I note this from this morning's National newspaper in Scotland:
NEW research has suggested that the UK Government's planned changes to immigration and settlement rules risk triggering an unprecedented migrant worker exodus.
It comes after Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) could change from five years to 10 or even 15 and that this could apply retrospectively.
Now, a community survey shared with the Sunday National from campaign group Skill Migrants Alliance of more than 10,187 skilled migrants has found that 62% would “seriously consider” leaving the UK if the changes go ahead.
Meanwhile, a further 31% say they would “possibly” leave.
In the last week, UK Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has reacted angrily to suggestions that she is trying to "out Reform" Reform. However, the evidence that this is exactly what she is seeking to do is overwhelming.
The only reason to change the rules on indefinite leave to remain in the UK, as she is doing, is to use migrants already in this country with legal permission as weapons in Labour's war to fight off the threat from far-right political parties. In the process, they are sacrificing the interests, concerns and well-being of all these valuable members of our communities, whilst prejudicing the future of many of the public and other services on which we are so dependent in this country and which are supplied now, as they often have been throughout history, by people who have come to this country to live.
Shabana Mahmood and the entire Labour edifice that supports this action, from Kaya Starmer downwards, should hang their heads in shame at their actions. No political party that respects human rights, human well-being, diversity, and the contribution that migrants have always brought to the UK could behave in the way that they are doing. They are collectively a bunch of charlatans pursuing a toxic political agenda to advance their own self-interest at considerable cost to others. The sooner they are thrown out of office, the better.
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I am horrified by Labours proposals.
People who seek to make their lives in the UK need some level of certainty, to expect someone to spend years without the security of Citizenship, subject to the whims and demonstrable incompetence of the UK’s immigration bureaucracy and without access to many of the services as a result is both ridiculous and inhumane.
Doubly so when it is applied to those already here
Thanks all round for a pressingly important article!
Not only is such a move gratuitously cruel to immigrants but it is also stupidly harmful to our society which, allegedly, the government is supposed to protect and develop.
Doctors: 36.3% are non U. K. nationals
47.5% of specialist medical practitioners were born outside the U. K.
Nurses: 30.0% are non-U.K. nationals
Dentists: Approximately 30% of dentists qualified outside the U. K.
[Data from AI Overview]
P.S. “retrospective legislation is bad in quality, wrong in principle and dangerous in character” [Hansard]
Thanks
“The sooner they are thrown out of office, the better.” One hopes the process starts in May. The ideal result would be LINO loses all its seats in Wales & Scotland & cedes control of all the London boroughs it holds to the Greens. Mahmood is unfit to be a lollipop lady. Starmer could be the UK entry to the “Liars Olympics” – I am confident he would win gold.
The problem is that after they are thrown out their replacements will be worse!
There are many people who will vote tactically to keep the far right and neo-fascists from power, both on May 7th locals, and at the next GE. Shabana Mahmood is making sure those people don’t choose Labour for their tactical vote. What’s the point of voting Labour to keep Reform out of power, if the result is Shabana Mahmood’s hateful far-right immigration and asylum policies? Similarly, if I like Reform UK Ltd for its racist policies, why would I vote Labour? And if her immigration policies frighten me, then I won’t vote Labour either.
If she wants the votes of racists, she should join Reform UK Ltd, and get some tips from Sue Ellen Braverman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabana_Mahmood
https://theconversation.com/who-is-shabana-mahmood-the-home-secretary-is-the-face-of-labours-most-hardline-immigration-policies-to-date-269977
Given that this Blue Labour Home Secretary, lauded by Maurice Glasman, once claimed to support a general amnesty for undocumented workers
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1383099123201426
I call her out for cynical opportunistic hypocrisy. Was she lying in opposition, or lying in government? Or does she, like Starmer, have very “flexible” principles?
Maybe the psephologists need to tell us something about those who are still voting Labour? Who are they? What do they believe in?
I wish I knew.
I have friends who still think Labour is the party of old.
I am utterly baffled by them
If they think that then they can’t be paying attention. No other explanation I can think of.
How does UK Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and the Labour party plan on replacing the skilled and semi-skilled workers who leave? Are not “crops rotting in the fields” do the lack of skilled farm workers?
