The UK’s left-wing government is talking tough on migration but will fail to make any meaningful changes as it’s own lawmakers will stand in its way, predicted Nigel Farage ahead of Monday’s announcement.
The Home Secretary (interior minister) Shabana Mahmood will address Parliament on Monday afternoon to announce a package of measures she says will toughen up border controls, but critics from both left and right have decried the bid to appear serious on migration either immoral or insincere.
The government has already extensively trailed and soft-launched the plans over the past few days. Among the measures pitched have been restricting or even halting visas for foreign countries who refuse to cooperate on taking back deportees, and expanding the horizons for migrants getting settled status.
While border control is not natural territory for Britain’s Labour Party, it has suffered a historic collapse in the polls since its loveless victory at the national General Election last year and is trailing far behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Reform is offering the public major and meaningful changes to immigration rules, and almost daily polls show migration is a commanding issue for voters.
Attempting to claw some ground back on the matter, Mahmood is simultaneously announcing border control measures of her own while decrying the implied “dark forces” of Farage and Reform.
In a Sunday op-ed Mahmood asserted that while the UK is fundamentally welcoming to foreigners, things had gone too far of late and now needed to be reigned in, lest public consent for even having an asylum system at all be broken. Quite side-stepping whether that point has already been reached — again, polling shows Britons are overwhelmingly against mass migration and the pace of change, and support massive deportation numbers — Mahmood opined: “In recent years, the pace and scale of illegal migration has been profound… The pressure placed on local communities has been profound. The burden borne by taxpayers has been unfair. More than 100,000 people now live in asylum accommodation, funded by the taxpayer.”
As made clear by Mahmood, keeping a lid on public anger around mass migration is of personal importance to her as a second-generation immigration. She added: “Unless we act, we risk losing popular consent for having an asylum system at all… I know that some of these measures will face opposition. But this is a moral mission for me. I know that a country without secure borders is a less safe country for those who look like me.
“Dark forces are stirring up anger in this country, and seeking to turn that anger into hate. We must take the opportunity we have to stop that from happening.”
Junior government minister Alex Norris also expressed the view that the purpose of policy change now is to mollify public opinion just enough to save the asylum system from a future Reform government. He said: “When you have low public confidence, that’s when people start to make perhaps unfair or superficial assessments. If we restore order and control at our borders, it’s the government’s job to do it, then we can have the system we all want.”
Norris also threw a bone to the left, tacitly admitting there was little behind the tough talk. On the proposal that the timeline for asylum seekers to get settlement being increased to 20 years, he revealed actually this would not apply to many.
He said: “Those individuals who were on that 20-year route to settlement – we will give them the chance to switch to work or study routes so that they are learning English, so that they are taking part in the economy, so they’re contributing to their own lives and to British society. And if they do that, they can earn their right to settlement, like others on on work and study routes do already.”
Nevertheless, Norris denied the policy was just tough messaging with nothing behind it.
While the talk coming from Mahmood may be unusually severe — for a left-wing politician — reaction from the right of British politics is that talk is cheap.
Nigel Farage, whose rise and rise in the polls these policies are meant to arrest, reflected that Mahmood would be simply unable to deliver while hamstrung by both her own lawmakers, and the international law which he vows to withdraw from but to which the left-wing government is totally beholden. He said: “The home secretary sounds like a Reform supporter. It’s a shame that the Human Rights Act, ECHR and her own backbenchers mean that this will never happen.”
Former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who has emerged as one of the few from the wreckage of that party with meaningfully right-wing views, expressed comparable remarks. She said: “I’ve seen first hand others talk tough on illegal immigration without actually wanting to get anything done. One problem the Home Secretary has is an out of touch Labour Party that will never accept her plans.
“Throw in Blair’s Human Rights Act and the ECHR and these reforms will sadly amount to nothing. The only solution is scrapping both.”
And indeed, the left of the Labour movement has already begun expressing its outrage on what’s been soft-launched by Mahmood so far. The Guardian has been tracking the feeling of the left closely and notes Momentum, the hard-left party-within-a-party that was the vehicle that brought Jeremy Corbyn to become leader last decade have rejected the plans out of hand.
They said in a statement: “The home secretary’s new immigration plans are divisive and xenophobic. Scapegoating migrants will not fix our public services or end austerity. The government must fundamentally change course. Refugees are welcome here.”
Diane Abbott, a stalwart of Britain’s hard left and also a key ally of Corbyn said of the change in direction: “Draconian, unworkable and potentially illegal anti-asylum policies only feed Reform’s support. The government has learnt nothing from the period since the general election.”
