Labour's last straw

The Party crosses my particular red line

Keir Starmer and David Lammy meet Ursula Von der Leyen, 25.04.2025. Photo under a Creative Commons License 2.0 by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

It’s always a bad sign for the prospects of your work of art if I like it, usually a surefire indication that it has very limited commercial prospects. Likewise, if I break with you politically, it really isn’t much of a signal of your wider political destiny – I live outside of the UK, am motivated by niche concerns such as multilingualism, and am relatively untypical in my life situation. Probably the opposite in fact; as I used to joke when I lived in Germany, ‘What’s the government going to do for stand-up comedians who can't vote?’

Still, I’m entitled to my two cents. And I’ve tried to be constructive about the UK's newish Labour government, because I’m a social democrat, and Keir Starmer is a normy social democrat and better than what we had across the Tories’ 2010-2024 collective dereliction of duty. The government has already some good stuff on housebuilding, renewable energy and renter's rights.

Last week, however, a quite specific policy was announced which saw me finally lose patience with this incarnation of Labour. You'd have had to look for it in the policy weeds which mean, busy as they are, the vast majority of voters wouldn't notice.

Last week saw the announcement of White Paper on immigration reform. The policies overall were targeted at reducing immigration levels, particularly amongst the lower-paid. Well, that’s what the voters want; no argument here. Voters want lower immigration, better public services, and have no objection to a pony being thrown in too.

I can make my argument – which I genuinely believe – that you will never appease voters who hate immigration with any level of immigration and that no matter how tight you make the rules you can’t satisfy people who hate the very concept of people from abroad; once you’re charging people 29k a year to be able to apply to live with their spouse, you’re already well along the way to system of pure vindictiveness. I went through said system with my own spouse and even those people the policy was designed to appease were baffled when I told them about it.

Last week's White Paper also brought the announcement that the period to qualify for Indefinite Leave to Remain for economic migrants was to be doubled from five years to ten. Meaning a foreign national with a full-time job in the UK would have to wait ten years before even having the right to apply to live there permanently.

And yes, that move disgusted me, repulsed me, crossed a line after which Labour can, tho it means very little in the overall scheme of things, no longer even in extremis have my vote.

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Let me explain why this rankled so much.

I am currently living in Belgium on a work visa. Every year, I renew it to stay in the country; I have just done this, a process this time mercifully stress-free. I am tied to my job; if I lose it, I have three months to find another role, or I have to return to the UK. I can also switch to another employer here if that opportunity presents itself.

So I currently have very little freedom. I try my best to be good at my job, which I continue to enjoy, but there is always the fear that a single slip, a single unprecedented bad day, and I will have to leave the country. The same applies if I get sick.

In this context, it’s very difficult to plan any kind of life. I do want to settle here; my own skills, speaking French, German and increasingly Dutch, plus my native English, are unusually well suited to the Belgian market and the particular context of the European institutions. I struggle to think what I’d do back home, particularly after two years spent making myself more appealing to Belgian employers.

The deal I took is that, after five years attached to a single employer (or a few, should I change jobs) I get to be a bit more free. Then, I could freelance for a while, or even take a few months off, or do some charity work. I even could go away somewhere else and come back.

I was just about prepared to accept that deal for the long term although, when I came here, I was buttressed by having a wife and home back in London. I figured well, you have to work anyway, so is it really that different from the life I'd have to be living anyway even if I did have greater freedom?

Now I just imagine the current Belgian government taking the thing I was patiently working towards, and doubling it without consultation. Changing the rules of the game when I was playing and trying to play fairly. How petty that would seem. How much fear it would cause me. Messing with my life, my plans, which are already precarious and bureaucratic anyway.

And above all the perpetual uncertainty that would limit me too, ten years of worrying about visas, ten years of never being a full part of where I wanted to build a life. This is approaching Gulf State levels of uncertainty for and isolation of foreigners. What have they done to deserve that?

