Leading UK legal professionals have issued warnings about a political “downward spiral”, after a Tory lawmaker seen as a potential leadership candidate proposed that significant quantities 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 cancelled, to ensure the UK remains predominantly “culturally uniform”. The Tory leader, the party head, later distanced herself from Lam’s statement last Thursday.
While the leader initially said the statement were “generally consistent” with party policy, she later reverted to existing policy that only revoke permanent residency status if someone has broken the law. However, the statement has raised alarms for many as a indication of “dangerous times” and part of a larger political discourse.
Growing Trend of Immigration Criticism
In recent months, leaders across political parties have adopted anti-migrant rhetoric and echoed proposals that were once seen as extreme. Lately, a Reform UK leader expressed dissatisfaction about “every advert” seemingly featuring “ethnic minorities”, and in September, the group’s head, Nigel Farage, pledged to abolish the primary pathway for migrants to obtain British citizenship.
Earlier this year, Keir Starmer said the UK faced the danger of becoming an “nation of foreigners” without stricter border controls.
“It’s hard to believe that the implications of that statement were not fully understood, and it was appealing to a specific group,” said a leading barrister, who has examined claims of racism within the opposition party.
The barrister, whose family emigrated from the Caribbean, said Lam’s comments were a “thinly disguised keep Britain white campaign”. The legal expert said the current political discourse was an “absolute indictment” that someone like himself, from multiple generations of people who had served the country, should still feel insecure.
“It’s a race to the bottom,” added the lawyer. “It’s alarming to see the opposition feeling the sole solution to Reform is to try and outdo their policies, rather than actually talk about the positives of migration.
“The rhetoric has to change and has to be accurate.”
Public Sentiment and Extremist Movements
Backing for the party 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 extremist rallies from decades past and fearful the UK is “going backwards” as elected officials target migrants.
“We’re in very dangerous times,” said an immigration lawyer, who has acted for hundreds of victims at the heart of the residency controversy, in which UK citizens from the former empire living in the UK legally were classed wrongly as illegal migrants.
McKenzie said her father, who moved to the UK from Jamaica in 1951, would be rolling in his grave over the present debate. Lately, her daughter has questioned 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, born in Britain, experiencing insecurity,” 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 added. “The tenets of this, the tentacles of it spread so far when you start talking about deporting and expelling 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 partners who hold this status, have expressed that the recent policies suggested by Conservative and Reform leaders have left them feeling insecure in the UK, and characterized the broader political anti-migrant discourse as discriminatory, frightening and unwelcoming.
Ramzi Darwazeh, a person with dual nationality living in the city with his family, said the recent surge of the party in the surveys had pushed him to get his UK passport. For the last several years he has gone through the process of obtaining permanent residency – at a huge financial cost – after relocating to the UK on a spousal visa. Should the suggested changes be enacted, he fears his family would be separated.
“It’s easy 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 in daily life, he has “no issues”, Darwazeh has been alarmed by the proliferation of national symbols in his neighbourhood, 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 unfriendliness persists.
“It’s strange that in a country where migrants are needed, no one’s actually selling a beneficial narrative about migration at all,” he remarked. “I consider the demonisation very peculiar and frightening, long-term.”
