Dr Shahab Saqib, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Birmingham
Nearly a decade ago, the United Kingdom instituted a policy designed to render the lives of undocumented migrants so intolerable that they would be compelled to leave. The phrase ‘a really hostile environment for illegal migrants’ was used by Theresa May while Home Secretary, and it signalled an administrative experiment aimed at deterring.[1] The experiment was built through legislation and a web of administrative measures that enlisted landlords, employers, and public bodies in immigration control, and which tightened access to public services and welfare as instruments of deterrence.
Yet the practical realities exposed by subsequent events revealed the fragility of such distinctions. The Windrush scandal demonstrated how permeable the boundary between undocumented status and lawful residence was. Windrush Individuals who had resided in the United Kingdom for decades found themselves denied healthcare, employment, and documentation of their legal standing; some were forcibly removed.
The independent Windrush Lessons Learned Review, led by Wendy Williams, recorded institutional failures and urged systemic change. Williams emphasised a culture of ‘disbelief and thoughtlessness’ in parts of the Home Office and described outcomes as ‘foreseeably cruel’.[2] Her report recommended changes to record-keeping, redress mechanisms, and ministerial accountability. The government offered apologies[3] and accepted the review’s recommendations in principle.
One might have reasonably expected that such a catastrophic failure would inoculate the polity against repetition, particularly given the government’s declared contrition. Instead, the regret remained fundamentally performative, as it created space for renewed exploitation of the same exclusionary logic. The apology, divorced from structural change, functioned as a ritual rather than a reckoning.
In recent years, Reform UK, under Nigel Farage’s leadership, has accumulated considerable political momentum by advancing an immigration agenda that seeks to intensify and systematise exclusion. Though the rhetorical registers differ, the underlying logic represents an escalation: a transformation of hostile environment policy into what might be termed a hostile nation framework. The distinction is not merely semantic but categorical. It is a shift from managing irregular entry to orchestrating comprehensive national rejection.
Reform UK’s immigration agenda extends far beyond addressing irregular migration. It aims to dramatically curtail migration writ large through interlocking measures: a freeze on ‘non-essential’ immigration, tightened settlement requirements, and the construction of a dedicated deportation apparatus capable of removing large populations. The party has even proposed withdrawing from or limiting the application of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act.[4] These manoeuvres are explicitly designed to dismantle legal constraints on deportation and expand removal capacity.
The Reform UK immigration manifesto thus comprises a concatenated series of stringent proposals targeting both undocumented and lawful migration alike. Its centrepiece is a pledge to ‘freeze all non-essential immigration’,[5] justified on grounds of alleviating pressure on housing, public services, and what the party euphemistically describes as ‘our culture’.[6] Simultaneously, Reform UK commits to preventing irregular Channel crossings through detention and removal protocols, with options for offshore processing or return to France. The party articulates this commitment with categorical finality: those arriving without authorisation will be ‘detained and deported and never, ever allowed to stay, period’.[7]
To operationalise these objectives, Reform UK proposes establishing a UK Deportation Command and executing mass deportations of potentially 600,000 individuals within a single parliamentary term.[8] Achieving this ambition would require dismantling existing legal frameworks: withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act 1998, and disapplying international asylum treaty obligations. Such measures would fundamentally restructure the juridical landscape governing migration and refuge.
This agenda targets not merely the undocumented but legal migrants themselves. Reform UK seeks to abolish indefinite leave to remain, impose substantially higher salary thresholds[9] and stricter language requirements for settlement and restrict welfare benefits exclusively to British citizens.[10] Additional proposals include earnings and skills-based entry criteria alongside severe restrictions on dependants.
What Reform UK proposes is not merely an intensification of hostile environment policy but a fundamental reconstitution of the state’s relationship to migrant populations.[11] The hostile environment was predicated on administrative cruelty directed at undocumented persons; a hostile nation represents the weaponisation of law itself, the systematic marshalling of state institutions to render migration not merely difficult but existentially untenable. It is a policy architecture designed to exclude not through discrete bureaucratic acts but through the comprehensive penetration of exclusion into every domain of social and civic life. For migrants, the result would be a state that does not simply punish irregular presence but manufactures conditions of permanent precarity for all non-citizens, a descent from administrative hostility into something closer to institutionalised national rejection.
