Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
As I said, I don't think it will happen. It would cause havoc domestically as you tried to actually implement it. When people actually see the stories of pensioners having their pension taken away and told to leave, families split up, e.t.c, then it's not so easy to defend, and people will object. Not to mention how practically difficult it would become.
Internationally it would cause problems too. There are Brits in Europe with their equivalent of Leave to Remain who might be worried they would get the same treatment back.
I think they're only doing it to appeal to the Online right, the ones who spent a great deal of time judging other people's Englishness. Other than the polling, I have looked for right-wing reactions otherwise of X but could only find an article in The Spectator condemning it.
Still, it's a published policy from the party of the opposition so something to take seriously.
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The devil is always in the detail and for all the tough-sounding clauses about who stays and who goes, it is, at the end of the day, merely an enabling act thanks to clause 8 which grants the Sec of State the power to vary the rules.
I’m not sufficiently anorak to know for certain, however I suspect if the actual intention is to grant the SoS power to decide tougher rules on who can remain in the country, then the prior 7 clauses are entirely redundant in the main body of the act and would probably be deleted during the legislation’s passage through parliament. They belong in the accompanying Immigration Rules, which are variable by order of the SoS. Which rather calls into question why they’re even there in the draft Bill. My suspicion is that it’s grandstanding, an advert for Tory tough-talking designed to slash the tyres of Reform’s battle bus.
I do think we need to be tougher on who gets ILR. I also do think we need to be able to revoke ILR. I simply don’t accept that we have to live forever with the social consequences of poor - possibly pernicious - immigration policy aimed at engineering radical social and cultural change in this country. However as written those rules would indeed cause chaos and there ought to be exceptions - pensioners being an obvious example, extreme length of stay being another.
Re your earlier point about polling not supporting this - that is very much the point of a democracy. If there actually is no appetite for this in the country, then the Tories will fight 2028 (probably) on a core vote strategy and won’t win the election. So you have nothing to worry about. Also, if polling you’ve seen doesn’t show public support for this, in what sense can you think (as you indicated earlier) that you don’t like what the country’s becoming - because you don’t seem to think that’s what it actually is becoming?