Immigration, indecency, and incompetence

As I and many others have noted, we are seeing the extraordinarily rapid development of extreme policies on immigration becoming mainstream. The failure of Brexit to ‘solve the problem of immigration’, with the consequent neutering of extremist politics that was meant to bring, can be chalked up to the long list of its unmet promises.

At the same time, as with Brexit, what is now being proposed about immigration also entails promises which cannot be kept, if only because those promises deny or ignore the damage, both economic and non-economic, these proposals would do. In this sense, along with the immorality of such proposals, we should beware of the utter incompetence of those making them.

An affront to decency

In the last fortnight, this new extremism came to fresh prominence with remarks by Tory ‘rising star’ Katie Lam, in which she spoke of deporting large numbers of people who have ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ (ILR) immigration status. As with last month’s Reform proposals, this crosses a very significant line in that it would entail retrospectively changing the rules.

Whilst Lam’s comments received much attention, she was articulating something which, to less attention, has been Tory policy since last May, when they promulgated a draft ‘Deportation Bill’ (although, post-Lam, this is reported to be under “internal  review”). Under this policy, the criteria for deportation would capture those who had, quite legitimately, received benefits at some time during their residence in the UK or who had earned less than £38,700 a year for an aggregate period of six months within their time of residence.

It would also include people with ILR, or their dependents, who had received any form of ‘social protection’, which would seem to include NHS treatment and pension payments, and perhaps even universal credit. Thus it has the potential to end up separating families, deport retirees after decades of living here to countries with which they have no substantive connection, or to make those with ILR fearful of seeking healthcare.

The enormity of these proposals can hardly be over-stated. Not only would they apply retrospectively but they would entail compulsory repatriations, something not even envisaged by Enoch Powell in the 1970s (who argued for a voluntary repatriation policy). And they would apply on a huge scale, affecting potentially 5% of the UK population (£).

Nothing like this has ever been undertaken in a modern democracy: even in Trump’s America, legal immigrants are not the target of deportation policy. It’s closest analogue in recent times is Idi Amin’s Uganda. If enacted, it would mean not only leaving the ECHR but would also, since as currently described it would apply to some people with EU Settled Status, undoubtedly mean an end to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU. So we would immediately be back to a ‘no deal Brexit’.

The pivot to values

As well as being unprecedently draconian in its scope, this proposal is noteworthy because it is not simply animated by an intention to reduce the number of immigrants, nor is it solely concerned with the supposed extent of immigrants’ financial ‘contributions’. At least in Lam’s telling, it is also intended to increase ‘cultural coherence’. Exactly what this means can only be guessed at, and none of those guesses paint Lam in an edifying light, but it shows that the proposal is also meant to remove those who don’t share some supposed sense of ‘British values’ (although many of us would think that the proposal itself is an affront to what we take those values to be).

This is important because it reflects how the anti-immigration case has largely ceased to present itself as being not an objection to immigrants, per se, but just a ‘concern about numbers’. The pivot to values (which of course long pre-dates Lam’s comments, but they are the latest exemplification) is part of what has enabled anti-immigration rhetoric to lump together everything from an asylum-seeker who commits a crime to a person speaking a foreign language in the street. It also enables racists to pretend that, far from objecting to immigrants’ skin colour, they are heroically standing up for women’s or gay rights, or for Christian or Enlightenment values, or any number of other hypocrisies.

Given the way these proposals target legal, not illegal, immigrants, and do so retrospectively, and taken in conjunction with the fact that they involve leaving the ECHR, then some even more sinister possibilities open up. Why confine the crackdown to those with ILR? Why not revoke the acquired citizenship of those who do not share ‘our values’? And, if that, then why not extend the same test to those born in this country? Even if they can’t be deported, they could at least be rounded up for ‘re-education’. This is where the logic of ‘cultural coherence’ leads. If that seems alarmist then so, too, would it have seemed alarmist even a few years, perhaps even a few months, ago to envisage a ‘mainstream’ political party advocating the compulsory deportation of legally settled immigrants.

