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5 hours ago
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It is too early to declare Sir Keir Starmer’s “one in, one out” migration deal with France a failure, but nor can the government claim that it is working as intended. This week, the Guardian revealed that one of the first people deported under the treaty had found his way back to the UK via a small boat. On the same day, Home Office data revealed that the number of people who had made the journey so far this year – 36,886 – had surpassed the total for 2024. The usual partisan recriminations followed. Opposition parties accuse Labour of failing to grip the problem; ministers say they are burdened by a long legacy of Conservative mismanagement. Both things can be true.
For all its deficiencies, Sir Keir’s deal with France recognises two facts that his Tory and Reform UK opponents cannot accept. First, engagement with EU states is a sine qua non of functional migration policy. Second, without some legal mechanism for accepting refugees, desperate people will always gamble on the illegal ways.
Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are too committed to vilification – casting France as the enemy and refugees as criminals – to engage with those propositions. They refuse to acknowledge the humanity of people who put their lives at risk to enter Britain illegally. Worse, they have policies to undermine the position of millions of people who have settled in the country by legal means.
The target for both Reform UK and the Conservatives is indefinite leave to remain (ILR) – residency status that confers rights and access to state services short of the privileges of citizenship. Mr Farage proposes scrapping ILR and imposing tougher conditions on those currently on track to qualify. The Tory policy is much more extreme, retroactively revoking ILR from anyone who has claimed any form of state benefit or fallen below an annual income threshold of £38,700. This would strip residency rights from hundreds of thousands, quite possibly millions, of people, thereby making them liable to be deported.
The result would be removals on an epic scale. In terms of total number and as a proportion of overall population, the displacement would exceed the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin’s military dictatorship in 1972. The comparison is not one that many Conservative MPs welcome. Some appear to have been unaware until this week that their own policy is that monstrous, discovering its content only when Katie Lam, a junior shadow Home Office minister, spelled it out in a newspaper interview last Sunday. But the ILR revocation regime was proposed in an opposition “draft bill” presented to parliament in May.
Ms Lam’s interview clarified that the motive for removing so many apparently undesirable people, regardless of whether they call Britain their home, would be “cultural coherence”. There are fringe parties of the far right that are less explicit in their intention to engineer demographic homogeneity by means of mass expulsion. There is also, thankfully, no evidence that the British public supports such an ambition.
The political pressure to deal with illegal migration across the Channel is real and Labour will pay an electoral price if it fails on that score. But a policy of redefining millions of people’s neighbours, friends and family as illegal migrants in order to drive them out of the country should disqualify the party proposing it from debate in a civilised democracy.
