Can we extract the Reform nonsense from Labour?

These immigration proposals are obscene, but the government can be forced to think again.

Reform’s Suella Braverman gazes at Keir Starmer during PMQs this month. © House of Commons

The government’s plans on immigration are guided by two aims: fairness and integration. They’re mentioned on nearly every page of the immigration white paper and in nearly public utterance by the home secretary Shabana Mahmood and in nearly every section of the earned settlement consultation document. So it goes without saying that these are the two values which these proposals aim to kill.

They act in a way which is not fair, could not possibly be interpreted as fair, runs against any sense of natural justice and contradicts the core legal principles on which this country is based. And they operate, persistently and in myriad foreseeable ways, to eradicate the ability of immigrants to integrate into British society. Mahmood is either lying about her belief in these values or she is so inept that she is now on the verge of destroying that which she wishes to protect.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about Keir Starmer finding his progressive voice since Morgan McSweeney left. Who knows. Perhaps that’s true. But we should be clear: No government could call itself progressive while passing these measures. No government could claim to be engaged in effective policy-making, given the measures contradict the aims they are ostensibly meant to achieve. And no government which gave a good goddamn about the immigration issue would pass anything which looked like this. It is a dog’s dinner of half-conceived policy, Reform rhetoric, mean-spirited sentiment, and profound intellectual muddle.

There is still time to stop it. The consultation on the plans closed last week. Public and parliamentary pressure can make them think again. And that must happen. Because if not, we’ll be forced to sit and watch as a Labour government - a Labour government, sweet Christ - passes some of the most draconian anti-immigrant policies of our lifetime.

It is clear, from the very first paragraph of the immigration white paper, that the government is trying to appeal to Reform voters. “Britain,” it states, “became a one-nation experiment in open borders. The damage this has done to our country is incalculable.” In reality, Britain did not become a one nation experiment and therefore no damage took place because the event never happened.

This is from Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ period, in which he warned that integration was fraying and we were becoming a cold and atomised place to live due to immigration. It was an obscene speech - easily the worst thing he has done - and he has since apologised for the language. But he has not apologised for the argument, which was wrong, or the policies, which were shit. The basic poison of this era of his leadership is still working its way through the machine while he insists on how progressive he has now become.

The white paper announced a series of policies but two were particularly far-reaching and troublesome. The first concerned the right of refugees to be reunited with their families. And the second concerned how long someone would have to stay in the UK before they were eligible for indefinite leave to remain. We’ll take them in turn.

People who’ve been granted refugee status can apply for a refugee family visa for their partner, or their children under 18. This route was closed on September 4th last year while the government reviewed its conditions, with an expected Spring 2026 launch of a new scheme. During this period, the most brutalised people on earth - refugees, not asylum seekers - have been denied reunion with their family.

The language at the point of the suspension suggested the Home Office had no idea what it was doing. Quite literally, it did not seem to understand whether what it was proposing was temporary or permanent. When the Lords secondary legislation scrutiny committee asked the Home Office about the review, it described it as temporary. “It is important to recognise this is a temporary measure,” it said. “Given we intend to reopen the route in the Spring 2026, applicants may decide to defer their application for a short period of time”. All very reasonable. Cup of tea and a biscuit.

So it was strange that Starmer then released a press release on October 2nd in which he said that automatic family reunion rights for refugees “will” end. This, apparently, is for two reasons. First, to reduce “the pull factors driving high levels of illegal migration to the UK”. And second, because it is “unfair” that those in small boats have “greater rights to… family reunion than… even British citizens”.

Neither of these arguments makes any sense. If the government believes it will reduce the “pull factor”, it would have evidence to that effect. It does not. When the Lords committee asked about this, the Home Office replied: “It is not possible to estimate the impact on future impact [sic] on family migration applications, as there are a number of potential behavioural responses of migrants to the suspension, which are uncertain and cannot be quantified.”

In other words, they claim to be reducing a pull factor but are unable to demonstrate any evidence that this is in fact the case. Who knows? Perhaps more people will get small boats to be with their partner because the family route has been removed? That seems at least possible. We’ll never know, because the Home office has no data to underpin its arguments.

The prime minister is apparently also upset that refugees can bring over their family without any of the conditions which apply to other groups. British citizens who marry a foreigner, for instance, must provide six months of income slips showing they earn £29,000. Why should people born here be subject to harsher standards than those who arrive here?