Even in its own grotesque terms, the Tory ILR policy is an absurdity. The very idea that it would create ‘cultural coherence’ is nonsense because it would actually undermine that concept’s close cousin, ‘integration’. It would remove any sense that integration was desirable or even possible, by making ‘indefinite’ residence precarious, and making it clear that those with ILR were only present under sufferance: ‘we don’t really want you here and we’ll kick you out the moment we feel like it’ is hardly an incentive assimilation. In fact, even if these proposals are never implemented, the very fact that they have been made will almost certainly already have had the effect of undermining integration, signaling to millions of immigrants just how unwelcome they are, and that it would be rather foolish to make long-term plans to be part of this country.

Public opinion

Some commentators have taken comfort from the fact, which I also referred to when I discussed Reform’s ILR proposal, that opinion polls show the current ILR rules to be well-supported. Thus, it is suggested, both Tory and Reform parties are pursuing an extremely unpopular policy. I am not so sure that this can be relied upon. The opinion polls most often cited seem to date back to early in 2024, before the now two summers of far-right agitation and, crucially, before anyone started talking about ILR as a salient issue in the immigration debate, let alone as a problematic one. More recent polling, from September 2025, shows a more mixed picture. In particular, although retrospective withdrawal of ILR is still unpopular, it does have the support of 29% of the public.

It therefore seems quite likely that public opinion will continue to move on ILR the more it is targeted by Reform and Tory politicians. And, as I also pointed out in that previous discussion, this will be aided by the way that, whilst denouncing the Reform proposals, Keir Starmer’s government has its own plan to extend the ILR qualifying period from five to ten years, and to introduce new ‘contribution-based’ tests. This is less draconian, since at least it would not apply retrospectively, but it contributes to creating a sense amongst the public, which did not exist before, that ILR is a ‘problem’ in need of a solution.

What we can now call the Reform-Conservative solution, apart from being grossly immoral, is also unworkable, in multiple senses of the term. It would almost certainly encounter substantial legal challenges, and arouse huge popular opposition once its effects began to be felt. And even if a future government pushed all that aside, the economic damage would be enormous. Not only would it strip out desperately needed members of the workforce, it would deter the arrival of new immigrants – including the so-called ‘brightest and best’ we are always told the UK wants, and perhaps especially these, since they have many other possible destinations.

Indeed, what the anti-immigration lobby seems unaware of is that the UK is actually in an emerging global competition for immigrants (£), of all sorts, with other countries with ageing populations and low birth-rates. In fact, rather than constantly yammering on about the supposedly ‘undiscussable’ issue of immigration, the latter are the demographic issues politicians should really be addressing.

Their failure to do so, and instead to pander to and promote anti-immigration sentiment, is a massive failure of leadership. As analysis by James Bowes, published this week by UKICE, shows, “the coming collapse in immigration”, in response to ‘public concern’ is set to have damaging economic effects which the public will certainly not enjoy. Yet, even as net migration falls, a survey shows that frequent GB News viewers finds that 84% of them think it is rising, as do smaller, but still large, majorities of frequent viewers of ITV and BBC News.  

Unfit for office

It's this unworkability and lack of realism which links directly to Brexit, which in the UK is the foremost example of how populism and incompetence are so strongly linked (the Truss mini-budget is another example). We already know, if only from those two examples, that any claim to governmental competence the Tories may have had has long since gone. But voters expecting Reform to be an improvement are in for a disappointment.

I noted in the first post of the new title of this Blog that an important part of this period of post-Brexit politics would be that Reform’s success in local elections, giving it control of twelve councils, would bring with it mounting evidence of the party’s utter incompetence when it achieved power. We are now seeing that evidence emerge (as well as plenty from the ructions within Reform’s tiny cohort of MPs and the scandal of Farage’s grift).

Recent examples have included revelations of in-fighting at Kent County Council, Reform’s ‘flagship council’, which led to five councillors being expelled from the party this week. Other Reform-led councils, including Worcestershire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire, have experienced various degrees of chaos. Meanwhile, at Northumberland County Council, where it is the main opposition, Reform has expelled three councillors from the party, the most recent one having allegedly said he wanted to shoot Keir Starmer.

