Prominent UK legal professionals have issued warnings about a political “downward spiral”, after a Tory lawmaker considered a potential leadership candidate suggested that large numbers of lawfully resident households must be deported.
Controversial Statement on Residency Rights
The MP, a opposition home affairs spokesperson and a party enforcer, stated that individuals with lawful residence in the UK should have their right to stay revoked, to ensure the UK remains predominantly “culturally uniform”. The Conservative leader, the party head, later retreated from Lam’s statement last Thursday.
While the leader initially said the remarks were “broadly in line” with party policy, she later returned to existing policy that only revoke permanent residency status if someone has committed a crime. However, the proposal has raised alarms for many as a signal of “perilous periods” and belonging to a larger political discourse.
Growing Trend of Anti-Migrant Rhetoric
In recent months, politicians across various groups have absorbed anti-immigration language and repeated proposals that were once seen as extreme. Lately, a Reform UK leader complained about “every advert” seemingly featuring “ethnic minorities”, and in last autumn, the group’s head, Nigel Farage, pledged to abolish the primary pathway for migrants to gain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, Keir Starmer said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without tougher immigration policies.
“I don’t accept that the implications of that statement were not fully understood, and it was targeting a particular audience,” said a leading barrister, who has investigated claims of racism within the opposition party.
The barrister, whose parents emigrated from the Caribbean, said the remarks were a barely concealed racial purity campaign”. The legal expert said the current political discourse was an “absolute indictment” that someone like himself, from multiple generations of people who had contributed to the country, should still experience anxiety.
“We’re in a downward spiral,” added Forde. “It’s desperate to see the opposition feeling the only answer to the rival party is to try and outdo their policies, rather than actually talk about the positives of immigration.
“The rhetoric has to change and has to be truthful.”
National Mood and Extremist Movements
Support for Reform has increased in the polls, 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 previous eras and concerned the UK is “regressing” as elected officials target migrants.
“These are perilous times,” said Jacqueline McKenzie, who has represented hundreds of affected individuals at the centre of the Windrush scandal, in which UK citizens from the Commonwealth living in the UK lawfully were classed wrongly as unauthorized immigrants.
McKenzie said her parent, who emigrated to the UK from Jamaica in 1951, would be deeply disturbed over the current discourse. Lately, her child has asked whether they should get overseas citizenship.
“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.
“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 deporting and removing people who are lawfully resident, and vast numbers 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 shared that the new proposals floated by political figures have left them feeling uncertain in the UK, and characterized the broader political anti-migrant discourse as discriminatory, alarming and unwelcoming.
One individual, a dual British-Jordanian citizen residing in Manchester with his wife and children, said the growing support of the party 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 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 the man, 37. “It’s uncertain how this unfolds in two, three years.”
While day to day, he has “no issues”, he has been alarmed by the increase of national symbols in his neighbourhood, a trend that has been widely co-opted by the far-right and anti-immigration protesters. In the future, though the household has no desire to leave, they may think about it if the hostility continues.
“It’s strange that in a nation where immigrants 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.”
