What does mid mean?

Sunder Katwala looks at the government’s proposed reforms to settlement rules in the UK as part of its immigration policy overhaul and asks whether they could meet the fairness challenge. 

Securing public confidence on immigration policy has proved a daunting challenge for successive British governments. The Labour government’s attempt to break that cycle sees it pursuing three major policy reforms at once. Two of these were key pledges in its 2024 general election manifesto: reducing overall numbers to “sustainable levels” (without indicating what that sustainable level might be) and bringing back control to the asylum system. Labour’s third major initiative is the biggest overhaul of the settlement rules for decades. There was no mention of settlement or citizenship in the party’s manifesto.

Labour’s record is sharply contested in a polarised political debate. But on the specific pledges it did make, it has made more progress than is usually recognised.

Overall immigration numbers have fallen spectacularly. The government inherited record levels that were likely to halve due to the final decisions of the last government.  But Labour has reduced the numbers much further and much faster than almost anybody recognises, including government ministers and their political opponents.

So the fall in immigration risks being a very well-kept secret. There is a time-lag in the data but a bigger lag in the political discourse. The latest headline figure – net migration of 205,000 – relates to the 12 months up to June 2025. But published data shows there was a further 45,000 fall in visas by the end of the year – so the 2025 net migration headline number, which comes out in May 2026, will be down again. The Home Secretary used the mid-2025 headline number to tell the Home Affairs select committee that “net migration remains high by any measure”. Yet 2026 will almost certainly see the lowest level of net migration this century – and negative net migration is likely in 2027.

Another reason that the collapse in overall numbers has not been noticed is that asylum claims are rising. The data shows progress on reducing the asylum backlog, with incremental if slow progress on reducing the use of asylum hotels. The government has also sought to publicise a significant rise in removals. Yet boats crossing the channel make a lack of control visible. The question of what will and won’t work to secure control is contested.

It is the settlement proposals that have proved most contentious. Their aim is to reflect popular ‘rights and responsibilities’ principles – that those who join the club should show a willingness to contribute. Those principles underpin the current system – with English language, good character and citizenship tests, and the symbolism of the citizenship ceremonies introduced two decades ago. The key difference with earned settlement is a much more stratified approach. Some people could qualify in three years, and some in five years – but the timelines will be doubled as a baseline, trebled for some, and quadrupled for refugees.

These complex proposals are often misunderstood. Media reports invariably say the timeline will be ten years for most people – but a 15-year wait will be more common for those who came in the last parliament. That is not simply a rule for care workers, but for all mid-skill roles (below RQF Level 6): chefs, lab technicians, data analysts, electricians and hotel managers would all wait 15 years for settlement too.

The most contested issue has been whether or not it is fair to apply new rules to those already in the UK. Critics say this would move the goalposts. The government’s main argument has been that it would be unaffordable not to do so.

The Home Secretary deployed the eye-catchingly large figure of £10 billion in net fiscal costs for care workers and their adult dependants. Yet analysis by the IPPR and others has shown that the £10 billion figure is a mirage since the government’s proposal for a longer path to settlement would seem to make little, if any, difference to this number – and most costs would be incurred in three decades’ time.

So the key question is: what are the fiscal gains or costs of the government’s reform proposals?  MPs and peers have been trying to find out: the government appears to be stonewalling on supplying those details – but it will be impossible for parliamentarians to debate the current reforms, or possible alternative proposals, without the real numbers.

Earned settlement creates, by design, a hierarchy of status in terms of what different migrants deserve. A foreseeable but perhaps less directly intended consequence is to create a stratified hierarchy of settlement for dependents too. The child of a banker could be a citizen by the age of eleven, while his classmate who is the daughter of a cleaner at the bank would have a fifteen-year wait – and would not be eligible for home student fees.

To advantage the most affluent children while placing impediments to their working-class peers inverts the aims of the government’s opportunity agenda. The Home Affairs Select Committee has proposed several mitigations that could soften the impact on children – but it is an inherent feature of making parents “earn” their children’s settlement at different rates too.

The stratified hierarchy has a highly racialised pattern too. Most black and Asian migrants from Commonwealth countries will face a 15-year wait, while migrants from the EU and north America are likely to attain settlement earlier. Different patterns of dependent visas means there will almost certainly be a more racialised distribution for children than for adults. These lengthy timelines risk seeing people fall out of status too – risking the creation of a new Windrush scandal.

The settlement reforms are sharply contested, both on their core principles and how they will apply in practice. The Prime Minister has signalled a willingness to listen to the challenges made by care workers and their allies. “People do want fair rules. They want clear rules but they also want compassionate and fair rules” he said in a newspaper interview. The outcome will ultimately depend on a political judgment – about what can and cannot be defended as fair.

By Sunder Katwala, Director, British Future.

The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is bragging about how “successful” the Managed Migration to Universal Credit has been. This is despite over 360,000 vulnerable people being stripped of vital benefits in the process.

The DWP announced the closure of Employment Support Allowance and Housing Benefit following the campaign to force claimants to move to Universal Credit.

