If not the Hong Kongers, what immigrants will Britain let in?

The UK's immigration soul searching risks tipping into madness if it can't even guarantee a future for BNO visa holders

It’s perhaps because of my own immigration story that I find stories from others who uproot and resettle in new countries totally touching and inspiring. Over the last four years, I’ve loved reporting on the Hong Kong British National (Overseas) arrivals to the UK – they came at Boris Johnson’s invitation, as the National Security Law ushered in a new, more authoritarian phase for their home city. I have met Hong Kongers in churches and local hustings, working as software developers or becoming stay-at-home dads. It’s never an easy decision or process to leave one home and make another. But the 160,000 Hong Kongers who’ve come have gone at the process with gusto and warmth.

So I’ve wanted to write something raising awareness of their position in Britain’s increasingly precarious immigration debate for a while now. In May, Keir Starmer railed against Britain becoming ‘an island of strangers’ and pledged tougher rules on legal immigration, much as a response to the rising threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform. But the government was unable to confirm whether those tighter rules would also apply to the Hong Kongers (indeed, they didn’t seem to anticipate that as a question at all) – and have still not confirmed.

Illustration courtesy of ChatGPT

If the rules are tightened, then the Hong Kong BNO arrivals would be facing ten years’ settlement in the UK before they can apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) and then citizenship, instead of five years. Those who arrived in 2021, in the first wave, would be able to apply for ILR next year under current rules, but they’d have to wait until 2031 if the proposed changes are applied retrospectively. Parents are uncertain if they can afford to keep their teenage children in the UK for university; others are putting off life decisions like buying a house, because they don’t know what their immigration status and the corresponding financial burdens over the coming years will be.

There are many reasons to think that Britain’s immigration system is not working, I write in today’s Times:

We are not integrating enough, we are humiliatingly powerless when it comes to small boats and deportations, we are still too embarrassed to discuss issues of race and culture.

But if Britain has no space even for a group like the Hong Kongers – on average more educated than Brits, highly employable and law-abiding – then who will we let in? Most charitably, the Labour government has merely forgotten about the Hong Kongers as they try to triangulate an attack against Reform (though even that would be a pretty uninspiring interpretation of the government’s incompetence). It’s not too late to give the group some certainty, and more widely, recognise that Britain will always need some level of immigration.

Let’s not let this moment of national soul-searching tip over into madness.

Updates on the Christopher Cash/Christopher Berry espionage case:

I wanted to give readers an update on the Cash/Berry case as so much has happened since the case was dropped. There is a lot of commentary in the media, and it seems that any number of former national security or diplomatic or political figures have come out to criticise the case’s handling. Yesterday’s Sunday Times reported that even the White House is concerned with the incident. Safe to say that this case has much longer to run and we may find out more very soon.

The short take is: we still don’t know what happened.

But there is growing momentum in public opinion and in the media discussion that it was the government which chickened out, with the case resting on how willing Labour was to call China a ‘threat’.

The Crown Prosecution Service’s director, Stephen Parkinson, sent a letter to MPs last week, suggesting that the CPS tried ‘over many months’ to get the government to provide evidence to show that ‘at the time of the offence China represented a threat to national security’. This was needed this year, and not at the time of charging, Parkinson said, because of a 2024 espionage case involving Bulgarian nationals spying for Russia, which the High Court ruled that:

“Enemy” for the purposes of the 1911 Act includes a country which represents at the time of the offence, a threat to the national security of the UK.

In the light of this new judgment, it was considered that further evidence should be obtained.

Pressure has since continued to pile on the Labour government, in particular the National Security Advisor Jonathan Powell (formerly Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff), with reports suggesting that he was the one holding back the government from providing that evidence, along with the Treasury.

I can see why this theory is persuasive. Labour is hoping to warm up relations with China, with Starmer still due for a visit to the country soon. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is in dire straits over her lack of money, and upsetting one of the UK’s major trading partners doesn’t seem smart. The court trial would have been weeks of dredging China and its operations in the UK (benign and malicious) through the media, with no guarantee of success as conviction under the Official Secrets Act is notoriously difficult.

If this is what has happened, my (perhaps naive) wish is for the government to, more directly, make the argument that China is not a threat. There are of course legitimate reasons to think that it is, but it was a Conservative foreign secretary (James Cleverly) who put it well when he said: ‘forgive me when I say that no punchy catchphrase or plausible adjective can do justice to such a country or to any sensible approach towards it. If you are looking for British foreign policy by soundbite, I’m afraid you will be disappointed.’ The debate over the espionage case has seemed to assume that any government would be outrageous for not declaring China a threat, when in fact the formal position has never gone so far, under the Tories or Labour – for good reason. I personally think we should continue to reject ‘foreign policy by soundbite’.

But in any case, Parkinson’s explanation leaves some unanswered questions. Fundamentally, it’s not clear why the CPS required ‘further evidence’ anyway. The idea that the Bulgarian spy ring raised the evidential threshold has been questioned by legal experts, including the former head of the CPS Ken Macdonald:

And if it isn’t the Bulgarian spy ring that was the thing that changed, why was whatever evidence went into charging in the first place no longer enough to prosecute now?

Murkier and murkier.

In the meantime there was a little more in the Times about the allegations brought against the men and what they were meant to have done:

When detectives from SO15, Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism branch, scoured Chris Cash’s bank records and found £600 in payments from Christopher Berry, they thought they had hit the jackpot.

The money must be, they would later claim, the parliamentary aide’s financial reward for supplying information to his friend to pass on to operatives from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

So it was a blow to their case when Cash showed, by supplying correspondence and financial records, that the money was for separate work on translation services.

From that point, The Times understands, any reference to Cash having financial inducement was removed from the case papers.

And before the espionage case dramatically collapsed at the Old Bailey last month, prosecutors were expected to have to concede there had been no payment at all to Cash for allegedly passing information to Chinese intelligence.

What I’ve been reading:

• UK becomes BYD’s largest international market after sales surge (Financial Times). A big moment, though not a surprise given the UK is one of the only (perhaps the only?) countries in the West that has no tariffs against Chinese EVs.

• Why isn’t Europe diversifying from China? (Rhodium Group) Relatedly, I came late to this analysis by the Rhodium Group that shows the EU is failing in its pledge to ‘de-risk’ from China – imports from China are actually increasing as a share of the bloc’s trade.

• The Oct. 7 Warning for the U.S. on China (Mike Gallagher for the Wall Street Journal). This op-ed was an example of one of my least favourite genres of commentary – comparing conflicts which, basically, have nothing alike with each other, to each other. There was a lot of understandable parallel-drawing between Ukraine and Taiwan in 2022, but this is the first time I’ve seen October 7 compared to a potential Taiwan invasion and Hamas compared to the CCP. The two groups couldn’t be more different in my mind, rendering the entire premise of the piece (whatever other insights it may have) just incredibly, well, irritating.