This is a useful example of how immigration law always ratchets towards the most severe outcome. Migrants rights groups have protested against the income benchmark on spousal visas for years. They said that it broke up families. They said that people working part time, or in retail, often did not hit these salary levels and were therefore being told by their own country that they could not live with the person they loved, an intolerable intrusion by the state into their intimate life. Those concerns were all ignored. But now, all of a sudden, the hardships the state has imposed on those families is an excuse to impose ever worse hardships on other groups, to make it all equal.

There is, of course, no mention of the idea that you would make things equal by removing the hardship from the British cohort. Everything must always degrade towards the most draconian possible solution. This is the first rule of immigration policy and the mechanism by which we eradicate our better nature.

So which is it? Is the suspension temporary or is it permanent? Are they assessing policy proposals or have they already decided? Patently permanent. Patently already decided. As the Lords committee said: “This appears to us to be a change in policy stance that potentially preempts the results of the review and undermines some of the supporting arguments for the statement. As such, we are concerned that it represents policy making by press release rather than following due process.”

They’ve got no good argument for what they’re doing here, except the cruelty-calculus of separating one family on the basis that they already separate others. They’ve got no evidence that it would achieve their policy aims. They’ve got no moral basis to do it and no practical basis to do it. They don’t have a goddamn thing. But they’ll do it anyway, force children to grow up without their dad, then put out another press release about Britain’s proud history of generosity.

The other plank of the government’s immigration reforms concerns indefinite leave to remain. No-one used to give a damn about this status until Nigel Farage started talking about it, and then Labour ran after the dog he set loose. It is an immigration status allowing you to stay in the UK as long as you like without having to make further applications. It’s sometimes called settled status. A year after that, you can usually apply for citizenship. Under the current rules, people on other visas - let’s say spousal or working visas - are offered this settled status after five years.

That’s pretty normal internationally. Switzerland demands ten years, but all other major democracies are between three to six years. It roughly corresponds to what the public thinks is appropriate as you can see by the British Social Attitudes survey - although to be fair the public rarely thinks much about this issue so the way you frame it has a significant effect on the result.

The government has decided to extend it to ten. This is ruinous. It forces people to live as an outsider for a full decade, without any normal sense of national identity, legal status or civic participation. It is a policy which specifically aims to discourage integration. It is a direct attempt to create an island of strangers.

The ten year wait is the default. Under plans put out to consultation which ended last week, arrivals in the UK would then be able to shorten the number of years by good behaviour or lengthen it by bad behaviour, as if they were in jail. Good behaviour, in this case, is having lots of money. Bad behaviour is using benefits or seeking asylum.

If you learn English to a high level, they knock a year off. If you earn £125,140, they’ll knock seven years off. If you earn £50,270, they’ll take five years off. But if you receive benefits for under a year, they’ll add five. If you receive benefits for over a year, they’ll add ten. If you arrive in a small boat, they’ll add 20, making it effectively impossible for you to ever regularise your status in the UK. Interestingly, workers sponsored for jobs in the UK but with skills designated at below degree level - care workers, basically - have an extra five years added as well, making them wait 15 years for settled status.

A short while ago, Farage said he would strip people on indefinite leave to remain of their status. This breaks one of the core principles underpinning a stable and legally sound society: the principle against retrospective law.

Laws should apply to the future, when people know what they are and can follow them, not the past when they did not know what they were and therefore could not follow them. Similarly, if we say to an immigrant that they have settled status, we do not say tomorrow that it is gone on the basis of activities they could not have knowingly avoided. This is fair and just, but it is also self-interested. Countries which break their word are not reliable. They are not somewhere you want to invest or headquarter a business. Britain’s stability, the sense that it stands by its word and its legal propositions, is one of its greatest advantages.

When Farage issued this threat, Starmer correctly called it “immoral”. In the government’s consultation, it continues that attack. “We will not, and would never, take away settled status from those who have already been granted it,” it says. “Fairness is the most fundamental of British values. We made these people a promise when we gave them settlement. We welcomed them here permanently at that point, and we do not break our promises.”

But in fact, the government does want to break its promise. The proposals it is putting forward would apply retrospectively. They would apply to the people who are already in this country waiting for settled status. They came here on an understanding about what the process entailed. Now, as they are in the process, it is being changed.

