Leading UK legal professionals have raised alarms about a political “race to the bottom”, after a Tory lawmaker considered a potential leadership candidate proposed that significant quantities of lawfully resident households must be deported.
Divisive Remarks on Legal Status
Katie Lam, a shadow Home Office minister and a party enforcer, remarked that individuals with legal status in the UK should have their permission to remain revoked, to ensure the UK remains mostly “culturally coherent”. The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, later retreated from these comments last Thursday.
While Badenoch initially said the statement were “broadly in line” with official stance, she later returned to existing policy that only withdraw permanent residency status if someone has committed a crime. Nevertheless, the proposal has raised alarms for many as a signal of “perilous periods” and part of a larger political discourse.
Growing Trend of Immigration Criticism
In recent months, politicians across political parties have adopted anti-migrant rhetoric and repeated policies that were once considered fringe. Most recently, a political party leader complained about “every advert” seemingly including “black and Asian people”, and in September, the party’s leader, the figurehead, pledged to abolish the main route for immigration to gain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, Keir Starmer said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without tougher immigration policies.
“It’s hard to believe that the implications of that phrase were not fully understood, and it was targeting a particular audience,” said Martin Forde KC, who has investigated claims of discrimination within the opposition party.
The barrister, whose family migrated from the West Indies, said the remarks were a “thinly disguised racial purity campaign”. The leading barrister said the current political discourse was an “absolute indictment” that someone like himself, from generations of people who had served the country, should still experience anxiety.
“We’re in a downward spiral,” continued the lawyer. “It’s desperate to see the opposition feeling the sole solution to Reform is to try and outdo their policies, rather than actually talk about the benefits of immigration.
“The language has to evolve and has to be accurate.”
Public Sentiment and Far-Right Activity
Support for Reform has surged in the polls, and far-right marches have drawn thousands to the capital, leaving many British people of colour feeling the circumstances are similar to far-right marches from previous eras and concerned the UK is “going backwards” as elected officials focus on migrants.
“We’re in very dangerous times,” said an immigration lawyer, who has represented hundreds of affected individuals at the heart of the residency controversy, in which UK citizens from the former empire residing in the UK legally were classed wrongly as unauthorized immigrants.
The lawyer said her parent, who moved to the UK from the Caribbean in 1951, would be rolling in his grave over the current discourse. Recently, her daughter has questioned whether they should get Caribbean passports.
“Currently we see young people in their twenties and thirties 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-immigrant fervour is being seen as a acceptable political direction for most political parties,” she continued. “The tenets of this, the reach of it spread so far when you start talking about removing and expelling people who are lawfully resident, and vast numbers of them as well. This represents a major shift, isn’t it?”
Individual Consequences
People with permanent residency, or with partners who hold this status, have expressed that the recent policies suggested by political figures have left them feeling insecure in the UK, and characterized the wider political debate as racist, frightening and hostile.
Ramzi Darwazeh, a dual British-Jordanian citizen living in the city with his wife and children, said the recent surge of Reform in the polls had motivated him to get his UK passport. For the past six years he has gone through the procedure of securing ILR – at a significant expense – after relocating to the UK on a marriage permit. Should the proposed policies be implemented, he worries his family would be separated.
“It’s simple for someone to say now, well, that will not occur,” said the man, 37. “Who knows how this unfolds in the coming years.”
While day to day, he has “no issues”, Darwazeh has been alarmed by the proliferation of St George’s flags in his area, a trend that has been widely adopted by the far-right and immigration opponents. In the future, though the household has no desire to leave, they may think about it if the unfriendliness persists.
“I find it really odd that in a nation where migrants are required, no one’s actually selling a beneficial narrative about immigration at all,” he remarked. “I just find the vilification very odd and terrifying, long-term.”
