Kemi has come up with her first policy… and it’s a stinker

The Conservative leader wants to make it harder to claim British citizenship – which is an unworkable policy that will fail to win back Reform voters, says John Rentoul

After she was elected, Kemi Badenoch told her shadow cabinet that she wouldn’t reveal any major policies for at least two years, so maybe this is a minor policy. It is certainly one that is not going to make much of a contribution to getting the Conservatives out of the hole they are in.

The Conservative leader has announced that she wants to make it harder for immigrants to claim British citizenship. Her plan is to double the time that immigrants need to have been in the UK before they can claim “indefinite leave to remain”, from five to 10 years. Once someone is granted indefinite leave to remain, she says, they are on an “automatic track to citizenship”, and “we believe that too many people are gaining citizenship via that route”.

This immediately runs up against an obvious objection: if it is too easy to become a British citizen, why didn’t the Conservatives do something about it when they were in government?

That is the problem with almost everything that Badenoch and her shadow ministers say – which was why it was sensible of her to say that she would focus on values rather than specific policies for the next two years.

But nature abhors a vacuum. As Aristotle once said, opposition politicians have to make policy announcements or they cease to exist. Or, worse, they concede the floor to Nigel Farage.

Badenoch was keen to make clear, in her interview with the BBC this morning, that this new policy is not just an announcement: “We need to have proper plans where everything is coherent, not just making announcements. This is something that will work. It is a plan, and it is something that we can do very quickly, because Labour has a bill which they’re bringing in next week.”

Well, it will “work” in the sense that it engages with the government’s legislative timetable and it gives Tory MPs something to do – namely, to vote on the losing side against Labour’s working majority of 171. But it wouldn’t “work” if Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, clapped her hand to her forehead and said: “You are quite right, you know, I hadn’t thought of that – we ought to double the qualifying period for indefinite right to remain…”

The point about indefinite leave to remain status is that it recognises that someone has been in Britain for some time and that it would be difficult, cruel or unfair to try to remove them. Whether it takes the state five years to recognise that or 10 will make no practical difference.

All that making it harder to qualify for citizenship would do is to contradict everything else that Badenoch says about integration and how important it is that immigrants sign up to the values of the host country.

She is on stronger ground arguing that criminals should not qualify for citizenship, except that it is already notionally the government’s policy that foreign criminals should be considered for deportation. Anyone who can remember the last Labour government knows that this is harder said than done. Indeed, Charles Clarke lost his job as home secretary because of it: he promised that every non-national coming out of prison would have their case looked at, and would be put on a plane if they had no right to be here, but the Home Office failed to deliver.

Badenoch is right to suggest that more people who are not entitled to be in the UK should be removed, but then we are back at square one again. The annual number of removals halved under the Conservatives between 2016 and 2019 – before the pandemic.

Badenoch should be congratulating Cooper on starting to get the numbers back up again, instead of pretending that her policy is “tougher” than Labour’s.

Which brings us back to Badenoch’s fundamental problem, which is that the Tories lost control of immigration when they were in government and that millions of people voted Reform as a result and intend to continue to do so. It is hard to see what Badenoch could do to persuade these voters that another Tory government would do things completely differently – apart from waiting several years for what Boris Johnson called the blessed sponge of amnesia to work its magic.

In the meantime, there is a policy vacuum to be filled – with any old rubbish.