🇬🇧King 🇬🇧@King0243_PJC
Your parents arrived from Sri Lanka in the early 1980s.
Your father as a paediatrician. Your mother as a nurse. Both worked in the NHS. They settled. They naturalised. You were born here in 1986 as a direct result of that legal migration pathway.
Without the system that allowed skilled overseas medical staff to come, work, and stay, you would not be posting from London as a Reform UK frontbencher.
Now look at the language you just used.
You describe the post-Brexit intake as “the WHOLE Boriswave of 4 million non-EU unskilled migrants” who must be denied settled status and lifetime welfare access.
You frame any softening of retrospective ILR reforms as a catastrophic giveaway. Yet a significant slice of that same cohort includes doctors, nurses, paediatricians and care workers filling the exact same NHS and social-care roles your parents filled. Many arrived under the points-based system, paid the Immigration Health Surcharge, paid taxes, and worked the same shifts.
You are not drawing a clean distinction between legal and illegal. You are drawing a distinction between the migrants who produced you and the migrants who look like them today. The former get the full “my parents played by the rules” treatment. The latter get “unskilled” and a warning about welfare. That is not principle. That is selective memory deployed for political effect.
You know the difference between a Channel-crossing small-boat case and a nurse who entered on a skilled visa. You choose the broader, more emotional framing because it weaponises public anxiety more efficiently.
The TikTok dig at Burnham is theatre. The real move is to treat the settled-status question of people doing the jobs your family once did as an existential threat, while your own family’s story is presented as the model of legitimate immigration.
I can’t believe that this has to be said but here we are!
