Copyright newstatesman
The competition for hardest Tory on immigration continues. In the spotlight this time is “rising star” (and former Spad to both Boris Johnson and Suella Braverman) Katie Lam, who – despite her party failing to tackle illegal migration during its 14 years in power – has decided to up the ante by targeting legal migrants too. On Monday night, Lam appeared on Peston to defend an interview she did with the Sunday Times in which she said a “large number” of people have come to Britain legally who shouldn’t have been able to do so. In the offending piece, she told the paper: “They will also need to go home. What that will leave is a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people.” Asked by Robert Peston to define a “culturally coherent” country, she said: “There is a gathering view now, which I subscribe to, that multiculturalism has not succeeded in this country, that what you need is one culture for a country to be a success. Now you can be a multi-ethnic culture, you can be a multiracial culture, but you need one national culture for a people to live together in harmony and prosperity.” What does “they will also need to go home” mean, exactly? Maybe Lam is just endorsing the current Conservative stance of updating rules on Indefinite Leave to Remain so foreign nationals need to live in the UK longer before they can apply (a policy Labour’s Shabana Mahmood has recently nicked). But the “culturally coherent” bit, in the context of the Tories’ bitter infighting over their immigration record in government, sounds an awful lot like she’s going further. Reform’s position is to scrap ILR altogether, including for foreign nationals who already have it. They too believe a large chunk of these people need to “go home”, whatever their legal status might actually be. Lam’s position on this seems to have evolved. Speaking to the New Statesman over the summer, she kept her migration talking points to the less controversial (even for Labour MPs these days…) topic of people crossing the channel illegally: “Restoring the border and fixing the immigration situation is a condition of anybody who takes power in Britain”. For Lam, that meant leaving the ECHR, something Kemi Badenoch was not at the time too keen on. Being ECHR-sceptic à la Robert Jenrick (who Lam backed as leader last year) was a clear statement. How times change. Leaving the ECHR is now official Conservative Party policy. Even Labour is looking at tweaking the rules. Could it be that hardline rising star Tories need new ways to signal just how hardline they are? Even if those ways are so extreme (and counter to the concept of the rule of law) it makes them sound like they’re not really Tories at all…? [Further reading: The left’s immigration failure]
