Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

In recent months, as the anti-immigrant Reform U.K. Party surged to the top of the polls, the U.K.’s Labour government has sought to make it harder for immigrants to get “indefinite leave to remain” — essentially a British version of the U.S. green card — as well as restrict access to benefits for immigrants.

Currently, immigrants can seek “indefinite leave to remain” after five years in the country. Now, the Labour government’s plan is to double that wait time to 10 years. It has also proposed making refugees wait 20 years for citizenship; seizing the assets of asylum seekers; and curbing family reunification.

The Labour Party’s strategy, pushed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, is to take the wind out of the Reform U.K. Party’s sails by co-opting some of its more toxic policies around immigration, even if the impact is to drive away needed workers, in health care and other industries, who can more easily get residency rights in other countries in Europe and beyond.

There is scant evidence that this anti-immigration strategy is actually working to Labour’s political advantage. True, polls show that Reform U.K. seems to have peaked in mid-2025, and that in recent months its support has begun to ebb — as outsider parties normally do in the U.K. system. Yet, it still is polling significantly ahead of Labour. And, come the general election, it will almost certainly receive a massive propaganda assist from the Trump administration in the U.S., which makes no secret of its loathing of European social democratic governments and which has explicitly allied with Reform U.K. in its aspirations to deport immigrants from the U.K. in much the same way that Donald Trump is currently removing them wholesale from the United States.

In fact, if the general election were held tomorrow, the Reform U.K. Party could conceivably end up with the most members of parliament, putting it in pole-position........

© Truthout