Despite no longer being in government, the Conservatives are still drafting legislation. Their new “Immigration and Visas Bill” promises to revoke Indefinite Leave to Remain “in certain circumstances” – specifically, a prison sentence of a year or more, receipt of “social protection” or income less than £38,700 for at least six months. This appears to put anyone on ILR who retires and claims the state pension at risk of a visit from a British spin on ICE. One right-wing Conservative frontbencher, Katie Lam, declared that large-scale deportations of those with ILR status would help make Britain “culturally coherent”. In the Financial Times, Stephen Bush argued that the policy is more extreme not only than that of Reform UK, but of Idi Amin and the 2005-era BNP. Conservative officials deny it would apply to state pension claimants – but what of people claiming, say, maternity leave?
On Wednesday morning, as we awaited Labour’s response, I posted this on Bluesky:
If I were running Labour comms I would commission an app called ‘Will the Tories/ Reform deport you?’ then let the reactions on TikTok and Instagram do their work.
To my surprise, this took off. Plenty of the responses lambasted Labour, but lots more seemed to think it was a good idea. That afternoon, a web developer and Labour supporter called Rich Holman replied to say that he had built such a site. He told me that while the Conservative policy wouldn’t affect him personally, he found it so upsetting he wasn’t sure how to respond – until he saw my post and thought, “that’s something I can actually do”.
His site is very simple – a single page of questions asking your country of birth, tax and employment status and so on, then a result screen in red or green. He built it using the gov.uk template, adding a disclaimer to stress it’s only a demo. It took him just two hours.
One or two people tried it out. Maria Goretti posted: “Just taken the test – I’m on the next boat out. (74 yrs old, worked as an educator, raised 3 children:1 teacher & 2 doctors all working in UK, volunteered all my life & excellent grasp of English)”. She told me that as an Irish passport holder – she arrived in England aged seven – special conditions apply which the site didn’t accommodate. Though she adds that that could change.
Anand Madhvani, who told me he “lived under the threat of deportation for many years as a child”, said this week’s news “reopened deep fears, even though I’m not directly targeted”. He likes the idea of the site because “It may help people who aren’t directly threatened to imagine themselves in others’ shoes.” When he tried it out, it was “unnerving to read the final ‘verdict’.” It “felt like a gut-punch, even though I knew it was not real.”
In response to this week’s rhetoric, Holman constructed the site so that it says you only get to stay if you were born in the UK. He is not claiming that it accurately reflects Conservative – or Reform – policy; he built it to prove to himself that doing something like this at speed was possible. As he put it, “we move in a very fast digital landscape now”, and the online right “are much more nimble”.
At 5.30pm on Wednesday, several hours after Holman finished his site, Labour Party chair Anna Turley issued a statement: “It’s utterly grotesque that Tories want to deport people with the lawful right to be here to achieve ‘cultural coherence’”. “This policy”, said Turley, “would mean tearing families apart and ripping out our neighbours from communities.”
Why did this take so long? And why are Labour wary of creating something like Holman’s site? Clearly, the party of government has to act responsibly, especially on such a sensitive subject – something Holman was conscious of too. On top of that, there is the risk of creating hostages to fortune, especially in an area where government policy is still taking shape.
The problem is that in our helter-skelter permacrisis, caution is as risky as risk. And the left has managed responses like Holman’s in the past. In 2017, a site appeared called School Cuts, which invited you to enter your postcode and learn how much the government had cut the budget of your local schools, and how much more of that was coming. An initial London spin on this was created by a co-operative called Outlandish; the National Education Union thought it so effective it commissioned a national version. It’s still lauded in Labour circles as a triumph of guerrilla campaigning.
But more recently, this creative energy seems to have shifted elsewhere. A site called The Muslim Vote appeared in advance of last year’s election, and is thought to have come close to costing Wes Streeting his seat. And it was striking how many of the responses to my post suggested Labour would never do anything like this, but the Greens would.
In government, Labour cannot be as fast online as insurgents from left or right, but it has to find creative ways to narrow the gap. And not just as a matter of strategy. The longer the response takes, the bigger the opening for fear and confusion. As Madhvani told me, “It shouldn’t take so long to recognise ethnic cleansing as utterly grotesque, but Labour’s response was hesitant, which made this seem a valid option.” (Not that “ethnic cleansing” is a characterisation the policy’s advocates would accept.)
Many of the responses to my post insisted that Labour’s policy is just as bad as the Conservatives’, and that an app or site should include the question of whether Labour would deport you. And perhaps it should. The shock of the difference between a red screen and a green one would be one way to make clear that Labour’s approach is not to retrospectively revoke Indefinite Leave to remain – and to expel huge numbers of people who have been here legally for years.
[Further reading: Caerphilly shows Nigel Farage’s Achilles heel]
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