Immigration

The Prime Minister has asked the Home Office to remove NHS workers and social care workers from the immigration health surcharge as soon as possible. As Katy Balls reported earlier today, frustrations were growing within the Tory party that healthcare workers could be clobbered with this fee as they work tirelessly to help British patients get through the Covid crisis. It seems Boris Johnson has listened to his backbenchers and u-turned. The fee will be waived for a range of health staff, from doctors and nurses to technicians and cleaners. This exemption is good news for workers in the healthcare sector, but it shouldn’t be the end of the policy review. This

The idea of a flotilla of little ships crossing the English Channel from France to deposit their beleaguered human cargo safely on our shores was born in this country’s darkest hour during the second world war. To say that the method behind the success of the Dunkirk evacuation 80 years ago has been repurposed for the modern age is something of an understatement. These days the little ships are usually inflatable dinghies packed with desperate young men from Asia and Africa who seek to evade this country’s immigration laws. They land at various points between Dover and Hastings and – if undetected – many head for rendezvous points pre-arranged with

Once you accept that Brexit is happening – because, like it or not, the British people demanded it – it is not so very hard to accept that Brexit must come with consequences. In the absence of free movement from the European Union to the United Kingdom, new immigration arrangements must be put in place. As a political matter – which should not be confused with the policy design or practical application of new immigration controls – these must be seen to be tougher than the regime which preceded it. That is the meaning of ‘Take Back Control’. So it is no great surprise that the measures announced today represent,

Jeremy Corbyn – ‘I want a close relationship’ with the EU The Labour leader was Andrew Marr’s chief guest of the day. Marr began by asking for Corbyn’s personal stance on Brexit, something which has proved highly elusive since the referendum result in 2016. Corbyn happily gave the Labour party’s position, but once again refused to be drawn on the issue:   AM: Do you want this country to leave the EU or not? JC: We’re going to put that choice to the British people, and they will make that decision… I want a close relationship with the EU in the future. ‘You don’t know’ who I’m going to negotiate with If

When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise their status so that they could start paying taxes and contributing to the country in other ways? When this magazine reprised the issue last week, the usual objections were recycled: why reward criminality? But the actual cases are more complicated. Trevor Rene is one such case. He was born in Dominica in 1969 when it

This afternoon’s law and order theme to Tory conference did take a bit of a knock when police were called to an altercation involving one of the party’s MPs, resulting in the backbencher, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, being sent home. Not long after this incident, which sent parts of the conference centre into lockdown, Priti Patel walked onto the stage and announced that ‘today, here in Manchester, the Conservative party takes its rightful place as the Party of Law and Order in Britain once again’. Politics today is so tumultuous that it has scarcely been thought remarkable that the Home Secretary is so happy to make clear that her party lost this

Tomorrow the government will say what will happen to free movement in the event of a no-deal Brexit. I understand that free movement will be replaced by a three-year temporary Leave to Remain Scheme for EU nationals who arrive in the UK before 31 December 2020 and register with the EU settlement scheme. Their three years would start from December 2020. So, in other words, if you are an EU citizen who arrives in the UK in March 2020 you would be entitled to stay until at least December 2023. This is a significant change from previous government plans to end free movement on 1 November in the event of

Priti Patel is the new Home Secretary. This is likely to attract a fair bit of opprobrium from Boris Johnson’s critics, given she is a supporter of the death penalty. Whether or not she has been given any remit to examine that particular policy issue, she has a big job on her hands. The Home Office is one of the hardest departments to run. Theresa May managed to survive it, largely by micromanaging everyone else into the dust. Her successor Amber Rudd did not, finding that obeying her boss too well led to her being implicated in the Windrush scandal. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, May’s aides in the Home

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is often taught to schoolchildren, who read it as a warning about the fragility of human power. Conservatives should study it now and ensure they take an opportunity to learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration. If there was one issue that helped May become, for a short time, a figure of “cold command” over her party, it was immigration. As home secretary and then Prime Minister, she was the senior figure at the top of the Conservative party who consistently took the hardest line on the issue. By the mid-point of the 2010-2015 coalition government, David Cameron would privately concede that all of his ministerial

In August 2007, three months after coming to power at Holyrood, the SNP launched its National Conversation on Scotland’s constitutional future. We have been talking about little else since. Among the many national conversations postponed is one on immigration. The CBI has tried to kick-start such a discussion by warning that, within 20 years, just one third of Scotland’s population will be of working age. Given that figure is currently 64 per cent, it is an arresting claim. It is also entirely plausible. The Office for National Statistics predicts the number of working-age Scots to grow by just one per cent between now and 2041, while the pensioner population is expected

I was working in Johannesburg when I first got wind of the fact that Ireland has become an illegal back door to the UK. If you’re from a country such as South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Fiji or Guyana, you need, not just a passport, but a prearranged visa, obtained from the local embassy for a fee, before you can even board a plane to Britain. It takes time, your details are checked, and you need to show a reason why you’ll go home at the end of your stay. In the 1980s most African nationals could come to Britain visa-free. But worries about terrorism and crimes committed once in the

The British government’s new white paper on immigration has been shaped by a social norm which argues that the white British ethnic majority’s interest in limiting the pace of cultural change and facilitating assimilation is racist. The emphasis on skills rather than numbers, on economic over cultural considerations, and on rebalancing immigration away from Europe speaks to this. The document reflects the thinking of both Brexit and Remain politicians. Yet it does not align with the motives of many who voted Leave, or a considerable chunk of those who voted Remain. These voters seek lower levels of immigration, and research shows that this is driven more by identity threat than