British Citizenship (Terms and Conditions Apply)

Labour is making migrants earn their place, while Reform is deciding that even citizenship is enough. We’re heading for trouble.

What follows below is my personal story of coming to the UK, building a life here and finding somewhere I have, up to now, genuinely believed I belonged. If you also came to the UK from another country, I would love to hear your story too. What worries you about the direction we’re heading in? Has it changed how secure you feel? Let me know in the comments, or feel free to email me on iratusursusmajor@gmail.com.

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I have, as of this year, been living in the United Kingdom for over a decade.

I moved here with my husband because he got an incredible opportunity to work in the UK. An opportunity that was genuinely worth jumping for. Which we did. With both feet.

We arrived in London three weeks apart because, while he had held a British passport from birth, I only held a South African one. That meant completing a pretty invasive visa application to join my own husband as his spouse.

It was the first of three, and little did I know that the nearly £2,500 it cost at that stage would be merely the tippy-top of the £12,000 iceberg that becoming an actual British citizen would eventually cost.

Two suitcases each is what we brought with us for our new life. Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, we hit the ground running. At first, we lived in a house-share, where I learned to my horror that one of the most valuable commodities you could possess was bog roll. In a house-share of seven people, the levels of arse-wiping were frankly astounding. We were constantly running out.

It wasn’t long after I stepped off my Emirates flight that I started working. I had a whole week off before booking my first temp job, and about six weeks before landing my first proper role, which required two bus journeys of roughly 20 stops each.

Over the past decade, I have not been without work once. I have been incredibly fortunate in that. I have been a higher-rate taxpayer for eight of the past ten years. I have worked almost exclusively in healthcare, much of that time in or alongside the NHS. I have done my best to contribute positively to the society that became my home, and eventually, I very proudly became a citizen of the United Kingdom.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

All in all, I have tried hard to be a contributing member of this country, and I have been exceptionally privileged and lucky that I have been able to do so.

The other thing I was immensely lucky with, was the timing of emigrating here. Yes, the visa process was onerous, expensive and, at times, deeply frustrating and just a little bit dehumanising¹, but when I arrived, the atmosphere was merely hostile. It has now turned fully aggressive.

Because had things taken a different turn, and had my husband and I moved here in the early 2020s, I would have been part of what has been called by many the “Boris-Wave.” A lovely little term that evokes the feeling of threat, of being overwhelmed. Of invasion, some might say.

And yes, immigration to the UK since we left the EU has been significant - numbers absolutely ballooned once we had packed our little Union-Jack socks and fucked off away from the continent.

Because a truth not told often enough is that this country is, and always has been, exceptionally dependent on migrant labour. Whether through colonial exploitation of local workers and resources, the large-scale reliance on Irish migration to keep mines and essential services running during the 1800s, the recruitment of the Windrush generation to staff our public services after the Second World War, or the overt dependence on European labour in agriculture, care and healthcare during the early 2000s.

That last one, of course, got the right especially tumescent with rage at the temerity of people born elsewhere, sometimes even speaking another language, picking their vegetables and taking care of their nans.

I digress though. Back to timing.

Were I to have arrived a few years later in this country, I would now be looking down the barrel of a whole new and even more unpleasant set of rules and regulations, because under this government, a Labour government, mind you, the scapegoating of migrants is being ramped up.

Because no longer will it merely cost you tens of thousands of pounds and wait for five years before you can genuinely call the UK Home, this now looks likely to be extended to ten years instead.

Get sick and lawfully get support from the government for under 12 months? You get to add five years to that.

Have the audacity to need that support for over a year? Have another ten years.

And if you’re a low-paid worker? Say, something like the person who cares for our elderly, or someone who works in our fields? That’s fifteen years for you, please and thank you.

There is, of course, a loophole.

Not for ordinary people, of course. That would be silly. No, no - that would be for people who, in the government’s eyes, earn a high enough salary that they are finally (finally) considered as contributing enough.

It is grim. As. Fuck.

I had some hopes when the latest episode of Westminster losing its collective shit ended with Starmer saying Au-Revoir and Andy Burnham coming down from Manchester to have a go at being PM for a bit would improve things on this front.

That Burnham would take one look at the policies put forward by Shabana Mahmood and then do the reasonable thing of checking that she’s not Enoch Powell in a convincing rubber mask.

That has, sadly, not happened. Burnham has retained Mahmood and appears broadly supportive of the direction of travel, although his government has yet to confirm exactly which of her proposals it will implement.

