I warned you this would happen. And now it’s happened.
Labour’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood just capitulated to the far-left within the Labour Party by dramatically softening her immigration reforms.
By watering down her plans, Mahmood has essentially thrown in the towel to the extreme, pro-immigration, open border fanatics in the Labour Party who will now increasingly drive government policy and the direction of the country.
But before explaining the U-turn and what it means for the future of Britain, we should first remember how we got here because the story involves two parties.
It was Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch and the Tories who — despite promising to lower immigration in 2019 — then did the opposite by imposing the ‘Boriswave’.
A huge, unprecedented and incredibly costly wave of immigration that transformed Britain without the Tories ever asking the British people whether they wanted it.
The sheer scale of the Boriswave was so large that today one in every thirty people in Britain arrived between the years 2001 and 2005. Just think about that.
And most came from radically different cultures outside Europe, with nobody in Westminster giving any thought to what it might mean for social cohesion.
This disastrous policy is already eroding Britain’s economy and treating British workers like second-class citizens in their own country.
Not even one in five of the migrants who the Tories imported into Britain came on skilled worker visas.
The vast majority are low-wage, low-skill workers who earn well below the average salary, are taking more out of Britain’s economy than they are putting in, and so their costs are having to be paid for by British workers.
They also brought hundreds of thousands of relatives into Britain with them, whose housing, welfare, and other costs also have to be covered by the British people.
Which is why in the years and decades ahead the Boriswave — which nobody ever voted for — is forecast to cost the British people hundreds of billions of pounds — with some estimates in Westminster suggesting more than £600 billion.
Now fast forward to 2024 and the arrival of the Labour government.
Labour politicians promised the British people they would get a grip on all the chaos. And they were very clear themselves about what had gone wrong.
Keir Starmer accused the Tories of having turned Britain ‘into a one-nation experiment in open borders’.
Yvette Cooper described the Boriswave as ‘a free market experiment on immigration’ which, she went on, had ‘undermined’ Britain’s economy.
And Shabana Mahmood likewise described it as an ‘extraordinary open border experiment’, which was not just ‘unprecedented’ but ‘destabilising’ for the country.
Earlier this year, Mahmood even warned that the specific influx of foreign care workers into Britain, many of whom never ended up working in social care, could end up costing the British people roughly £10 billion, if not much more.
These were Shabana Mahmood’s warnings, in her own words.
And this is why countless Westminster columnists and pundits — from Fraser Nelson to Lord Glasman — lined up to sing her praises. Shabana, they said, ‘gets it’. She won’t let the British people down. She’s a hardliner.
But now fast forward to this week.
Because when the moment came to do something about it, to regain control over the system and end the insanity of the Boriswave, Shabana Mahmood bottled it.
She folded. She sold out to the far-left, globalist fanatics in her own party.
Under her revised proposals, roughly 300,000 foreign care workers and their families will now be able to apply for permanent settlement in Britain — to stay here forever — despite having only been in the country for just five years.
They will only need to earn £25,000 — well below the average wage in this country and nowhere near enough to ensure they are making a net contribution to Britain.
An initial fifteen-year wait has been reduced to just five — after which the Boriswave migrants will have full access to the welfare state, student loans, and the right to bring even more relatives into Britain.
Just look at the numbers.
Of the more than 760,000 people who came into Britain on the Health and Care visa route between 2022 and 2026, more than 470,000 of them were relatives.
They will now all be allowed to stay in Britain. Forever. While claiming welfare benefits, council housing, student loans, and more.
So too will thousands more migrants in the public sector who came to Britain for jobs that often did not exist due to fraud and exploitation in the care system but who instead of being asked to return home will be offered a new 5-year visa — after which they will be allowed to settle in Britain forever under a ‘second chance’ scheme.
In other words, the Labour government is now allowing migrants who did not even fulfil the criteria of their visa to stay in Britain anyway, and potentially forever!
And that’s not all.
Refugees coming to Britain on ‘safe and legal routes’, including new routes from Afghanistan and Gaza, will also be allowed to stay forever after just five years.
And even more shockingly, Mahmood will allow migrants who enter Britain illegally to stay in the country forever — albeit after a wait of 20 years, or so.
Instead of making it clear that if you enter Britain illegally you will never be allowed to stay, Shabana Mahmood has just given illegal migrants yet another reason to try and enter our country at will, knowing that if they make it here then the British state will eventually allow them to stay forever.
In the end, astonishingly, the British state expects …