There are rightly many areas where the Liberal Democrats can be proud of what we achieved – and stopped – in government. There were other areas where we had little impact and left things in a much worse state than we found them. For me the most noticeable of these was immigration. Not only did we countenance some highly unfair changes, particularly the income requirement for spousal visas, for which our Ministers must take the blame, but our Conference passed policy which reflected what the coalition had done rather than our own liberal values.
In York two years ago I made an intervention in the debate on immigration to say I’d be voting against the policy, and that it broke my heart to do so. That was captured by the Guardian at 10:42 here.
Caron Lindsay says it breaks her heart to have to vote against a Lib Dem immigration policy. But she will vote against this motion because it supports the “horribly unfair” minimum income requirement for people coming to the UK to join their families. These immigrants are not entitled to claim benefits anyway, she says, so this is unnecessary.
My view was very much that this flew in the face of what we were saying about equal marriage. How could we consider love to be equal when we required people to have a certain income (regardless of whether their spouse had a job or not) in order to live in their own country.
As the world gets smaller, it is not difficult to fall in love with someone from the other side of the world. How can we deny our citizens the right to build their families here if they wish to do so?
A report this week from the Children’s Commissioner for England lays out in painful detail that it’s not just spouses who suffer from the enforced separation our immigration rules impose. Children separated from a parent suffer real emotional trauma.
It found that children, almost 4 in 5 of whom were British citizens, suffered distress and anxiety at the absence of a parent for reforms which simply don’t do what the government said they would do, e.g. reduce dependence on state benefits or increase tax take.
Worryingly, it says that the best interests of children are not considered and that the rules break national and international law.
No fewer than 20 pages of the report (Section 4) cover the various emotional, physical and behavioural harms caused to children as a result of these rules. It’s worth taking time out to read the whole thing. The conclusion is damning:
Thousands of children are being forced to grow up without a parent solely as a result of these Rules. Children are growing up in broken homes, separated from a parent, and in some cases siblings, for prolonged and unknown lengths of time. In further cases, children face being torn from the life they know in the UK in order to be reunited as a family abroad. Other children are prevented from returning to the UK, their country of nationality, and are effectively exiled abroad in countries with far lower health and education standards.
When the evidence about the thing we’re not supposed to call the Bedroom Tax showed that it wasn’t meeting its policy objectives and was causing unnecessary hardship, we changed our policy. This report on the effects of the family income requirement should force a similar change in outlook.
We are doing the right thing on refugees at the moment. We also need to do the right, evidence based thing by children caught up in an unfair immigration system.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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6 Comments
My partner is Chinese and we are lucky enough to meet the minimum income threshold, but it is humiliating to have to prove this in the first place. We both work, I have never claimed a penny in benefits and as you rightly pointed out as part of the application the non-EU spouses have to sign a declaration stating they understand that they do not have recourse to public funds.
This policy does nothing but hurt families and help Theresa May in her pursuit of her ridiculous arbitrary unachievable immigration targets.
Those of us who work in this field have been sickened at the way in which the government has shifted the goalposts to make it easier and easier to discount the human rights of children to have regular contact with both parents.
However, the craziest thing is that UK citizens are the only working British citizens who do not have a right to have their spouse/partners and family dependents stay with them in the UK. This policy has a monstrous impact on children.
The minimum income threshold is a deeply anti-family policy and is also a source of pain to a substantial number of British citizens. It should be attacked on both these grounds.
It is a product of the obsession with raw numbers of immigrants, with no recognition of the pressures and needs at any particular time.
“There are rightly many areas where the Liberal Democrats can be proud of what we achieved – and stopped – in government. There were other areas where we had little impact and left things in a much worse state than we found them. For me the most noticeable of these was immigration.”
I think you are actually being too kind to the Lib Dems in coalition there. The Tories could justifiably claim to have “stopped” the Lib Dems from carrying out some of their astonishingly anti-immigrant policies of 2010, such as the one where immigrants would have been prohibited from moving to the south east so as not to pinch all the drinking water – a policy which even Andrew Stunnell described as reminiscent of 1930s Germany.
Stuart, that is a gross misrepresentation of the policy we had in 2010
I dont remember LDV complaining about this policy much at the time. Which is a shame because it always was a sick policy. We complain about fathers abandoning their children but we supported a policy which actively split up families based on an arbitrary figure, and the policy discriminates specifically against Britons versus other EU citizens.