This partly reflects the collection of oddballs and dodgy characters who have suddenly found themselves in positions of responsibility. But, at Kent and elsewhere, it also reflects the impracticality of all the airy talk of cutting huge swathes of waste and reducing council tax bills. As at national level, the easiest thing to promise when in opposition is ‘cutting red tape’, but the hardest thing to achieve when in power is to do so without cutting services.

Thus, on contact with reality, all the nonsense about millions being wasted on ‘diversity officers’ or ‘health and safety’ is exposed as such. On the other hand, Reform-led Nottinghamshire have managed to find £75,000 to buy 150 union jack flags, whilst Reform’s Greater Lincolnshire Mayor, the charmless former Tory MP and Education Minister Andrea Jenkyns, has requested an extra £147,000 for office staff to answer her emails.

Against this background, last week Zia Yusuf became the second head of Reform’s ‘DOGE’ to resign within less than a year of its creation. This was the body, modelled on Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, supposed to identify efficiency savings in Reform councils, although it has failed to undertake any audits to date (£), and is reported to have only visited three of the twelve councils.

Reform’s experience of the realities of local government also sheds light on the impracticality of its, and the Tories’, national immigration policies. Back in July, Kent, again, complained about the Labour government’s new restrictions on visas for social care workers because of the damage it would do to the provision of social care within the county. There are other reasons to think that some within Reform are becoming wary of its racism and anti-immigration agenda. Yusuf himself resigned as Party Chairman last June, apparently because of Reform MP Sarah Pochin calling for a ‘Burqa ban’ (although it subsequently became unclear where he stood on this issue). More recently, Neville Watson, a prominent Reform activist and its only Black branch chair, resigned from Reform over its hardline and divisive anti-immigration stance.

Pressing the FU button

The latter led to some social media ribaldry along the lines of ‘I never thought the leopards eating people’s faces party would eat my face’, but this is a glib and politically maladroit response. In this period, when Reform is not, but could become, a party of national government, such recantations or realizations should be praised, not mocked. Things are very finely balanced. A few percentage-points difference in voting at the next general election could, under first past the post, be the difference between near-total defeat for Reform, or Farage becoming Prime Minister. So in the next few years anything which makes voters reflect on what a Reform government would mean is going to be important.

There is, of course, a bedrock of support for Reform which will always be there, deriving from those who genuinely support its policies or just its actual or perceived values. But what could bring it to power would be if, as with the Brexit vote, enough voters decide, as Guardian columnist Marina Hyde pungently put it, to “press the F*** You button” [1]. Amongst the reasons to do so might be the idea that ‘they can’t be any worse than the main parties’ (but they can: that’s why tracking their chaos and incompetence in local government matters) or ‘they ought to be given a chance’ (but they are being, and we can see what it leads to).

Another reason to press the ‘FU button’ is the idea that ‘we’ve got nothing to lose’ and the closely associated one ‘it won’t affect me’. Though these are slightly different from each other (as the second kind of voter might acknowledge having something to lose, but just assume that it won’t be them), they are both versions of thinking that ‘the leopard won’t eat my face’. So it is important that now, before it is too late, some of those who currently think this begin to reflect that they might be wrong. Otherwise, it will be like ‘Brexit morning’ all over again.

This becomes particularly important because, again as with Brexit, plenty of Reform’s support does not come from those with ‘nothing to lose’. It became fashionable in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, amongst those who were opposed to Brexit as much as amongst those who advocated it, to talk as if this had been some uprising for the dispossessed (especially the working class of Northern England) against ‘the elite’. But this was, at the least, highly simplistic, as analysis of the leave vote by Benjamin Hennig and Danny Dorling showed, given the levels of support for Brexit amongst middle-class and Southern voters.

Relatedly, the original concept of ‘Red Wall voters’, which subsequently became much misunderstood, was to do with those within traditional Labour seats (not always in Northern England) who traditionally voted Labour but who, in demographic terms, ‘ought to’ be likely to vote Conservative and, subsequently, increasingly did so (though now, increasingly, Reform). One way of looking at these voters is that their economic interests and political choices had become misaligned. If their parents and grandparents had voted Labour, it was as a way of furthering industrial workers’ interests, and doing so had been inherited as a cultural belief even if they, themselves, might well be self-employed or retired homeowners. Another way of looking at them is as being in the process of re-aligning cultural values, in particular from class identity to regional, national, or ethnic identity. Better, in fact, to see it as both.