All of this is what’s coming from a supposedly centre-left, social democratic government, with the picture on the right being even more rancid.

This week, in Reform UK’s distraction from the extended absence of Nigel “Give-Us-a-Bung” Farage exercise policy announcement, Richard Tice flanked by “30p” Lee Anderson, drew a few more lines in the discourse.

Their announcement proposes that no “foreign household” should be eligible for social housing, regardless of their employment status, taxes paid, length of residence or housing need.

This would explicitly include people who currently do qualify because they have Indefinite Leave to Remain or EU settled status. Tice also told us that Reform intends to terminate existing social tenancies held by foreign nationals after an apparent “short grace period.”

What this basically means is that a person who has lived here legally (whether that be for five years or five decades), paid their fair share of taxes and legally obtained permanent residency, could face losing their home on solely the basis that they had not become a British national for whatever reason.

Now, I can hear a few people say, “but, Bear, you’re a British citizen now, there’s no need to worry your furry little head.”

Except, that’s also not quite true - because Reform UK has now reached the point in their march to ever more overt authoritarian and ethnonationlist politics that they’ve started flirting pretty openly with a bit of old-school blood and soil rhetoric turned into policy as well. Under their policies and rules, I, as a naturalised citizen, i.e. someone who was born in another country, would still be treated less favourably than someone lucky enough to have been born in Slough.

Their proposal is that they will have 500,000 newly built social homes specifically for British-born workers, and set a target that at least half of all social housing be occupied by this same group.

Any Right to Buy scheme would exclude people born abroad, regardless of whether they are a citizen or not and any existing housing funding would also exclude them.

Reform has explained this distinction by stressing that citizenship is “much more than a piece of paper”, the unmistakeable implication of this being that naturalised citizenship is worth less than citizenship acquired by virtue of birth.

It’s also further reinforced by a narrow exception - that people, like my husband, born abroad to British parents, would not be counted in this way. That makes the whole principle just that much uglier, and it suggests that the test isn’t just where you were born, but whether Reform considers your family sufficiently British.

For a while now, things have been getting more and more grim for people like me who chose the UK as their home. The direction of travel now, though, is unmistakeable.

When a supposedly centre-left government devises ways to make permanent settlement slower, more expensive, more precarious and increasingly dependent on income, something dangerous is happening. When Reform simultaneously proposes stripping foreign nationals of homes they are legally entitled to occupy and treating some British citizens as less deserving because they were born elsewhere, that danger becomes impossible to ignore.

These two policies differ enormously in their severity, but they grow from the exact same, poisonous premise - that people who were not born in this country must continually prove their worth, while those born here are entitled to belonging by default.

We are entering a period in which we need to keep our eyes thoroughly peeled in every direction. It is of course easy enough to recognise that danger when it’s spangled in turquoise rosettes and quaffing a pint while stuffing £5m in their pockets while ranking citizens according to their birthplace and ancestry. It’s harder when that same underlying assumption is pushed on you by someone wearing a red blouse and speaking in a language of “contribution”, “fairness” and “earned settlement.”

The vilification of migrants doesn’t become harmless just because it’s been put through a focus group and signed off by Labour HQ.

Every time migrants are painted as a burden to be managed rather than people building lives, families and communities, it moves the boundary of acceptable politics that little bit more towards Reform.

And every time that happens, Reform realise that they can push harder and be crueller still.

I came to this country with my two suitcases. I joined my husband and I found work. I paid my taxes and became a citizen and built a life that I now, very honestly, consider to be pretty unambiguously British.

I know that I remain immensely privileged, but Reform UK’s policy makes clear that even the passport I spent years and thousands of monies getting may not actually be enough for me to be treated as an equal. That because the “Country of Birth” bit in my passport says South Africa, I may not be considered as deserving, regardless of how much I end up giving.

That should put fear into all our hearts, because the moment not even citizenship guarantees equal rights, we will no longer be able to assume that the stratification of society will stop with people like me.

That perhaps it matters where your parents were born. Or even your parents’ parents.

The slippery slope to blood purity is lined with prioritisation and policy, and unless we change tack very, very soon, the UK will continue dividing people into little boxes of those who belong and those who must always and forever earn the right to belong.

1. Anyone who has had to visit the application centre in Croydon can tell you that there is definitely no red-carpet waiting for you when you hand in your pack of nearly a hundred pages of evidence, despite the fact that immigration to this country is painted as a free-for-all open border.