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Keir Starmer and the Labour government have just kicked off a new political year in Westminster by trying to ‘out-Farage’ Nigel Farage.
While Starmer has proudly launched “phase two” of his premiership, prompting many to wonder what on earth was achieved in phase one, Labour’s Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has hit the airwaves this morning to outline the new strategy.
Labour, in short, will “talk tough” on immigration, be more aggressive in its response to Reform, and show the British people it is “getting things done”.
At the heart of this is a set of new policies that are clearly designed to try and slow the advance of Reform and calm a restless country that now feels like a tinderbox.
Labour will stop asylum-seekers who are allowed to stay in Britain from bringing their relatives into the country, too, and will also look to reform domestic laws so that the use of the European Convention on Human Rights to block the deportation of illegal migrants can be minimised, if not stopped altogether.
At least, that’s the plan.
But the problem is that by highlighting these issues, Labour is also inadvertently revealing how utterly insane and completely broken the current system has become.
As I pointed out on X, in a post subsequently shared by Elon Musk, if you really want to know just how crazy the system is then consider what everybody in Britain is now becoming aware of as I write this.
If you are a British person who wants to bring a foreign partner into the country then they will have to meet a minimum income requirement (of £29,000 a year) and show they can financially support themselves without having to rely on the welfare state.
But if you are an asylum-seeker or illegal migrant who has been allowed to stay in Britain then, astonishingly, you can immediately bring your relatives and they do NOT have to demonstrate they can afford to live in the country without welfare, they do not need to pay visa fees, and they do not even need to be able to speak English.
And the numbers are not small. By 2024, shockingly, close to 20,000 people were coming into Britain this way, while many others are having to play by the rules.
What does this look like on the ground? What are local councils actually having to deal with? Well …
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