"They Will Also Need to Go Home"

A sitting Conservative MP has introduced a bill that would make lawful residents deportable for earning under £38,700 - and Britain’s political class is barely blinking.

Welcome to Bearly Politics - an independent publication about power, politics and the systems that decide who gets to belong. I’m The Bear, a healthcare strategist by trade, a writer by accident and a long term resident of a country that keeps mistaking hostility towards people like me as competence.

If you’re new here, this piece is about the increasing gap between what Britain says it stands for and what it quietly legislates against. This week, it’s people like me.

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Over the years that you will have heard me banging on about the treatment of and the rhetoric around migrants and migration, there has always been a familiar refrain that has sometimes come back at me - a bit of an argument stopper that usually gets deployed to act as a hobbler by people with a subtly condescending smile, as if to gently soothe this clearly silly foreigner.

I’ve been assured, time and time again, that I am, quite obviously, overreacting - that the continuous debate that’s been raging since the early 2010s is only, and has only ever been about illegal migration.

That no one, of course, is concerned about someone like me who comes to the UK from abroad, does their bit, keeps their nose clean, contributes to society and, in general, avoids being “the wrong” kind of migrant.

All of these things, always said in a slightly patronising tone, has always been meant to calm. To disarm - and as it turns out, to gaslight.

Because, unfortunately, we now find ourselves in a place in our political ecosystem where not one, not two, but three political parties each have their own policies that take a very direct aim at - surprise, surprise - legal migration, including the party that is currently in government.

The reason why this has been placed in sharp relief again, is down to a Conservative MP, Katie Lam, who has made headlines after stating, without hesitation that:

“…there are a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect shouldn’t have been able to do so. It’s not the fault of the individuals who came here, they just shouldn’t have been able to do so. They will also need to go home. What that will leave is a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people.”

I cannot overstate emphatically enough the significance of these words.

They have not come from Nigel Farage at a Reform rally, throwing red meat at his base, nor was it a fringe blogpost on the outer reaches of GB News being shared. This statement is from a sitting Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, speaking on the record, outright calling for the removal of people who live in this country, who entered, lived and paid legally and did absolutely everything that successive governments have expected from them.

Now, if this were rhetoric alone, it would already bad enough - but Lam has taken it further than just that, and sponsored a bill in parliament, originally introduced by Matt Vickers and Sarah Bool, that would fundamentally transform the legal definition of settlement in the United Kingdom.

Screenshot from the Bill introduced by Vickers and Bool, Sponsored by Lam - Accessed 22 October 2025 and Available Online.

What’s being put forward by Lam goes well beyond the usual think-tank guff or late-night rants that we’ve become so used to from far-right commentators, but an actual legal instrument that sets out to achieve three extraordinary things at once:

It orders immigration law to be “read and given effect to disregarding the Human Rights Act 1998¹” with even interim measures from the ECHR to be ignored by officials unless a minister personally decides otherwise.

It resets settlement as a near permanent probation by hard-coding a 10 year minimum qualification period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) across all major routes², while explicitly excluding people who have simply lived here for ten years unless they fall within those channels, which in plain English means that time served doesn’t count unless it’s the right kind of time, and “partner of a British citizen” joins the list of routes that must wait a decade.

Most radically of all though, it converts ILR from a settled status into a means-tested “benefit” that can be revoked for not earning enough or even get close to touching “social protection.” Under Clause 3 of the Lam bill, ILR “is revoked” if your annual income, for any reason, falls below £38,700 for six months in aggregate during your qualifying period (or even after you’ve been given ILR) or if you or any of your dependents receive any form of “social protection”.

Exceptions have been made (specifically around Ukraine, Afghan and Honk Kong refugee schemes), but the architecture of the bill is coming through loud and clear - permanent status in this country becomes conditional on continuous prosperity and zero recourse help of any sort, with the financial threshold that will be increased on an annual basis by the Home Secretary.

In addition to the already mentioned, the bill would also create an annual cap on non-visitor migrants and will compel the Home Secretary of the day to revoke any visas issued above it - while at the same time making all these visas conditional on the same income floor and “no social protection” promise, while also barring the Secretary of State from granting leave outside of these rules under any circumstances³.

This bill goes well beyond being just a tightening around the edges and becomes a blatant constitutional posture - disapply the HRA to migration, transform settlement into something that is revocable and pegged to wage slips and ration entry by administrative ceilings that, if breached, will trigger an automatic revocation.

It is, in essence, creating a legal framework and infrastructure for a selective disenfranchisement of residents of this country which would be determined by income and circumstance, while empowering ministers to keep turning those screws via “immigration rules.”

