Leading UK attorneys have issued warnings about a political “race to the bottom”, after a Tory lawmaker considered a potential leadership candidate suggested that large numbers of lawfully resident households must be removed from the country.
Controversial Statement 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 cancelled, to ensure the UK remains mostly “culturally coherent”. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, later distanced herself from these comments last Thursday.
While Badenoch initially said the statement were “generally consistent” with official stance, she later returned to existing policy that only withdraw permanent residency status if someone has broken the law. Nevertheless, the proposal has raised alarms for many as a indication of “dangerous times” and part of a larger political discourse.
Escalating Pattern of Anti-Migrant Rhetoric
In recent months, leaders across various groups have absorbed anti-immigration language and echoed proposals that were once considered fringe. Lately, a Reform UK leader complained about “numerous advertisements” seemingly featuring “black and Asian people”, and in September, the group’s head, Nigel Farage, pledged to abolish the primary pathway for immigration to obtain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, Keir Starmer said the UK risked becoming an “nation of foreigners” without stricter border controls.
“I don’t accept that the implications of that statement were not fully understood, and it was targeting a particular audience,” said Martin Forde KC, who has investigated claims of discrimination within Labour.
Forde, whose family migrated from the West Indies, said the remarks were a “thinly disguised keep Britain white campaign”. The legal expert 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 experience anxiety.
“We’re in a downward spiral,” continued Forde. “It’s alarming to see Labour feeling the sole solution to the rival party is to try and outdo their policies, rather than actually discuss the positives of migration.
“The language has to change and has to be truthful.”
National Mood and Far-Right Activity
Support for Reform has surged in the polls, and far-right marches have attracted large crowds to the capital, leaving many British people of colour feeling the circumstances are similar to extremist rallies from previous eras and fearful the UK is “regressing” as elected officials target migrants.
“These are perilous times,” said an immigration lawyer, who has acted for hundreds of victims at the heart of the Windrush scandal, in which Britons from the Commonwealth residing in the UK lawfully 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 present debate. Lately, her child has questioned whether they should get overseas citizenship.
“Currently we see kids in their twenties and thirties who have got multiple generations ahead of them, UK-born, experiencing insecurity,” said McKenzie.
“These are extremely hazardous times where anti-migrant sentiment is being seen as a acceptable political direction for many groups,” she continued. “The tenets of this, the tentacles of it extend widely when you start talking about deporting and expelling people who are legally in the country, and millions of them as well. This represents a major shift, isn’t it?”
Individual Consequences
People with permanent residency, or with spouses who hold this status, have shared that the new proposals floated by Conservative and Reform leaders have left them feeling uncertain in the UK, and described the wider political debate as discriminatory, alarming and hostile.
Ramzi Darwazeh, a person with dual nationality living in the city with his wife and children, said the growing support of the party in the polls had pushed him to get his British citizenship. For the last several years he has gone through the procedure of securing permanent residency – 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 easy for someone to say now, well, that will not occur,” said Darwazeh, 37. “Who knows how this plays out in two, three years.”
While day to day, he has “no issues”, he has been alarmed by the proliferation of St George’s flags in his area, a trend that has been widely co-opted by the far-right and anti-immigration protesters. In the future, though the family has no wish to leave, they may think about it if the unfriendliness continues.
“I find it really odd that in a country where migrants are needed, nobody is promoting a beneficial narrative about migration at all,” he remarked. “I consider the vilification very odd and frightening, for the future.”
