Shabana Mahmood’s act of contempt

Shabana Mahmood has signalled she could water down her plans to make it harder for foreign workers to claim permanent residence in the UK, amid growing demands for a U-turn from cabinet colleagues and unions.

If Mahmood does this, under the Home Office "high case" scenario, 2.2 million migrants will settle, peaking at 620,000 in 2028, dwarfing the current record of 241,192 in 2010. More people could settle in the next 4 years than the whole of 1960 to 1990. Indefinite leave to remain gives a person the right to live, work and study in the UK for as long as they like and apply for benefits if they are eligible.

One tweeter suggests the Home Office model is only for main applicants and dependants that have previously been granted an entry clearance visa. It then uses settlement rates from migrant journey data of previous migrant cohorts and rolls this forward to 2021+ arrivals.

There is a very high likelihood that even the Home Office "high" estimate is an understatement, because as the Migration Advisory Committee have shown, migrants from poorer countries have higher stay rates, and the Boriswave is overwhelmingly made up of lower skill and lower wage migrants than previous cohorts. Once a migrant has ILR, they can apply to sponsor additional family members over, which would not be captured in this projection.

Overall, the MAC finds that five-year stay rates have risen steadily in recent years, from 74% for those arriving in 2014 to 85% for those arriving in 2019, and vary significantly across a range of factors. Migrants from wealthier countries are less likely to stay long term, while those from Africa, Southern Asia, and non-EU European countries show the highest retention.

On salary, migrants initially earning less than £40,000 have the highest stay rates compared to migrants on higher salary bands, while those earning over £125,000 show the lowest rates of long-term retention. The MAC cautions, however, that the true departure rate among the highest earners may be even higher than the data suggests, since longer initial visa durations for this group make early exits harder to detect.

In short, this is a massive influx of garbage immigration that isn’t wanted or needed. This is immigration which overwhelmingly affects the lives of working class Britons - for the worse. That this relaxation is demanded by the trade unions is a signal as to how British institutions have been captured to serve an ani-British agenda.

In my view, this is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. The Boriswave was never wanted in the first place, and happened in direct contravention of voter’s wishes expressed at the ballot box in the referendum and subsequent elections. To make the Boriswave permanent is another slap in the face.

If this goes ahead then puts the next right wing government into unprecedented territory where it will have to retroactively disapply acquired rights, turning our backs on several legal and moral conventions. It all but guarantees an autocratic right wing backlash. Leaving the ECHR is now a certainty whether it’s a good idea or not. Meanwhile, it sends a less that subtle message that the wishes of the British people, particularly the working class, are last in the pecking order.

This is precisely why public order is set to unravel. They can bang Danny Tommo up, making a martyr of him, but it rather looks like he will come home to quite a healthy mountain of donations, thereby setting the precedent that if you step up, the wider public has your back. Consequently, there are plenty more where he came from, and if they’re going to bang you up just for popping a dinghy, you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

If the powers that be were looking to escalate matters, they are going the right way about it. We’re starting to see all the classic signals in Ireland, and I would not be sleeping easy if I was a British judge.

This, however, is with the caveat that this policy announcement was one given to the Labour Party conference, therefore entirely disposable. Mahmood may look at the polls and think twice. You do have to wonder what sort of rank imbecile you have to be to look at a healthy poll lead and conclude that it's time to fling open the borders to Afghans and Palestinians. The rhetoric alone may be enough to throw Reform a lifeline.

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