I think we need to take a brief step back here as well to understand just how far the Lam bill would go and remind ourselves of what Indefinite Leave to Remain actually is.

Broadly speaking ILR is the legal mechanism through which the United Kingdom recognises that a person’s life in this country has become permanent. It’s the promise that if you’ve lived in the country for long enough, worked here legally, paid your taxes, kept your criminal record clean and proven your proficiency in English, then the UK is your home.

ILR is not citizenship, but it is stability⁴. It’s the thing that allows people to buy houses, start businesses, build families - it’s the compact between migrants and the UK that says “if you keep your side of the bargain, the state will recognise you as legally settled.”

What the Lam bill does is completely rip up that promise - and worse than that, it does so retroactively.

For a bit of context, this is something that is not often done - not by any state. The most impactful of these events was when Idi Amin ordered the wide scale expulsion⁵ of Uganda’s South Asian community in 1972. He justified the policy, in part, on cultural grounds, claiming that Uganda needed to be “more African.”

The human cost was catastrophic - families were scattered, properties were confiscated and whole lives were erased overnight, and the irony should absolutely not be lost on us that the United Kingdom became the primary refuge for the Asian communities who had had their lives overturned on the whims of a dictator.

I will note here that I don’t claim equivalence here, but it is a coherent warning, and to see, in 2025, a British MP now echoing that same logic - that of cultural “coherence” requiring the removal of lawful residents of this country - is something beyond hypocrisy as certainly beyond what could in any way be considered reasonable.

The reaction to Lam and her plans has been telling - Ed Davey came out swiftly to condemn her remarks stating:

“People who have come to the United Kingdom legally, played by the rules and made it their home do not need to ‘go home’. This is their home.”

For just a brief moment, someone in Westminster said what should be self-evident. Labour’s response on the other hand was… quieter. A spokesperson for the party said that:

“The Tories want to retrospectively change the rules to deport people who have been in this country and contributed to our society for decades… We welcome those who come to this country, legally, and give more than they take.”

Which, really, is the problem - even the defence from Labour accepts the premise that a person’s right to belong depends on what they give - that their humanity and home can still be measured against a balance sheet. It’s a rebuttal from Labour that protects no one and just reinforces the logic that got us here in the first place.

I would love nothing more than to, at this stage, say at least it’s only down to one Tory MP echoing the sentiments of Reform UK (who want to abolish ILR altogether) in an attempt to remain relevant, but, what makes this moment so grotesque is that the punitisation of migrants has become a partisan issue.

Shabana Mahmood, Labour’s Home Secretary, has herself already announced the government’s own plans to double the ILR qualifying from five to ten years and to make settlement something that is “earned”, translating to migrants having to prove they contribute more in taxes than they take in services and that there will also be a vague “contribution to community” caveat attached to the process.

Three major political forces in UK Politics have now, in their own ways, aligned on a single principle - that permanence, belonging and family life in this country should depend not on decency or legality, but on productivity.

I’m finding it personally very hard to see this as anything but an escalation of the UK’s long project of covertly hostile conditional belonging - this idea that citizenship, safety or dignity must always be earned and never guaranteed. It’s the final culmination of what has become a decades long culture war that says to migrants:

“You may stay, but only if you produce.”

The legal and moral incoherence of this position is absolutely mind-blowing - ILR is not a boon or favour granted by ministerial whim. It is a legal status that is defined in statute and protected under not only domestic, but international law. Section 76 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 already set out the narrow grounds which can lead to ILR being revoked⁶, but Lam’s bill adds a brand new category to this - “not earning enough” - and elevates it to the same level as a conviction for fraud or terrorism.

The bill would also fly in the face of set legal precedent, never mind being in breach of rights under the ECHR, because the High Court in 2008 ruled that applying new immigration rules retrospectively to people was unfair and unlawful. In the specific case that set this precedent, HSMP Forum Ltd v Secretary of State for the Home Department, it was recognised that migrants had a legitimate expectation that the rules they were expected to follow would stay the rules that applied to them. This is one of the things that make the UK a rule-of-law country instead of a rule-by-caprice one, and Lam’s proposal completely annihilates that principle. The fact that the policy has, at the time of writing, not yet been disowned by the Conservative leader - herself the child of non-British parents - makes the silence deafening.

The Lam bill would create, by its very definition, a permanent subclass of residents in the UK whose security is contingent on their payslips. Miss a few months of income? Risk redundancy? Go on mat leave or, god forbid, become ill or disabled?

You instantly become deportable.

The cruelty of this is built into the logic here - people who need protections the most become, through this bill, the most vulnerable for removal, and for those people on ILR with British spouses or children, the consequences would be catastrophic. There is already a long history of the Home Office separating families through bureaucratic rigidity and hostile policies, what the Lam bill would do is positively industrialise it.

