Nigel Farage’s Reform party, riding high in the polls, has unveiled a vicious new policy, the abolition of Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR). They have also launched Operation Restoring Justice—a plan to ratchet up the deportations of migrants who arrive on small boats.
Speaking at a flashy press conference, Farage said 800,000 people who ‘tend to be young, tend to be low-skilled’ were due to qualify for Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK over the next three to four years.
Dismissively referring to them as the ‘Boris-wave’, taking the opportunity to throw a barb at his one-time Brexit ally, he labelled these legally established workers ‘the greatest betrayal of democratic wishes certainly in anyone’s living memory’.
Reform’s racism
Reform’s proposals are barbaric. For those who have already secured ILR, it would be rescinded and replaced with a temporary visa, forcing them to reapply every five years under stricter rules, including higher salary thresholds and advanced English tests.
These individuals would be denied access to the NHS and benefits, and their families could be barred from joining them. The message is clear: you will never belong; you will never be secure; and you will always be second-class residents.
To justify this, Farage peddles outright lies. He claims this group is a ‘huge burden on the state’, with over half of them not working. This is a blatant falsehood, as qualifying for ILR typically requires five years of continuous lawful residence and employment.
His central claim of saving £234bn is based on a Centre for Policy Studies report that has been withdrawn because its figures were disputed. When challenged, Farage brazenly claimed the figure was ‘without a doubt too low’, a tactic straight out of his friend Donald Trump’s playbook.
Zia Yusuf, head of Reform’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE— another Trumpian copy), argued the true number of people who would be applying for ILR in the coming years was likely to be more than 800,000, because many of the people who have arrived after Brexit came from non-EU countries.
To arrive at this conclusion Yusuf blithely assumes all migrants want to stay in Britain permanently. This is untrue. Excluding short-term migrants who leave within a year, a substantial proportion leave before ever becoming eligible for ILR and most depart after 5-8 years (Migration Observatory). The great ‘invasion’ is a myth.
Yusuf also said that the policy would not apply to EU citizens who have been granted settled status in the UK. This exposes the racism at the heart of the policy; white, Christian Europeans are fine because they are ‘like us’; black and brown migrants need to be sent home.
Labour’s response
In the face of this, Labour’s response has been pitifully weak. Speaking at the Labour Party conference, Starmer feebly attempts to draw a ‘moral line in the sand’, criticising Reform’s plan while artificially differentiating between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants. He claimed he is ‘up for’ the removal of ‘illegal’ migrants but those with ILR are ‘our neighbours’ and ‘part of who we are’.
Yet Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is preparing to make it harder to ever get ILR status. Labour plans to extend the qualifying period for ILR from five to 10 years and add vague tests about ‘contributing to the community’. This is Reform’s policy in slow motion, designed to achieve the same goal of a perpetually precarious migrant workforce.
Most chillingly, both parties agree on the core strategy: the escalation of deportations as a ‘deterrent’. As Mahmood says, ‘You start with a small first step and then you ramp up, which is exactly what we’re going to be doing.’ Reform and Labour are competing over who can be toughest, while the human cost is ignored.
Both parties have adopted deliberate and cynical strategies to divide the working class, posing migration as the biggest crisis the country is facing when the real crisis – the crumbling NHS, the housing disaster, poverty wages – are caused by the bosses and bankers, not by the migrant nurse, cleaner or care worker.
We must reject this narrative. The enemy is not the migrant worker beside us. The enemy is the boss who exploits us all and the capitalist state that uses borders to divide us. We must organise in our workplaces and communities to build a militant, internationalist fightback. Only a united working class fighting for a world without borders can defeat the racist offensives of both Reform and Labour.
