Prominent UK attorneys have issued warnings about a political “race to the bottom”, after a Conservative MP seen as a potential leadership candidate suggested that large numbers of lawfully resident households must be deported.
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 right to stay revoked, to ensure the UK remains mostly “culturally coherent”. The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, later distanced herself from Lam’s statement last Thursday.
While Badenoch initially said the remarks were “generally consistent” with party policy, she later returned to existing policy that only withdraw indefinite leave to remain (ILR) status if someone has broken the law. However, the statement has raised alarms for many as a signal of “perilous periods” and part of a larger political discourse.
Escalating Pattern of Immigration Criticism
In the past few months, politicians across political parties have adopted anti-migrant rhetoric and repeated policies that were once considered fringe. Most recently, a Reform UK leader expressed dissatisfaction about “numerous advertisements” seemingly including “black and Asian people”, and in September, the party’s leader, the figurehead, pledged to eliminate the primary pathway for migrants to gain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, Keir Starmer said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without stricter border controls.
“It’s hard to believe that the implications of that phrase were not fully understood, and it was appealing to a particular audience,” said Martin Forde KC, who has examined claims of discrimination within Labour.
Forde, whose parents migrated from the West Indies, said Lam’s comments were a “thinly disguised keep Britain white campaign”. The leading barrister said the present political debate was an “utter condemnation” that someone like himself, from multiple generations of people who had served the country, should still feel insecure.
“We’re in a downward spiral,” added the lawyer. “It’s desperate to see Labour feeling the sole solution to the rival party is to try and out-Reform Reform, rather than actually discuss the benefits of migration.
“The rhetoric has to change and has to be accurate.”
National Mood and Far-Right Activity
Support for Reform has surged in the surveys, and extremist demonstrations have attracted large crowds to the capital, leaving many minority ethnic Britons feeling the situation are similar to far-right marches from decades past and concerned the UK is “going backwards” as elected officials target migrants.
“We’re in very dangerous times,” said Jacqueline McKenzie, who has represented hundreds of affected individuals at the centre of the Windrush scandal, 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 overseas citizenship.
“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 acceptable political direction 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 legally in the country, and vast numbers of them as well. That’s something very different, isn’t it?”
Personal Impact
Individuals with ILR status, or with partners 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 characterized the wider political debate as discriminatory, frightening and unwelcoming.
One individual, a person with dual nationality residing in the city with his family, said the recent surge of Reform in the surveys had pushed him to get his British citizenship. For the last several years he has gone through the procedure of obtaining permanent residency – 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 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 the coming years.”
While day to day, he has “no issues”, Darwazeh has been concerned by the proliferation of St George’s flags in his area, a trend that has been widely adopted by the far-right and anti-immigration protesters. In the future, though the household has no wish to leave, they may consider it if the hostility continues.
“I find it really odd that in a nation where migrants are required, nobody is promoting a positive story about migration at all,” he remarked. “I just find the vilification very peculiar and frightening, long-term.”