The scenarios involved here are not at all unthinkable - a British citizen married to a migrant partner (of which there are many) earning £38,700 a year loses their job or takes unpaid leave to care for a child or elderly parent, would, six months later, have their ILR automatically revoked. Their children, born and raised in the UK, would risk becoming would risk forced separation and the deportation of a parent.

There will of course, as ever, be defenders of this policy, and they will no doubt put forward the argument that “no one is proposing mass deportations.” Except that once the legal precedent exists, it becomes policy by precedent - Windrush began with administrative tightening, the “Hostile Environment” was born out of “necessity” and the Rwanda policy proposals began with experiments.

Beyond just the legal quagmire this creates, there will also be massive practical implications, especially when we think of migrant heavy sectors. The NHS and social care system would collapse within months if this bill were ever enacted - tens of thousands of healthcare workers - many from Nigeria, India and the Philippines - earn below the £38,700 threshold. These are the healthcare assistants, nurses, porters and many others who are keeping wards open and patients cared for. Care homes that are shakily propping up the system would simply fold. The Lam bill is not only morally completely deranged, but economically suicidal.

And yet, that more than likely won’t matter to the people advancing these ideas - because the policy is not about economics, it’s about hierarchy. The Lam bill is about the reassertion of a political and social caste system - one in which “real” Britons (ones defined by birth, not contribution) can never lose their place and everyone must constantly reapply for permission to exist and to remain. It’s an ideology that paints migrants not neighbours, friends, family members or colleagues, but as a problem to be managed. Useful when profitable, disposable when not.

When Katie Lam made her statement about creating a “culturally coherent” society, she wasn’t describing any sort of unity, she was describing uniformity - a country purified of difference, where the right to stay depends on sameness and success.

There lies, at the very centre of this whole conversation, a single, corrosive idea - that rights are negotiable, and that some lives are conditional, and once that principle becomes established in laws and rules, it will not stay confined to migrants.

It will seep into everything.

When a government can revoke settled status because someone doesn’t earn enough, they can cut benefits for citizens who do the same, and when it can disapply the HRA for one group, it can very easily be disregarded from another. The erosion of universality will always begin at the margins, but will very rarely stay there.

This country has spent many years pretending that the infrastructural hostility of the immigration system is a terribly unfortunate by-product of tough choices instead of being the point of it, but the Lam bill completely dispenses with that pretence. It’s an open and irrevocable declaration in legal form that contribution, community and legality mean nothing if you don’t meet an arbitrary threshold of worth, and it tells every immigrant who has made this country their home - and every British citizen who is married to one - that their place is not secure.

Having lived in this country for a decade now, it’s easy to recognise the signs - policies like this don’t emerge out of nowhere or in isolation, they’re like trial balloons to see just how far the line can be moved before the outrage starts burning out. What is sold as “just a proposal” invariably becomes a “necessary compromise”, a “hard decision” and before long, we find ourselves living with it as the new normal, and the only way that we can halt this in its tracks is to call it exactly what it is - state sanctioned cruelty that’s veiled in technocratic language.

It’s worth saying that the Conservative Party likely won’t adopt the Lam bill and just choose to quietly ignore it, but, unfortunately, the damage is already done.

Every day that goes past in which this bill is unrepudiated signals a tacit approval.

Every day that the Labour government does not condemn moves like this in the strongest possible terms normalises it.

Every day that the rights of settled people get treated as policy variable, we erode the foundation of what actually makes Britain worth belonging to.

The question I end with today isn’t whether Katie Lam has crossed a line - it’s whether there’s even a line left to cross.

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1. The HRA of 1998 embeds the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, telling judges and officials to interpret legislation compatibility with human rights - disapplying it would mean those safeguards simply stop applying to immigration cases.

2. Skilled Worker, Scale-Up, Global Talent, Innovator, Founder, UK Ancestry and, importantly, the partner route.

3. As it stands, the Home Secretary can exercise discretion in exceptional cases - along the lines of humanitarian, family unit, medical grounds, etc.

4. To everyone stating that “they could just naturalise”, it’s not really that easy. For many settled migrants its prohibitively expensive - the full cost for an adult now exceeds £1,500. In addition to this some nationalities must also renounce or risk losing their original citizenship due to restrictions that may be in place - being true for quite a few EU countries.

5. Approximately 60,000 people were expelled in 90 days - the UK accepted roughly 29,000 refugees, many of them who remained and rebuilt their lives and businesses here.

6. Those are: Serious criminality, deception or ceasing to meet refugee criteria - all linked to personal misconduct, not income.