We must demand an end to these shifting political norms
When Nigel Farage stood before the press last month, he brandished a few pages carrying his proposal to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain. These plans are nothing short of chilling and a threat to the futures of hundreds of thousands of people.
Stripping away one of the most fundamental and hard-earned routes to permanent settlement in the UK is as cruel as it is legally incoherent. It risks violating basic human rights, including the right to family life and protections from non-discrimination. Worse still, it also puts conditionality on people who have settled, built lives and communities here, recasting them as guests in their own home.
The human cost of this would be palpable – people forced to reconsider everything overnight – facing the potential reality of families split apart and livelihoods destroyed. There are reports of people who have spent their whole lives in this country, whose parents are teachers or nurses or NHS workers, confronted with the fear that their legal status, and their livelihoods, are now in question.
Ghena, a 22-year-old law student, told the Londoner described the impact that this would have on her, following coming to the UK as a refugee when she was 15. She said: “Taking away my indefinite leave to remain status would send me back to Syria, a war zone that the British are at least partially responsible for.”
The Prime Minister condemned this policy as racist, and I agree. It explicitly targets people who settled in the UK following Brexit – many of whom have settled from outside of the EU.It also follows a concerted campaign to justify measures such as these by constructing racist stereotypes of migrant communities and people seeking asylum: as draining this country’s public services, as threats to women, as fundamentally other to ‘British values’. Farage’s own imagery when introducing this inhumane policy is telling enough: justifying it by saying that Britain is not the ‘world’s foodbank’.
The build-up of racism and xenophobia in UK immigration has been decades in the making. The Runnymede Trust, in its analysis of 52,990 news articles and 317 House of Commons debates on immigration from 2019 to 2024, found the routine use of racist tropes and stereotypes to justify hostile migration policies. In other words, the research showed that, while the terms ‘immigrant’ and ‘migrant’ may appear neutral in “real world news reports and parliamentary debates, they were overwhelmingly associated with minoritised ethnic groups”.
Starmer’s condemnation of this policy is paper-thin, despite the real-world consequences of the normalisation of these hostile policies. Mere days after Farage’s announcement, the new Home Secretary introduced plans to extend the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain and impose tougher tests – echoing similar harmful rhetoric.
This has been coupled with a government that remains silent on the attacks facing people seeking asylum when they are targeted by far-right actors, and with the continued retention of measures in the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and Nationality and Borders Act, which undermine asylum protections. You cannot have it both ways: the government cannot condemn opponent’s immigration policy as racist, while adopting rhetoric and measures that echo the same harmful narratives.
Last month, a coalition of anti-racist organisations called for the government to recognise a national emergency of racist violence. The number of hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales has risen for the first time in three years, alongside devastating stories of racist violence like the shooting of a nine-year-old girl in Bristol with a pellet gun and the horrific racially motivated rape of a Sikh woman in the Midlands.
Racism and xenophobia in this country does not exist in a vacuum – they take their cues from the very top. As HOPE not Hate has shown, government rhetoric against migrants inevitably fuels the far right, with a 102% jump in far-right activity in 2022. Following last summer’s racist riots – in which mobs targeted mosques, hotels housing people seeking asylum, and terrorised racialised communities – the UN urged the government to curb racist hate speech and xenophobic rhetoric, including from political and public figures.
There is a clear connection between these acts and the toxic media and political discourse surrounding migration and racialised people. From Robert Jenrick lamenting the absence of “‘white faces” in Birmingham, to Farage’s recent claims that teachers are “poisoning” children by talking about race and racism, the mainstreaming of racism and xenophobia has become a feature of our national life.
Reform may not be in government for now, but it is edging closer to power in ways that should concern us all. This is evident not only in Reform’s recent local election success, but in the increasing uptake of its rhetoric across the media and political spectrum. In the face of a devastating rise in racist hatred across the country, we must demand an end to these shifting political norms.
Last month, the Prime Minister promised to tackle “an old and dangerous playbook that sets people against one another”. In practice, that means stepping out from Reform’s shadow.
Alba Kapoor is Amnesty International UK’s racial justice lead
Image credit: Number 10 / Simon Dawson – Creative Commons
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