Labour’s half-measures on ILR will please nobody

Back in May, I wrote about the self-defenestratoin of Sir Keir Starmerthe self-defenestratoin of Sir Keir Starmer: “a command performance in the traditional ritual suicide of a British political consensus: opening the Overton Window real wide and then hurling oneself out of it.”

Reading this morning about Labour’s plans for overhauling Indefinite Leave to Remain, it definitely feels like they’re on that trajectory. Per the Times:

“Foreign citizens will have to volunteer in their community, have a “spotless” criminal record, speak English to a high standard and be a net contributor to the economy to qualify for permanent settlement.”

Read on and it turns out even this isn’t entirely true: foreign offenders will not be automatically barred from ILR but merely face delays before they can apply.

A full assessment of this will depend on the details, not to mention how it interacts with other parts of the system – if there’s a minimum time-served threshold to trigger ILR delays, for example, will the Sentencing Council start deliberately undershooting it, as it has on the deportation threshold?

But even so, its a compromise which satisfies nobody. The Government’s progressive critics will see a beastly litany of hurdles for people looking to settle here, and the rest will see the outline of a lanyardist paper tiger, a tough-sounding but ultimately bare-minimum effort to reconsecrate the basic idea of ILR.

(This is not to mention how the Government proposes to assess whether people are net contributors: if it’s only over their first ten years in the country, that’s going to miss a lot of lifetime net extractors, if it doesn’t it’s going to hold a very uncomfortable mirror up to the real character of much immigration.)

Labour would have been better served with something bolder. ILR, combined with an automatic pathway to citizenship based merely on living here long enough, is a fundamentally low-control system and will go sooner or later.

There is nothing unfair or inhumane about a system where the basic setup is a renewable but time-limited visa, with various conditional pathways to citizenship. It would allow economic migration on a more sustainable basis, as it would be clear from the off that the default position was that one was entitled to participate in the economy, not the polity.

It may take a while to get there. But Labour is buying itself time: having already extended the ILR qualification from five years to ten, perhaps it will simply continue to do so, tucking the rights of the Boriswave into a tomorrow which never arrives.