Shabana Mahmood's asylum crackdown is enough to make Scrooge blush – but it's not too late to change

For anyone that hasn’t yet seen the new festive film Christmas Karma, there’s one character that feels a little too familiar.

In Gurinder Chadha’s retelling of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is a “rich British Indian who despises refugees”. A part that lands perfectly, because outside the cinema, the same role is being played to perfection.

Shabana Mahmood is the latest in a long line of British South Asian home secretaries determined to make life harder for migrants and refugees. Her new migration plan makes Christmas Karma look like a documentary.

At a time of political polarisation and rising anti-immigrant rhetoric, Christmas Karma is not just a festive film, it’s a moral parable for the Britain we’re living in. And it might be exactly what the country needs.

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Chadha’s film challenges anti-refugee rhetoric by humanising a Scrooge who is both deeply prejudiced and wounded by his own displacement. It centres the beauty of multicultural Britain through a soundtrack that moves from mariachi to British Punjabi royalty, Malkit Singh. And it exposes the casual racism of comical Indian accents and diaspora communities who “forget their roots”. Chadha’s Scrooge even swaps “Bah Humbug” for the common South Asian phrase “Bakwas”.

There will be many who rage that the film is “anti-British”, complain about too many Black and brown faces on screen or insist that it desecrates Dickens. And while the film won’t be enough to unite a divided nation, it exposes the truth: the division we’re witnessing across the country is being fuelled by racism and xenophobia, not immigration.

Christmas Karma could have been the antidote we needed this winter. Instead, our politicians are determined to make it a mirror, reflecting the worst of Britain.

While Chadha’s fictional Scrooge finds redemption, developing compassion and care for his community. Our very real Scrooge at the Home Office is determined to double down on hatred and division.

The home secretary’s latest announcements will make the UK the most unwelcoming country in all of Europe for asylum seekers, a bleak Christmas message for those seeking safety. 

Mahmood intends to make refugee status temporary, reviewed every few years, with some having to wait up to 20 years until they are allowed to settle. She has threatened to confiscate the only valuables people have managed to bring with them – a mother’s necklace, a family heirloom. Imagine surviving a journey across continents only to have your last connection to home seized by a rich state. What could be more Scrooge-like than that?

Many once believed that Britain would look after them. But it’s becoming more obvious that under Mahmood, migration will continue to be used as a political weapon, one that fuels racism and tears communities apart, while letting the super-rich off the hook.

Hate has become the easy option for politicians who lack ideas. And if Mahmood looked in the mirror she might see “a dark force stirring up anger”, staring right back at her.

The truth is Shabana Mahmood’s policies won’t fix the real issues people are facing nor “disincentivise” people from coming to our country. They won’t bring down the cost of living, build affordable homes, cut energy bills or strengthen communities. But they will tear apart friendships, families and neighbourhoods.

This very same dismantling of neighbourhoods appears in the most painful scene in Chadha’s film, which depicts Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s South Asian community. A reminder that displacement never happens in a vacuum. It was the British Empire that moved South Asians to Uganda and then left them to suffer the fallout of their unequal system. The fear and uncertainty felt by migrant communities in the UK, after Mahmood’s latest announcements, echoes the history and pain of those divided communities with uncomfortable clarity. This should be a sharp warning for Mahmood.

Christmas Karma may not win any awards, but Shabana Mahmood has gone one step further than previous performers – Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman – she’s playing Scrooge so convincingly she should take home the Oscar.

Yet even in this despairing moment, there must be hope. Like Dickens’s Scrooge, it’s not too late for change. Mahmood and her government could still rethink the trajectory of their immigration agenda and choose compassion over cruelty, before Britain begins to resemble the bleak future Chadha paints.

There is a pathway in which people seeking safety are provided with safe routes and people across the country struggling to make ends meet are also supported.

We deserve policies that build communities, not fear. We deserve leaders who can see the flames of the future approaching and change course. We deserve compassion and safe routes now.

Ravishaan Rahel Muthiah is a strategic communications expert and human rights campaigner who has led groundbreaking political, climate and migrant justice campaigns.

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