Charlie

This is how you manufacture consent. People need to go and actually read the government website to see the full set of proposals. Mahmood has slightly softened the first version of her insanely draconian plans, and now its being spun as a win for progressive Burnhamism. But Mahmood's packages in totality are the most hardline and unfair reforms to immigration and asylum rules in a generation, and bake in discrimination against poorer immigrants doing the social necessary by low-paid jobs that make society function. It is extraordinary to pretend that anything is 'softening' when the journey to full rights and settlement has been made longer for nearly every category of immigrant - except ultra-wealthy arrivals, who will get expedited settlement. The plan for asylum seekers still sees their status reviewed every 30 months. People who arrive 'irregularly' or through 'clandestine' means will have to wait up to 30 years for settlement. Safe and legal routes have new, hard caps, which will inevitably push the vulnerable into seeking irregular routes to feel safe. This package is more severe, and more unfair, than anything promised by the Tories.

Today's unjust and unfair immigration reforms top two weeks where Labour under Burnham has come into sharper focus as his government has taken key decisions. It does not look like much of a radical departure from Starmerism after all. Quite a few of these choices would not have been made if Zack Polanski had won the Holborn & St Pancras by-election. But since then Labour has felt emboldened that it no longer meets to consider its left flank, and is tacking hard to the right on key issues. The result has been a welter of decisions that will make average people poorer, the most vulnerable even more precarious, the climate worse, speech more constrained, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank more benighted, and all of us less safe as Burnham re-embraces busted militarism and inaction on the climate crisis. None of this will end 40 years of neo-liberalism. But it will usher in an age of increased insecurity, hardship and war. For those who may have missed it, in the last two weeks Burnham's government has: - approved new oil and gas drilling at Jackdaw and strongly briefed they will approve Rosebank, which will end any hope of the UK meeting it's emission targets; - passed a cowardly budget that guarantees living standards will continue to fall while failing to properly tax the ultra-rich, fossil fuel companies and banks; - briefed they will increase defence spending on the back of departmental cuts to nearly every department except health, including slashing subsidies on renewable energy and the warm homes plan; - briefed that they will be undertaking new "welfare reforms" under the hand of arch-Blairite Alan Milburn; - agreed to become an active participant in a hot war to protect Saudi Arabia's necrotic dictatorship in the wake of the spiralling conflict in Iran and the region, driven by the US and Israel; - introduced new asylum and immigration reforms that guarantees huge numbers of the most vulnerable will be thrown into greater insecurity in conditions where they can be exploited by unscrupulous employers, which will apply retrospective settlement conditions on low-paid (and thus vulnerable) immigrants, and which applies extraordinarily cruel settlement conditions on asylum seekers; - collapsed local governments in defence of Zionism even as the UK shamefully caved into Israeli pressure over shutting the East Jerusalem consulate; - accepted the deeply problematic Bell report, with Lucy Powell promising to pressurise every school in England to adopt the deeply flawed and censorious IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, which is now being challenged by the Good Law Protect and which has been forcefully rejected by the National Education Union.