Leading UK legal professionals have raised alarms about a political “downward spiral”, after a Conservative MP seen as a future party leader suggested that significant quantities 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, remarked that individuals with legal status in the UK should have their right to stay revoked, to ensure the UK remains mostly “culturally coherent”. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, later retreated from these comments last Thursday.
While the leader initially said the remarks were “broadly in line” with party policy, she later returned to current rules that only revoke permanent residency status if someone has committed a crime. However, the statement has raised alarms for many as a signal of “dangerous times” and part of a larger political discourse.
Escalating Pattern of Immigration Criticism
In recent months, leaders across various groups have adopted anti-immigration language and repeated proposals that were once seen as extreme. Most recently, a Reform UK leader complained about “numerous advertisements” seemingly including “black and Asian people”, and in last autumn, the group’s head, the figurehead, pledged to abolish the main route for migrants to obtain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, the Labour leader said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without tougher immigration policies.
“I don’t accept that the implications of that phrase were not comprehended, and it was appealing to a particular audience,” said a leading barrister, who has investigated claims of discrimination within Labour.
The barrister, whose family emigrated from the West Indies, said the remarks were a “thinly disguised racial purity campaign”. The leading barrister said the present political debate was an “absolute indictment” that someone like himself, from multiple generations of people who had served the country, should still feel insecure.
“We’re in a downward spiral,” continued Forde. “It’s desperate to see the opposition feeling the sole solution to the rival party is to try and out-Reform Reform, rather than actually talk about the positives of immigration.
“The rhetoric has to change and has to be accurate.”
National Mood and Far-Right Activity
Backing for the party has surged in the surveys, and far-right marches have drawn thousands to London, leaving many British people of colour feeling the circumstances are similar to far-right marches from decades past and fearful the UK is “regressing” as elected officials focus on migrants.
“These are perilous times,” said Jacqueline McKenzie, who has represented hundreds of victims at the centre of the residency controversy, in which Britons from the former empire residing in the UK legally were mistakenly categorized as unauthorized immigrants.
McKenzie said her parent, who emigrated to the UK from Jamaica in 1951, would be rolling in his grave over the current discourse. Lately, her daughter has asked whether they should get Caribbean passports.
“Now we’re getting kids in their twenties and thirties who have got multiple generations ahead of them, born in Britain, feeling less than,” 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 continued. “The principles here, the tentacles of it spread so far when you start talking about deporting and removing people who are legally in the country, and vast numbers of them as well. That’s something very different, isn’t it?”
Individual Consequences
Individuals with ILR status, or with partners who hold this status, have expressed that the new proposals suggested by Conservative and Reform leaders have left them feeling uncertain in the UK, and characterized the broader political anti-migrant discourse as discriminatory, frightening and hostile.
One individual, a dual British-Jordanian citizen living in Manchester with his wife and children, said the growing support of Reform in the surveys had motivated him to get his British citizenship. For the last several years he has gone through the process of obtaining ILR – at a huge financial cost – after moving to the UK on a spousal visa. Should the proposed policies be enacted, he worries his family would be split up.
“It’s simple for someone to say now, well, that will never happen,” said Darwazeh, 37. “It’s uncertain how this plays out in two, three years.”
While in daily life, he has “no problems”, Darwazeh has been concerned by the proliferation of St George’s flags in his neighbourhood, a practice that has been widely co-opted by the extremist groups and anti-immigration protesters. Long-term, though the household has no desire to leave, they may think about it if the hostility persists.
“It’s strange that in a country where migrants are needed, nobody is promoting a beneficial narrative about migration at all,” he added. “I consider the vilification very peculiar and terrifying, long-term.”
