Leading UK legal professionals have raised alarms about a political “downward spiral”, after a Conservative MP seen as a future party leader proposed that large numbers of legally settled families must be deported.
Divisive Remarks on Legal Status
The MP, a shadow Home Office minister and a Tory whip, stated that individuals with legal status in the UK should have their right to stay cancelled, to guarantee the UK remains mostly “culturally coherent”. The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, later distanced herself 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 withdraw indefinite leave to remain (ILR) status if someone has committed a crime. However, the statement has raised alarms for many as a signal of “perilous periods” and belonging to a larger political discourse.
Growing Trend of Immigration Criticism
In the past few months, leaders across political parties have adopted anti-immigration language and repeated proposals that were once considered fringe. Lately, a political party leader expressed dissatisfaction about “numerous advertisements” seemingly including “black and Asian people”, and in September, the group’s head, the figurehead, pledged to abolish the main route for migrants to gain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, the Labour leader said the UK faced the danger of 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 investigated claims of discrimination within the opposition party.
The barrister, whose family migrated from the Caribbean, said the remarks were a barely concealed 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 feel insecure.
“We’re in a downward spiral,” added 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 talk about the positives of migration.
“The language has to evolve and has to be truthful.”
Public Sentiment and Extremist Movements
Support for Reform has surged in the surveys, and far-right marches have drawn thousands to London, leaving many British people of colour feeling the situation are similar to extremist rallies from decades past and fearful the UK is “going backwards” as elected officials target migrants.
“These are perilous times,” said an immigration lawyer, who has acted for hundreds of victims at the centre of the residency controversy, in which Britons from the Commonwealth living in the UK legally were mistakenly categorized as illegal migrants.
McKenzie said her father, 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.
“Now we’re getting young people in their twenties and thirties who have got multiple generations ahead of them, UK-born, feeling less than,” 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 deporting and expelling people who are lawfully resident, and millions of them as well. That’s something very different, isn’t it?”
Individual Consequences
People with permanent residency, or with spouses 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, alarming 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 polls had pushed him to get his British citizenship. For the past six years he has gone through the procedure of securing ILR – at a huge financial cost – after relocating to the UK on a spousal visa. Should the suggested changes be implemented, he fears his family would be split up.
“It’s easy for someone to say now, well, that will never happen,” said Darwazeh, 37. “Who knows how this plays out in the coming years.”
While day to day, he has “no issues”, he has been alarmed by the proliferation of national symbols in his neighbourhood, a trend that has been widely adopted by the extremist groups and immigration opponents. In the future, though the family has no wish to leave, they may consider it if the hostility persists.
“It’s strange that in a nation where immigrants are required, nobody is promoting a beneficial narrative about immigration at all,” he remarked. “I just find the vilification very peculiar and terrifying, long-term.”
