Shabana Mahmood goes full-on ICE on TikTok

Having seen the spectacular success of the US body ICE’s videos of undocumented immigrants being arrested and escorted from the country, hardline home secretary Shabana Mahmood has decided she fancies a bit of the action and launched a similar TikTok channel.

The channel, securebordersuk, has so far published four videos with prosaic titles such as “Illegal migrants arrive at newly expanded detention facility before being returned”, in a bid for any boat-toting foreigner scouring social media to be deterred from heading to Britain’s coast.

The Home Office has said the account is aimed at tackling online misinformation and to deter people from making the dangerous crossing over the Channel, with Mahmood saying: “There is no place for illegal working in our communities. That is why we have surged enforcement activity to the highest level in British history so illegal migrants in the black economy have nowhere to hide.”

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But at present the channel has garnered fewer than 10,000 followers and a similar number of likes, with comments left on the videos almost uniformly negative: “Oh my God why are we taking inspiration from America”; “The UK is sick”; “This is not okay”; “Right so we’re following America into fascism I see”; and “this country is embarrassing”, being among the more polite observations.

Still, at least the Home Office hasn’t been blowing the budget on the music being used on the videos, which varies from ominous to curiously disco-adjacent. Most of the soundtrack consists of copyright-free tunes available on numerous Spotify compilations, and pretty much all of it by non-British artists.

Tunes include LoVibe’s Good Man With A Broken Heart, which may describe Keir Starmer’s attitude to the nonsense now being put out by his own government, while one video is soundtracked by a piece of music with the suspiciously foreign title of Descobertas Novas, the Portuguese for “new discoveries”.