The claims of Reform UK did not emerge in isolation. The present Labour government has evidently drawn influence from this rhetoric, moving to extend the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain.[12] Even while not in government, Reform UK advances an agenda that the sitting government adopts through indirect measures, seeking to harvest the populist support. What is presented as pragmatism is, in truth, the quiet normalisation of the very hostility once disavowed.
This trajectory from Windrush to current changes exposes a profound institutional pathology: the capacity to acknowledge catastrophic moral failure while remaining structurally incapable of genuine change. The government’s response to the scandal, its apologies, its acceptance of the Williams Review recommendations operated largely as a performative gesture, a ceremonial acknowledgment that left the underlying logic of exclusion fundamentally intact.
Nine years after Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ was conceived, the core architecture of deterrence remains operative. It has simply been starved of resources rather than dismantled; suspended rather than rejected. This incompleteness has created the conditions for its revival in more virulent form. The failure was not that officials were callous or cruel, though many were, but that the system itself was never subjected to genuine scrutiny. The Windrush scandal became an aberration to be regretted rather than a symptom requiring diagnosis and cure.
The contemporary resurgence of exclusionary politics, therefore, poses an urgent ethical and political question: can a nation that has acknowledged catastrophe bear witness to its impending repetition without being implicated in that repetition? If the Windrush scandal represented a moment of reckoning, what does it mean that the polity now contemplates policies that dwarf the original harm in scope and intent?
Against this landscape of incomplete reckoning, Reform UK’s agenda does not emerge as an aberration but as a logical continuation. The scandal, if it is to signify anything beyond historical tragedy, must become the ground for juridical repair and institutional reconstruction. Otherwise, it will be remembered not as the moment Britain turned away from exclusion, but as the moment it failed to, a moment of false regret that enabled what followed. The question implicit in that requirement is precise and urgent: what was the point of regret if the polity may now repeat and intensify the error? Regret that does not alter structural incentives is ritual; reform that does not acknowledge the human stakes is hollow.
[1] Andrew Sparrow, ‘Theresa May interview: “We’re going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception”’ The Telegraph (25 May 2012) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/theresa-may-interview-going-give-illegal-migrants-really-hostile/ accessed 22 October 2025.
[2] Williams, W. (2020). Windrush Lessons Learned Review. London: Home Office.
[3] Priti Patel, ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’ (House of Commons, 19 March 2020) https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/windrush-lessons-learned-review
[4] Sky News, ‘Nigel Farage has a new “leave” campaign – here’s how it could work and how it might impact you’ (27 August 2025) https://news.sky.com/story/nigel-farage-has-another-leave-campaign-how-would-it-work-and-how-might-you-be-impacted-13418933
[5] ITV News, ‘Reform UK: Nigel Farage launches manifesto “contract” with voters’ (17 June 2024) https://www.itv.com/news/2024-06-17/reform-uk-nigel-farage-manifesto-contract
[6] Ibid.
[7] Euronews, ‘Reform UK chief Nigel Farage says party will mass deport migrants if it wins election’ (26 August 2025) https://www.euronews.com/2025/08/26/reform-uk-chief-nigel-farage-says-party-will-mass-deport-migrants-if-it-wins-election
[8] The National News, ‘Deportation command could remove 600,000 illegal immigrants, UK’s Reform Party claims’ (26 August 2025) https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/uk/2025/08/26/deportation-command-could-remove-600000-illegal-immigrants-uks-reform-party-claims/
[9] The Independent, ‘Nigel Farage’s plan to scrap indefinite leave to remain could put thousands at risk of deportation’ (22 September 2025) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-uk-ilr-immigration-policy-nigel-farage-b2831087.html
[10] Evening Standard, ‘Nigel Farage vows welfare reform to get people back to work’ (21 October 2025) https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage-welfare-reform-people-b1248937.html
[11] COMPAS (University of Oxford), ‘The most radical part of Reform’s deportation plans’ (26 August 2025) https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/article/the-most-radical-part-of-reforms-deportation-plans
[12] Sky News, ‘Labour promise changes to indefinite leave to remain – but don’t go as far as Reform’ (23 October 2025) https://news.sky.com/story/labour-promise-changes-to-indefinite-leave-to-remain-but-dont-go-as-far-as-reform-13440249