It was only last November that the Home Secretary warned of the risks to cohesion “fuelled by the scale of immigration and the pace of change.” It was only last May that the Prime Minister himself spoke of Britain “becoming an island of strangers” – a remark he later regretted, but which resonated with the public because it was true. And it was the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood herself who argued that the so-called Boriswave of over two million arrivals since 2021 represented a “£10 billion drain on our public finances”, a figure that, very likely, significantly understates the real cost.
Yet, at the first sound of gunfire from Labour backbenchers (and former Deputy PM Angela Rayner), Downing Street appears to be in full retreat. Asked repeatedly whether the Government would press ahead with its own Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) reforms, a No. 10 spokesman would say only that ministers were “considering responses” to the consultation and would reply “in due course.” That is hardly the language of a Prime Minister committed to his own policy.
Angela Rayner’s intervention – branding the proposed changes “un-British” and a “breach of trust” – was hardly a surprise. It is, of course, also meaningless. Those who came in as care workers, or those granted temporary refuge, were not told that Indefinite Leave to Remain would automatically follow after five years of residence. Each ILR application should be assessed on its individual merits.
The notion that the British taxpayer, who has never been asked whether they want unlimited numbers of poorer-country nationals, should be made to foot the bill is simply wrong and unfair – and, indeed, un-British.
More than a hundred Labour MPs, including Tony Vaughan KC, MP for Folkestone and Hythe, and another human-rights lawyer, had already expressed discomfort with applying the reforms retrospectively. Charities and religious leaders have piled in to pour heaps of ordure on Ms Mahmood’s proposals, much as we expected.
Let us be clear about what is at stake. The Home Secretary’s proposals: doubling the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain from five to ten years, with conditions around criminal records, employment, and English-language proficiency, were welcomed by Migration Watch as a sensible and overdue first step. They were the bare minimum required. They will do little to reduce the scale of the inflow. They would simply mean that the enormous cohort already here does not gain automatic settlement and full access to the welfare state without meeting basic conditions after five years of continuous residence.
The fiscal stakes are huge. The Home Office’s own estimate of £10 billion is widely considered far too low. The Centre for Migration Control has calculated the cost of dependants alone at £35 billion.
And yet No. 10’s instinct at the first sign of the expected backbench resistance is not to defend its Home Secretary but to equivocate and then, likely, to cave in. The Government’s priority, it seems, is not the struggling taxpayer or the pressure on public services but avoiding a row with backbenchers who would sooner prioritise the rights of migrants over those of the British public.
Writing in The Independent earlier this month, I wished the Home Secretary well and expressed the hope that she would succeed with her proposals. I warned that opponents of firmer measures on her own benches would do their utmost to thwart her plans; however modest. That prediction has, clearly, come to pass.
If the Prime Minister cannot back his own Home Secretary on even this most basic of reforms, the public is entitled to conclude that Sir Keir Starmer has no appetite for reducing sky-high inflows of migrants. Be warned, Sir Keir: come the next election, the electorate will not forgive being let down again.