This inquiring Yank mind wants to know her plan as this is MAJOR problem in the USA with all the ICE enforcement crackdowns. Many legal residents of the US have gone underground or just left. The higher the skill level, the more likely they are/were to leave.
Labour? Plan? They don’t do that. And imagining consequences is beyond them.
Self interest in the moment is all that concerns them. I am, unfortunately , being serious.
Not only does Labour have no plan for how to replace workers forced out of the country under its racist immigration proposals, Fiona Hill – former director Russian and European affairs in the National Security Council in Trump’s first administration, co-author of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) and now chancellor of Durham University – says “With no single minister responsible for national resilience in times of crisis there is no sign the government is taking action. We have seen the effects of choke points in the Gulf, disruptions to transport. The NHS cannot cope with mass casualties, and we need to build up food supplies and systems to cope with disruption to imports.
The SDR, published last June, said the UK should “build national resilience to threats below and above the threshold of an armed attack through a concerted, collective effort involving – among others – industry, the finance sector, civil society, academia, education and communities”.
“We don’t have archives of maps digitised and no analogue systems to use if digital systems collapse. This is an urgent national debate that needs to happen now.”
Her intervention comes after her co-author of the SDR, Lord Robertson, a former secretary general of Nato, accused the government of “corrosive complacency” over what he said was a failure to implement the review’s 62 recommendations.
His criticisms largely focused on the political conundrum faced by the government, which is the trade-off between spending on areas such as welfare versus the need to expand military capabilities.” (My emphasis – here we are back to austerity once more!)
From https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-war-defence-fiona-hill-russia-iran-b2963630.html .
Thank you. And these are key issues.
“Given that this Blue Labour Home Secretary, lauded by Maurice Glasman, once claimed to support a general amnesty for undocumented workers.”
This was tried in the USA in the 1980s during the Regan Administration but it did not produce the results hoped for. The problem is that a Comprehensive Immigration Bill was not compiled and passed by Congress following Amnesty so the original problem was not solved.
The USA and the UK need to compile and pass a Comprehensive Immigration Bill for all people going forward then back-track to decide how to handle the problem of undocumented workers currently residing illegally.
I read about this with dismay and shock some while back, and had lost sight of it, thank you for this piece. The US constitution, although largely disregarded by the current administration, has guided and constrained administrations, anyone can read it, carry a copy with them. When the government changes what has been agreed, whether it is removing or reducing support for people, or their rights, the effects can be negative to a crushing degree. With such instability and precariousness, who can plan and thrive in life? Most of us have family or friends who have moved abroad, or moved here, we understand why people do this. Many of us know someone who is waiting for NHS care, or needs social security support in some form. If we don’t get a written constitution, or some form of social contract, then politicians, it appears, will carry on playing nasty games to stay in power. Only the rich will be able to move from one country to another, afford timely healthcare and support in disability and old age. An obscenity, eight decades after WWII and the start of the postwar consensus.
One of the more cynical and egregious party political developments of the past few years is the deliberate positioning of first and second generation immigrants to front discriminatory racist policies. Labour an Tories are equally guilty.
If in doubt, just look at the weaselly riposte from Mahmoud when defending her obscene reaction to a valid question. She immediately accused the questioner of racism. Political debate is being debased by the strategic weaponisation of racism (and ant-semitism of course) to avoid addressing the issues.
As a former Labour member, I keep expecting to awake and find the last few years are just a nightmare. Surely, a Labour gov cannot be as illiberal as the current one.
Sadly, they are even worse than that.
My own Labour MP is even dismayed by their policies which are demonstrably racist and more in keeping with the stuff in the Express, Mail, and Telegraph.
They are alienating their core supporters in an attempt to stop a lesser number of former Labour voters going to Reform. Those alienated will surely vote Green, SNP, or CC.
You cannot outflank racists – only encourage them to come back for more. Labour seems incapable of learning any lessons from its own history.
Labour has had a once in a generation opportunity – the parliamentary majority that is supporters hardly dared to hope for. So what is it doing? Throwing the opportunities away. I firmly believe that this marks the end of the Labour party. They have three more years. in which they could turn things around. But as a non-learning organisation and lacking imagination they are incapable of this.
I first voted Labour when I acquired the vote in 1954, in 2024 I voted for another party for the first time.
Thank you