Leading UK legal professionals have raised alarms about a political “downward spiral”, after a Conservative MP seen as a future party leader proposed that significant quantities of lawfully resident households must be deported.
Controversial Statement on Residency Rights
Katie Lam, a opposition home affairs spokesperson and a party enforcer, stated that individuals with lawful residence in the UK should have their right to stay cancelled, to ensure the UK remains predominantly “culturally uniform”. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, later retreated from these comments recently.
While Badenoch initially said the statement were “broadly in line” with official stance, she later reverted to current rules that only withdraw permanent residency status if someone has committed a crime. However, the statement has raised alarms for many as a signal of “dangerous times” and belonging to a broader political conversation.
Growing Trend of Immigration Criticism
In the past few months, leaders across various groups have absorbed anti-migrant rhetoric and echoed policies that were once considered fringe. Lately, a political party leader expressed dissatisfaction about “every advert” seemingly featuring “ethnic minorities”, and in last autumn, the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, pledged to eliminate the main route for immigration to obtain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, Keir Starmer said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without stricter border controls.
“I don’t accept that the ramifications of that statement were not comprehended, and it was targeting a particular audience,” said Martin Forde KC, who has examined claims of discrimination within Labour.
The barrister, whose family migrated from the Caribbean, said Lam’s comments were a barely concealed 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 experience anxiety.
“It’s a race to the bottom,” added the lawyer. “It’s alarming to see Labour feeling the only answer to the rival party is to try and out-Reform Reform, rather than actually discuss the positives of migration.
“The language has to change and has to be accurate.”
Public Sentiment and Far-Right Activity
Support for Reform has increased in the polls, and extremist demonstrations have drawn thousands to the capital, leaving many British people of colour feeling the circumstances are similar to extremist rallies from decades past and concerned the UK is “going backwards” as elected officials focus on 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 living in the UK lawfully were classed wrongly as unauthorized immigrants.
The lawyer said her father, who emigrated to the UK from Jamaica in 1951, would be rolling in his grave over the current discourse. Recently, her daughter 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, UK-born, feeling less than,” said the attorney.
“These are extremely hazardous times where anti-migrant sentiment is being seen as a legitimate policy orientation for most political parties,” she continued. “The tenets of this, the tentacles of it extend widely when you start talking about removing and expelling people who are lawfully resident, and vast numbers of them as well. That’s something very different, isn’t it?”
Individual Consequences
Individuals with permanent residency, or with partners who hold this status, have shared that the new proposals floated by political figures have left them feeling uncertain in the UK, and characterized the wider political debate as racist, alarming and hostile.
One individual, a dual British-Jordanian citizen residing in the city with his family, said the growing support of the party in the polls had pushed him to get his UK passport. For the past six years he has gone through the process of obtaining permanent residency – at a significant expense – after moving to the UK on a marriage permit. Should the proposed policies be implemented, he fears his family would be split up.
“It’s easy for someone to say now, well, that will never happen,” said the man, in his thirties. “Who knows how this unfolds in two, three years.”
While day to day, he has “no issues”, he has been concerned by the proliferation of St George’s flags in his area, a trend that has been widely adopted by the extremist groups and anti-immigration protesters. In the future, though the household has no wish to leave, they may consider it if the unfriendliness persists.
“I find it really odd that in a country where immigrants are required, nobody is promoting a beneficial narrative about immigration at all,” he added. “I consider the demonisation very odd and terrifying, long-term.”
