The Home Secretary is considering increasing payments to migrants for them to voluntarily return back to their own countries.
Shabana Mahmood insists her policy is “value for money” and told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast that she has told officials that “pilot a small programme” of larger payments “just to see how it changes behaviour.”
Currently the Home Office gives payment of up to £3,000 of taxpayers money for this who have no right to remain in the UK.
Mahmood set out asylum plans on Monday for the system and the financial packages will help with those who want to return voluntarily back to their home countries.
Mahmood said, “I haven’t alighted on the full sums involved yet, but I am willing to consider a big increase on what we currently pay.
“I know it sticks in the craw of many people and they don’t like it, but it is value for money, it does work, and a voluntary return is often the very best way to get people to return to their home country as quickly as possible.”
Tommy Robinson whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon posted on social media, “The Overton window has been obliterated, well done patriots.”
Mahmood said she would not “have any truck with anything that an individual like that has to say.”
She said, “If mainstream politics cannot have a discussion about secure borders and the rules by which people enter this country and the rules by which they must leave, if we cede that territory to the far-Right, if we show that we are either unable, unwilling, or simply don’t have the capacity to even think about the issue properly, and we cede it all to the far-Right, then we have let our country down.”
Mahmood also revealed her plan for the settled status system over the UK’s ongoing migrant crisis.
Mahmood said, “I, and so many others like me, are a patriot. Mine is a love of this country: one that is forever changing, while something essential about it always endures.
“It is a patriotism that finds room for those who trace their roots back many generations, and those, like me, who do not.
But I worry that this broad patriotism is, for some, narrowing and that a vision of a greater Britain is giving way to that of a littler England as anger turns to hate.
“Some will choose to scorn this analysis. They would rather we simply wished it away. But those who look like me do not have that luxury.
“Our lives – and the lives of our families – are more dangerous in a country that turns inwards. So we have no choice but to ask: what is the cause of our division? And how might this country be united?”
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