen as a rising star in government, attacked them last month too. Rayner signalled last weekend that the revised plan would be 'fair' to foreign workers already in Britain, including those in care jobs.

The Conservatives pounced. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said Mahmood had been forced to 'surrender to Angela Rayner and the open-borders Labour Left,' letting hundreds of thousands of low-wage and no-wage migrants stay and claim benefits, and called her position increasingly untenable. His alternative: a ten-year route to ILR, only for high-wage workers. All eyes on the Commons on Monday.