In Belgium, I want to integrate, I want to contribute, but nobody can really ask someone to wait a whole decade to have any options in a country at all.

And my second reason is the aforementioned story of what my ex-wife and I went through trying to get her to PR, the endless uncertainty of that. It’s not an experience I’d wish on anybody and certainly not one I’d plunge thousands of new arrivals in a country, with all the other challenges they have to surmount, into. It’s nothing less than the expansion of a permanently disenfranchised foreigner class.

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Out of solidarity with my fellow foreigners everywhere, then, I won’t be voting Labour again until this policy is changed, which is unlikely to happen. It’s the kind of policy which once never gets revised as people don't care or know about it.

Well then, it’s all the more important then that those of us who do care speak up.

And just maybe it is a tiny bit significant that even highly pragmatic people like me, who wish Labour and Starmer well, are winding up just about alienated by the relentless insular grimness of this government's tone.

It might be fine for the kind of voter who thinks the UK is the only country worth living in, who have no interest in ever living elsewhere. That may be most voters. I don’t expect the Labour Party to prioritise people like me who do want to move around freely, but it would be nice if we could stop policies which actively make my life much harder to try and satisfy people who don’t follow the details anyway.

I understand why they’ve done it; there have been high levels of immigration to the UK after Brexit, because the Tory Party genuinely convinced itself what people wanted was a fairer immigration system, rather than one equally horrible to everyone. Labour is worried about the new arrivals, the so-called ‘Boriswave’, qualify en masse for benefits in a few years and overwhelm an already-threadbare welfare state. Fascinating, isn't it, how austerity begets austerity; how the meanness of the Cameron years has ended up with an increasingly pinched British soul.

I remain open to a Labour Party which sees immigration and the potential for new people to come here and innovate, build businesses and contribute. And I don’t think a little safety of residence is too much to give those people when they join us here and work hard - as to be clear, this policy will apply to those already in full-time work.

It’s said too that there’ll be exceptions for those who contribute a lot economically, meaning in salaried jobs above a certain level; again, this is creating multiple tiers for migrants, and certainly abandoning the idea a foreigner could ever build something for themselves from scratch. Let alone that the most valuable foreigner might not automatically correlate to the highest-paid one.

Who's done more for the country really, the posted minted hedge fund manager or the low-paid care worker wiping arses for a decade? Which one should the Labour Party be supporting? There’s no ‘innovation’ in changing someone’s bedsheets, but nothing else runs without it. And if you’re worried about migrants collecting benefits, foreign workers already have no right to this before settlement; no access to public funds was written on my ex’s Biometric Residence Permit.

At present a single vote back in 2016, powered by the decisions of many people sadly no longer with us, has been interpreted as a licence to make foreigners’ lives in the UK progressively more unpleasant and annoying. And ruinously expensive. The remit of the Brexit vote has been extended very, very far, a sort of Uxbridge by-election of geopolitics, an overinterpretation of the views of a particular core who, to be frank, it barely impacts and whom no level of harshness to outsiders can ever satisfy.

It won’t help Labour, of course. They’ll never be able to out Reform Reform, and they’ll make other moves which will alienate the centre left even further. The actual migration policies themselves will inevitably come up against reality and its requirements.

But I can tell you that if Keir Starmer or those around him had ever had to stand in line for their work visa, had ever known the constant anxiety which comes with knowing your presence in a country is strictly time-limited and always open to be revoked, they wouldn’t be plunging people into further uncertainty without very good reason. This is a politics for and from narrow minds, or, even worse, cosmopolitans pretending to be inward-looking to appease a particular idea of working-class parochialism.

Foreigners are the very softest target in British politics. Given that I once again am one, I’m going to take a stand for them and their rights. What kind of Labour Party wants to give so much power to people’s employers, anyway, wants to keep workers chained to the whims of their bosses for a whole decade? Let the Labour Party go down with its ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ nonsense; even me, most pragmatic of turkeys, has had enough of voting for their particular brand of Christmas.