Today (23 September) Nigel Farage’s Reform party announced its most radical policy yet as it prepares to make a one-term dash from having five MPs to becoming the largest party in the House of Commons.
The party that now leads UK opinion polls says that it believes non-citizens resident in Britain should be stripped of their indefinite right to stay. Instead they would be subject, in perpetuity, to a regular round of tests under a visa system to determine their eligibility to stay – based on factors like income and skills.
If implemented, the policy would be a definitive break with decades of convention about the opportunities for foreigners who live and work in Britain. It would also represent a break for the British right, which has long spoken of “integration” as the highest goal of immigration policy. One of its two standard-bearer parties now intends to deport people who thought they had a right to live here, and who started families, bought houses and otherwise put down roots because of that belief. (Let’s see how Kemi Badenoch’s beleaguered Conservatives respond – the NS understands that at least one shadow minister thinks the party should condemn the plan).
Such a break will provoke major arguments. The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has already called Farage a “threat to our democracy” and an enemy of “British values” in response.
To realise of the extent of this “Overton Window” shift, cast your mind back seven years to the resignation of Amber Rudd. She left her job as Home Secretary in disgrace after revelations that 83 people with a legal right to be in Britain were wrongly deported by the Home Office, while hundreds more were threatened with removal, refused re-entry and deprived of other rights. The cause of the Windrush Scandal was a lack of proper paperwork combined with an increasingly hawkish approach to migration control under Theresa May. Its designation as a “scandal” gathered cross-party consensus.
But what was once the stuff of scandal is now the substance of policy. While the retrospective stripping of residency rights under May and Rudd was an accident, Farage has turned it into a manifesto pledge.
Like Davey, London mayor Sadiq Khan and many Labour MPs believe Farage’s plan would be morally wrong, economically damaging and legally unprecedented. Khan called it “unacceptable”, while backbenchers described it variously as “hateful and stupid”, “obscene”, “utterly vile”, “un-British, unfair and inhumane”.
And yet the Labour government’s initial response today was not to condemn it on moral grounds. Instead the PM’s spokesperson said this afternoon that Farage’s plan was “unrealistic, unworkable and unfunded”. Hamish Falconer, the Foreign Office minister who did this morning’s media round, said: “This sounds to me like another Reform policy proposal on the back of a fag packet.” He went on to say that “We have already removed 35,000 people who did not have the right to be here.”
The Labour press office, meanwhile, used its X account to say that the policy “falls apart as the think tank it based its numbers on says they are wrong”. (Farage claimed the policy would save over £200bn based on a contested Centre for Policy Studies report that is currently under review).
Government figures have reminded journalists that the Labour policy is to double the qualification time for ILR from five years to ten years, even contrasting this with Reform’s pledge to keep a seven-year residence route to naturalised citizenship.
These attempts to present Reform’s policies as impractical and unserious now seem to be the default government response. “Back of a fag packet politics” was also the phrase used against Farage’s mass deportations plan, announced in August. The government was similarly hesitant to use moral language during a summer of anti-migrant agitation, until Starmer later changed tack and condemned those who “whip up hatred” after pressure from his party.
But it is a source of growing unease in the PLP that Labour ministers tend not make a brief and punchy argument for what were once the basic shared principles of the party but instead argue about practicalities. Why? Because the practical argument doesn’t seem to be working.
Since Labour came to power last year net legal migration has been cut in half, falling to the lowest annual figure since 2021 (the Tories’ have claimed credit for this because of changes they made in the last days of the Sunak ministry). Meanwhile migrant returns reached 35,000 in the past year, the highest figure since 2017.
But numbers falling and returns rising has not improved the Government’s popularity, arrested the rise of Reform or reduced the salience of immigration as a major political issue. Unless the Government soon reaches a tipping point at which falling numbers translate into falling poll ratings for Mr Farage, Labour calls for a change of strategy will grow.
[Further reading: Your Party is a mess. That doesn’t mean it’s dead]
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