The Tories’ ham-handed deportation plan would include waves of “culturally coherent” people
Five people with Indefinite Leave to Remain sit round a table at a dinner party in an affluent part of town. One is an entrepreneur who, a few years ago, temporarily reduced his salary whilst getting his now-thriving business off the ground. Another is a researcher who lived off her own savings for the last nine months of her PhD, and has otherwise been in the top 20 per cent of UK earners throughout her time here. The third is a City worker whose British husband stays at home to take care of their child, who is in receipt of Disability Living Allowance. The fourth has a high-earning British spouse, which enables her to stay at home with their small children. The fifth is a Church of England vicar, living independently on a modest clergy stipend.
None of these people is a burden on the state. None has committed a crime. Yet under proposed legislation recently brought forward by the Conservative Party, each would be stripped of their settled status and forced to leave the UK — their families, friends, communities, and homes — seemingly without discretion or right of appeal.
James Price writes for The Critic of the need to make such an odious and absurdly ham-handed policy “dinner party acceptable”, and pours unqualified praise on Katie Lam MP — “a superb advocate for “pantsuit deportations”. — and her betrousered kind. But what happens when the people to be deported are the dinner party guests themselves?
Once the average Tory voter’s middle-class friends start being herded onto repatriation flights — along with NHS nurses, pensioners who have paid into the system for their entire adult lives, and other such apparent undesirables — I’m not sure how palatable even the most hardened immigration sceptic will find Lam’s bill of fare. After all, in a 2024 British Social Attitudes Survey, only 3 per cent of all respondents favoured completely removing access to welfare benefits by settled migrants. This number rose to a mere 11 per cent amongst those most averse to immigration. Hardly a policy triumph in the making.
Vindictive, nonsensical immigration policy that deports the baby with the bathwater is mere self-defeating indulgence
Here’s a confession: The five people at the dinner party are real. Four of them are my friends. One of them is me. Each of us loves this country so much that we have chosen to make our lives here, raise our families here, contribute our skills and talents here. The UK is our home, even if naturalisation is not a practical option for most of us right now. Were we to be pantsuit deported by those who put themselves forward as the guardians of a “culturally coherent” society, Britain would be the poorer — both figuratively and literally. Three British children would be without their parents. Three British people would be without their spouses. No one would benefit — either from our deportation or from the deportation of the many thousands like us from all around the UK.
People with ILR stay home to raise children whilst their partners support the household. They retrain for better careers that will enhance their contribution — in more than just the financial sense — to society. They temporarily accept a lower salary whilst starting a successful business employing British workers, or permanently accept a lower salary in order to follow their calling in the established Church. These are good things, as much for Britain as for the individuals involved, and should be recognised as such.
Deporting people who not only have done nothing illegal, but in fact have done what they were encouraged to do by people like Katie Lam — build a life, integrate, and take pro-social decisions for the benefit of their families and communities — is not a way to build a “culturally coherent”, functional, well-integrated society. Rather, it is a way to signal to the people who have invested their money and their lives here precisely because they love this country that the promises made to them (and any promises subsequently made to them or anyone else) by the British state are utterly worthless.
Vindictive, nonsensical immigration policy that deports the baby with the bathwater is mere self-defeating indulgence — a bit of political theatre that may look and feel good to a tiny minority of hardliners in the moment, but will cause, rather than prevent, social and economic turmoil on an unprecedented scale if actually enacted. It is also a not very cleverly disguised admission that the Conservatives are out of ideas on how to fix the very real (indeed, existential) structural issues facing our country. Those issues cannot be simply deported away, much as Katie Lam and others might wish.
By all means, deport foreign criminals whose actions have violated the social contract, showing their contempt for — and unwillingness to live peaceably in — British society. But retroactively applying punitive, ill-considered measures to law-abiding people who have been a benefit to society in more ways than policymakers’ fag-packet maths could reckon is not only socially, economically, and ethically disastrous: it’s un-British.