Imagine that you are a care worker without degree-level skills who came here in 2021, during the Boris Johnson administration. There were significant shortages in those roles, they wanted people to help and they made it clear to you what the conditions were. You are now a few months away from the end of the five year term and within grasping distance of settled status. But just before you can do so, they are going to add another ten years to that process. Ten. Not five. Ten. One of the most severe pathways.

Let’s say you claimed benefits at some point. When you did so, there were no rules against this. Now you will retrospectively discover that there were. Either five or ten years are added to the process.

Or let’s say you are the child of one of the people currently waiting for settled status in this country. There are around 309,000 of them, most of whom are dependants of people on work routes. Their parent was just slapped with a ten year extension of their waiting period. They will not have a secure status in the country they live in - probably the only country they can remember. They will not have citizenship. They will struggle to enter higher education. They will experience deep and corrosive uncertainty in the place they should call home.

Speaking in front of the home affairs committee earlier this month, the home secretary wobbled a little bit on how retrospective these plans would ultimately be, but stated explicitly that this element was not up for negotiation. “It is inconceivable that literally nobody who is currently here would be affected by any of these changes,” she said, “and I think we should be up front about that.” She based this assertion on the pitiful technical argument that indefinite leave to remain applications are “based on the rules at the time that you apply” rather than when you arrived. It might work in court. It is not the way anyone thinks or could possibly be expected to think and she knows it.

How would anyone ever take Britain’s word seriously again? How would anyone trust it? That goes for school-educated care workers from India, who the government evidently could not care less about. But it also goes for PHD-educated tech workers from San Francisco, who the government is much more interested in. It goes for billionaire investors in Saudi Arabia and China, for entrepreneurs from France. How do they know the government will keep its words to them when it would not keep it for others? It is a grim and mortifying irony that a barrister from north London should be the prime minister to eradicate Britain’s legal standards in this way.

And all for what? To reduce immigration. Which is already happening and in fact is now becoming so economically damaging that Rachel Reeves may have to introduce another tax-raising Budget to make up for the financial loss it entails. Shattering our legal standing so we can make ourselves poorer. What a winning set of decisions.

It’s not too late to stop all this. Every single part of these plans can be prevented before they are enacted - the family reunion rights, the ten year settled status requirement, the mad jangle of punishment pathways, and in particular the retrospective legal vandalism of their application on existing cohorts.

This can be stopped. But that will require people to demonstrate to their MP their strength of feeling, so that the parliamentary party demonstrates it to the leadership, and the leadership thinks again. This is not the way a sane country behaves. And it’s not the way a decent government behaves either.

Odds and sods

This week’s newsletter is available as a podcast - on Substack, on Spotify or at the top of the page.

If you don’t follow Sunder Katwala on BlueSky, you should. He’s really been doing the running on this issue, including in this brilliant column, which prodded me into writing about it today.

Couple of pieces for the i paper this week, one on Wednesday arguing that only the truth can end the royal scandal over Epstein and then one on Thursday on, well, you know. That whole thing. Quite a week, by God.

I also spoke a bit about Mandelson, Starmer and all that on ABC’s Late Night Live, which you can listen to here. Next time, I’ll be in the studio for the first time after eight years or so of doing the show, as part of a working trip in Australia.

We put out a special Patreons-only Q&A episode of Origin Story this week, in which we cover the crucial questions like: Why don’t people talk about Mikhail Gorbachev more, what book would you send to end tyranny, and what exactly is the political distinction between me and Dorian? You can access it here.

I’ve started getting requests for commercial advertising in the newsletter - small bits of copy where I’d write about a product, clearly designated as advertising. As long as the product isn’t immoral or defective, I plan to accept them. Why not? The newsletter is free, I leave a lot of money on the table that way, so taking on sponsorship is really welcome. If you have a strong reason for why you think I shouldn’t do this, let me know in the comments and I’ll have a think about it.

I really liked the BBC drama Waiting For The Out, which doesn’t seem to have got nearly enough attention. It’s about a philosophy teacher in a prison who is far, far more messed up than any of the men in his class. It’s very funny, and sweet, and utterly unsentimental, and has a very honest conversation about men and childhood and the extent to which you can realistically escape your past. It is also extremely well versed on prison life - the little bits I know from when I used to report on it suggest that a lot of research had gone into it. Non-judgemental, razor sharp, and the product of decent-minded people. It’s a real delight.

See you next week you bastards.