Editorial: ​Labour’s newly tough policy on immigration is too little and too late

With some nerve, the UK’s new home secretary says that racists were among those who attended the recent Unite the Kingdom rally in London.

The Labour MP ​Shabana Mahmood told her party’s conference in Liverpool that the “heirs to the skinheads and the Paki-bashers of old” were on the streets of the capital. “While not everyone chanted racist slogans, some did. Clear that in their view of this country, I have no place.”

These comments were self-pitying and misleading. Of course there will have been some racists at an event that attracted an estimated 110,000+ participants. But have not the critics of that march not been some of the same people who insist that the vast and almost weekly anti Israeli marches in London since the Islamic October 7 massacres cannot be judged by the (many) extremists in their midst?

In her speech, Ms Mahmood set out a series of conditions for those seeking a status known as “indefinite leave to remain”. Under proposed changes, migrants who want to remain in the UK will have to learn English to a high standard, have a clean criminal record and volunteer in their community. They will also need to be working, paying national insurance and not be claiming benefits.

All of this is welcome but too late, and inadequate. It comes from a Labour party that made a disgraceful loss of controls of our national borders (principally and unforgivably, a Tory failure) much worse. They sneered at the Rwanda scheme, which for all its flaws was a rare deterrent to entry.

But the proposed changes to indefinite leave to remain are too little, too late. It is granted after five years’ residency and means things like automatic and full access to an NHS that is already at breaking point. Labour wants to increase that to 10 years. But even after five years almost everyone who got in before 2021 is now eligible, and most of the massive wave of migration into the UK over the last two decades happened prior to 2021.