Prominent UK legal professionals have issued warnings about a political “downward spiral”, after a Conservative MP considered a future party leader proposed that large numbers of lawfully resident households must be deported.
Controversial Statement on Residency Rights
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 guarantee the UK remains predominantly “culturally uniform”. The Conservative leader, the party head, later retreated from these comments last Thursday.
While the leader initially said the statement were “broadly in line” with official stance, she later reverted to existing policy that only revoke permanent residency status if someone has committed a crime. Nevertheless, the proposal has raised alarms for many as a signal of “dangerous times” and belonging to a broader political conversation.
Growing Trend of Anti-Migrant Rhetoric
In recent months, politicians across various groups have absorbed anti-migrant rhetoric and echoed policies that were once seen as extreme. Most recently, a Reform UK leader expressed dissatisfaction about “every advert” seemingly including “ethnic minorities”, and in September, the group’s head, the figurehead, pledged to abolish the primary pathway for migrants to gain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, the Labour leader said the UK faced the danger of becoming an “nation of foreigners” without stricter border controls.
“I don’t accept that the implications of that phrase were not comprehended, and it was appealing to a particular audience,” said Martin Forde KC, who has examined claims of racism within Labour.
Forde, whose family migrated from the Caribbean, said the remarks were a “thinly disguised racial purity campaign”. The legal expert 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,” continued Forde. “It’s desperate to see Labour feeling the only answer to Reform is to try and outdo their policies, rather than actually discuss the positives of immigration.
“The rhetoric has to change and has to be truthful.”
Public Sentiment and Extremist Movements
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 far-right marches from previous eras and concerned the UK is “regressing” as elected officials focus on migrants.
“These are perilous times,” said an immigration lawyer, who has represented hundreds of victims at the centre of the Windrush scandal, in which Britons from the Commonwealth residing in the UK legally were mistakenly categorized as illegal migrants.
McKenzie said her father, who emigrated to the UK from Jamaica in 1951, would be rolling in his grave over the present debate. Recently, her child has questioned whether they should get overseas citizenship.
“Now we’re getting kids in their twenties and thirties who have got two generations ahead of them, UK-born, experiencing insecurity,” said McKenzie.
“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 principles here, the tentacles of it spread so far when you start talking about deporting and removing people who are legally in the country, and vast numbers of them as well. This represents a major shift, isn’t it?”
Personal Impact
Individuals with permanent residency, or with spouses who hold this status, have expressed that the new proposals floated by political figures have left them feeling insecure in the UK, and characterized the broader political anti-migrant discourse as discriminatory, alarming and unwelcoming.
Ramzi Darwazeh, a person with dual nationality living 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 past six years he has gone through the process of securing permanent residency – at a huge financial cost – after relocating to the UK on a marriage permit. Should the proposed policies be enacted, he worries his family would be separated.
“It’s simple for someone to say now, well, that will not occur,” said the man, in his thirties. “Who knows how this plays out in the coming years.”
While in daily life, he has “no problems”, Darwazeh has been concerned by the increase of national symbols in his neighbourhood, a trend that has been widely co-opted by the extremist groups and anti-immigration protesters. In the future, though the family has no wish to leave, they may think about it if the unfriendliness persists.
“I find it really odd that in a nation where immigrants are required, nobody is promoting a beneficial narrative about immigration at all,” he remarked. “I consider the demonisation very peculiar and frightening, for the future.”
