Leading UK legal professionals have raised alarms about a political “race to the bottom”, after a Conservative MP considered a future party leader suggested that large numbers of lawfully resident households must be removed from the country.
Controversial Statement on Legal Status
The MP, a shadow Home Office minister and a party enforcer, stated that individuals with legal status in the UK should have their permission to remain cancelled, to ensure the UK remains mostly “culturally coherent”. The Tory leader, the party head, later retreated from Lam’s statement recently.
While the leader initially said the statement were “generally consistent” with party policy, she later reverted to current rules that only withdraw permanent residency status if someone has committed a crime. Nevertheless, the statement has raised alarms for many as a signal of “dangerous times” and belonging to a larger political discourse.
Escalating Pattern of Immigration Criticism
In recent months, leaders across various groups have adopted anti-immigration language and repeated policies that were once considered fringe. Most recently, a Reform UK leader complained about “numerous advertisements” seemingly including “black and Asian people”, and in September, the group’s head, Nigel Farage, pledged to eliminate the main route for migrants to obtain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, the Labour leader said the UK risked becoming an “nation of foreigners” without stricter border controls.
“I don’t accept that the implications of that phrase were not fully understood, and it was targeting a specific group,” said a leading barrister, who has investigated claims of discrimination within Labour.
Forde, whose family emigrated from the West Indies, said the remarks were a “thinly disguised keep Britain white campaign”. The legal expert said the current political discourse was an “utter condemnation” that someone like himself, from generations of people who had contributed to the country, should still experience anxiety.
“It’s a race to the bottom,” added the lawyer. “It’s alarming to see Labour feeling the sole solution to Reform is to try and out-Reform Reform, rather than actually discuss the benefits of immigration.
“The rhetoric has to change and has to be truthful.”
National Mood and Far-Right Activity
Backing for the party has increased in the surveys, and far-right marches have attracted large crowds to the capital, leaving many British people of colour feeling the circumstances are similar to far-right marches from previous eras and fearful the UK is “going backwards” as politicians focus on migrants.
“These are perilous times,” said an immigration lawyer, who has acted for hundreds of victims at the centre of the residency controversy, in which UK citizens from the former empire residing in the UK legally were classed wrongly as unauthorized immigrants.
McKenzie said her father, who emigrated to the UK from Jamaica in 1951, would be rolling in his grave over the current discourse. Recently, her child has asked whether they should get Caribbean passports.
“Now we’re getting young people in their 20s and 30s who have got multiple generations ahead of them, born in Britain, experiencing insecurity,” said the attorney.
“We are in really, really dangerous times where anti-migrant sentiment is being seen as a legitimate policy orientation for many groups,” she added. “The tenets of this, the reach of it spread so far when you start talking about deporting and removing people who are legally in the country, and millions of them as well. This represents a major shift, isn’t it?”
Personal Impact
People with permanent residency, or with partners who hold this status, have shared that the new proposals suggested by political figures have left them feeling insecure in the UK, and characterized the broader political anti-migrant discourse as racist, alarming and unwelcoming.
Ramzi Darwazeh, a person with dual nationality residing in the city with his wife and children, said the recent surge of Reform in the surveys had pushed him to get his UK passport. For the last several years he has gone through the procedure of obtaining ILR – at a huge financial cost – after moving to the UK on a marriage permit. Should the suggested changes be enacted, he worries his family would be split up.
“It’s easy for someone to say now, well, that will never happen,” said the man, 37. “Who knows how this unfolds in the coming years.”
While day to day, he has “no issues”, Darwazeh has been concerned by the proliferation of national symbols in his neighbourhood, a practice that has been widely co-opted by the far-right and immigration opponents. In the future, though the household has no desire to leave, they may consider it if the unfriendliness persists.
“It’s strange that in a country where immigrants are needed, nobody is promoting a positive story about migration at all,” he added. “I just find the vilification very peculiar and terrifying, for the future.”
