Burnham’s ‘Boriswave’ u-turn could bankrupt Britain

The Makerfield by-election was seen as one of the most consequential in modern British history and, with reports that Andy Burnham intends to scrap planned reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), it is hard to argue otherwise.

The result last Thursday will not only give the UK a new prime minister, but could also mean up to 2.15million migrants who arrived between 2021 and the election of Keir Starmer – known as the ‘Boriswave’ – will soon be awarded permanent settlement, putting them on a pathway to British citizenship. A politician with a mandate of just under 25,000 votes is taking our country down a path that will have profound social, fiscal and democratic consequences.

Last year, home secretary Shabana Mahmood introduced modest proposals that would require care workers and their dependents who arrived during Johnson’s term to wait up to 15 years before obtaining ILR, with the baseline for other migrants increasing from five to 10 years. It was a long-overdue recognition that the last Conservative government’s immigration policies had led to an unprecedented spike in low-wage and low-skill migration.

Standing in a Red Wall seat, Burnham softly indicated that he supported the general gist of Mahmood’s plan. He also u-turned on his prior support for migrants to have immediate access to public funds on arrival, and said net migration needed to continue falling.

For an individual vying for the top job, this made perfect sense. Polling by More in Common found that 52 per cent of voters think the main reason immigrants come to the UK is to take advantage of welfare and the NHS. The vast majority of the British public do not support giving welfare to migrants.

But Burnham is no longer courting the support of ordinary Brits. The views and opinions of his Makerfield constituents were forgotten as soon as he entered the Avanti West Coast first-class lounge. His only guiding principle now is keeping the parliamentary Labour Party on side.

As soon as Mahmood’s proposals were first announced, an avalanche of criticism poured down from Labour backbenchers. The main line of attack was that these changes were ‘unfair’ after Britain had ‘promised’ migrants settlement after five years.

Quite when such a ‘promise’ was made by the British government is a mystery. It is also perverse for British politicians to hold a pledge made to foreign nationals as inviolable, while treating the repeated pledges made to the British electorate that mass migration will be brought to an end, and that public debt will be brought under control, as expendable.

As for the matter of fairness, is it really fair to expect overstretched taxpayers to stump up for yet more welfare spending? According to Mahmood, abandoning her reforms could cost up to £10 billion over the lifetimes of just this cohort of care workers and their dependants. And care workers are just one part of the Boriswave. Reform UK estimates that the lifetime cost of all those granted ILR between 2026 and 2030 could amount to £154 billion.

Indeed, some senior Labour figures, including Emily Thornberry, have all but acknowledged that Boriswave migrants obtaining settlement is going to cost a pretty penny, but that we should proceed down this path because to do otherwise would push them into destitution. Saying the quiet part out loud, Thornberry claimed in March this year that over half of migrant children are living in relative poverty. The only remedy, it seems, would be to award their low-earning parents the right to stay in Britain permanently so that they can then claim benefits.

Ironically, granting permanent settlement would actually negate the very justification that was used for the Boriswave in the first place – namely, that the care sector would collapse without vast numbers of migrants. After all, once an individual receives ILR, they have the right to work in whichever sector they wish or even to not work at all. No longer are they required to do the jobs that Britons supposedly don’t want to do. Instead, low-skilled foreign nationals would be free to compete for jobs at the lower end of the labour market, in sectors where there are no shortages. This would be an unmitigated disaster for the roughly one million young people in Britain not in education, employment or training, who would then find it even harder to enter the workplace.

It is hard to overstate how long the damage of Burnham’s embrace of the Boriswave would last. Even before the next General Election, hundreds of thousands of ‘Burnham-Settlers’ could have moved on to obtain British citizenship, putting them beyond the reach of even Reform’s proposal to scrap ILR. At which point, given the cost to the exchequer, we may start to see proposals to denaturalise large numbers of British citizens.

Andy Burnham, before even assuming office, may very well have sowed the seeds of his own downfall. He was elected by traditional Labour voters still hoping there was a politician on their side. For him to suddenly turn into a co-conspirator of Boris Johnson would put him on the path to electoral damnation.

Rob Bates is the research director at the Centre for Migration Control.