The politics of self-indulgence

At all events, these voters are not, for the most part, economically dispossessed. These are not young, unemployed, propertyless people, nor are the reacting to mass unemployment and economic depression. They are most likely homeowners, with some savings, but who feel themselves to be culturally dispossessed [2]. As such, I increasingly think that the best way to describe them is ‘self-indulgent’ or even perhaps, in a certain sense, ‘decadent’. That is, they can indulge their carefully-guarded cultural grievances by voting Reform because they do not believe that it will damage them to do so.

But, in fact, they are highly vulnerable, in at least two main ways. One is that, although Reform’s economic policies remain unclear and confused (and, like its local government promises, rely greatly on mythical ‘waste saving’ and false claims about the effect of scrapping Net Zero policies), Farage’s championship of the Truss budget, and of Javier Milei’s economic programme, suggests that a Reform government would mean economic chaos, of a sort which would most damage not the very poor (who may really have nothing to lose) or the very rich (who are well-cushioned against any loss), but these modestly well-off voters.

The second is that such voters are very likely to be dependent on the disability benefits Reform pledged, just this week, to take an axe to, and on the health and care services which are kept afloat by immigration. So just as when, after the Brexit vote, leave voters kept telling the EU citizens who they knew personally that they ‘didn’t mean you’ when they voted against immigration from the EU, they are likely to say the same to, as it might be, their Ghanaian care worker when a Reform or Reform-Con government starts the mass deportations. And, as with Brexit, by then it will be too late. Too late for those voters, and too late for the rest of us. Which is why the most urgent task in politics now is to persuade enough of those who are minded to vote for Reform that, for them personally, and their families, the consequences will be disastrous.

Rejecting the repellent

There are at least signs that this urgency is now being felt by voters, judging by the result of the Caerphilly by-election. Whilst a number of factors were in play, at least one important one seems to be that ‘progressive voters’ voted tactically for Plaid Cymru and against Reform. Thus, against opinion polls and, evidently, Nigel Farage’s expectations, Reform were soundly defeated. That is just one election, held in specific circumstances, and it would be foolish to extrapolate much from that, just as it would be from general surveys of voting intentions, especially in relation to what might happen in a general election that will probably not be held until 2029.

On the other hand, with Reform and the Tories now openly holding out the prospect of mass deportations, with all that would mean, the case for tactical voting is becoming ever stronger. After all, such voting is most in evidence when voters feel repellence, and that becomes more likely when parties advocate repellent policies. It becomes less easy to press the ‘FU button’ when you know what it will do, and neither Reform nor the Tories are doing much to hide that. The challenge for Labour, in particular, is not to chase those parties into equally repellent policies, and thus becoming repellent itself.

 

Notes

[1] I’m not using asterisks because of any prudishness on my part, but because the use of certain words causes posts to be blocked by some distribution networks.

[2] This is the background to the row this week over Pochin’s remarks about being ‘driven mad’ by adverts featuring too many black and Asian people. This was not an idiosyncrasy on her part, but repeated what has been a persistent whine on social media for some years, given as evidence that ‘it’s not our country any more’ and that white people are somehow victims of oppression. It’s a sign of the times that this fringe preoccupation is now the subject of national debate. The focus of that debate has been about whether Pochin’s remarks were racist, although ‘debate’ is too generous a word for the tortured apologetics that tried to show they were not, but they raise other issues. One is the incoherence of that racism. Sometimes, as with Robert Jenrick’s recent remarks, right-wingers complain about there being ‘no white faces’ on British streets. Yet, if this is supposedly the reality of modern Britain, then why are they also complaining that adverts are an unrealistic depiction of British society because they show too few white faces? The other relates to the incoherence of economic policy. Reform and the Tories constantly say that businesses face too much red tape, and that there is too much emphasis on ‘DEI’ initiatives seeking representativeness in hiring and promotion decisions. Yet, if it is true that adverts over-represent non-white people, they surely do so for commercial reasons. Or does Pochin propose that advertisers be subject to quotas to ensure they are representative in their imagery?