They bragged:

Over 1.9 million people now better supported to find good, secure jobs as the Government moves customers off outdated benefits and on to Universal Credit

Considering ESA was a benefit for disabled people who couldn’t work as much or at all, it’s absolutely gross that the focus here is on work. But it doesn’t come as a surprise from the department that wants to force disabled people into work by any means necessary.

What about those who haven’t migrated?

However, this ignores how many haven’t been able to claim or have been stripped of their benefits. The DWP sent out over 2,352,886 managed migration notices, and 1,985,703 have moved over. That means 367,183 people haven’t successfully moved over yet and could have them stripped away.

That means a huge number of disabled people who already live in poverty will be forced into even harsher living conditions. As the Canary has previously reported, making the move is especially difficult for chronically ill and disabled people, who struggle with stress and lack the energy to fill in excessive forms.

An internal report showed that some disabled claimants often have very little of what they were being asked to do. As a result, many failed to make a new claim for Universal Credit and lost their legacy benefit.

It’s been such a cause for concern that mental health professionals have warned the DWP that migration will put claimants at risk.

The National Association of Welfare Rights Workers told Work and Pensions committee chair Debbie Abrahams that:

These claimants will all have long-term health conditions and/or disabilities, and their legacy benefits are likely to be their only source of income. A failure to migrate to universal credit therefore carries a high risk of destitution, rapid deterioration in their health, and even death.

The latest DWP statistics, published on 11 November 2025, provide a detailed analysis of the migration of the ESA cohort to universal credit. The Department highlights that, for those sent a migration notice between July 2024 and May 2025, 3% failed to make a claim to universal credit and had their legacy benefits stopped. However, for claimants who were in receipt of ESA only, the figure alarmingly doubles to 6%.

Many lose out while DWP pushes workshy narrative

What’s also missing is that many forced onto UC have their benefits reduced and somehow have to survive on less as prices rapidly increase. Policy in Practice found that around 200,000 households lost around £59.54 a week. That’s over £230 a month that people are just expected to do without.

The DWP release also only mentions two of the benefits that are being amalgamated into Universal Credit. Others have an even worse success rate. As the Canary has previously reported, nearly a quarter of Tax Credits claimants who’ve been forced onto Universal Credit ended up without any benefits.

And once again, despite ESA claimants having already been found too sick to work, the DWP is obsessed with pushing the workshy narrative.

This Government is committed to updating the welfare system so that it promotes opportunity, rather than stifling it – as part of our Plan for Change.

The campaign means the number of people on Universal Credit has increased, particularly the number of people who receive the benefit with no requirement to look for work, as, since June last year, the focus has been on moving vulnerable people from Employment and Support Allowance.

There’s absolutely no need for them to constantly mention people with ‘no work requirements’ other than to remind people of this fact. By using this wording, they make it sound like people are choosing to work, as opposed to not being well enough to.

While the DWP are celebrating ‘supporting’ so many to switch to UC, it’s clear what their motives are. It’s easier to push people into work from Universal Credit, and even easier to turn the public against people with ‘no work requirements’.

Featured image via the Canary

4 min read12 min

One lesson from the conflict in Iran is that a cyber attack is the opening move of modern warfare. Israel proved this, hacking Tehran’s CCTV cameras to mark key targets and the Ayatollah himself for US and Israeli bombing.

But the UK is severely underprepared for this reality. As our energy sector rapidly digitalises like the rest of the world, a new target is opening up for hackers, and unless we learn from the Iran-US war, they will be able to strike at the heart of our industries, government and households.

Our nation is no stranger to having its energy weaponised, causing economic and social pain to British households. From blackouts in the 1970s due to the miners’ strikes and the oil crisis, to energy bills soaring when gas prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Cyber attacks can recreate this economic damage, and no form of energy supply is safe from attack. Whether it is gas, renewables or nuclear, every form of energy that our nation relies upon is susceptible. And as our energy system continues to digitalise, the threat cyber attacks pose to our country is growing.

The UK’s energy system is not prepared for such attacks, and Labour is failing to address this threat to our security.

Our enemies know this all too well. Over 90 per cent of the largest energy firms have already fallen victim to cybersecurity breaches to date, with attacks becoming increasingly regular. And they can repeat the damage other hackers have done to major British companies on our energy system, similar to the attack on Jaguar Land Rover in my constituency of Meriden and Solihull East in 2025 that cost the UK economy an estimated £1.9bn. This also caused major disruption throughout the automotive supply chain and has left companies facing bankruptcy.

Unless we strengthen our security, a cyber attack from anywhere in the world could switch off our energy supply, bringing much of our daily life and our economy to a grinding halt.

Despite this urgent need to take action, the government has ignored the severity of this threat and failed to tackle it since taking office. The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill is a unique opportunity to tackle this glaring oversight. However, Labour ministers are squandering this opportunity to protect our energy supply from cyber attacks.

This is why I am calling on the government to strengthen our energy system against cyber attacks by going further in the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill.

Firstly, the bill should only allow data from the UK energy sector to be processed either within UK territory or that of allied countries with robust cybersecurity mechanisms. By limiting the processing of this data to places we can trust, we would make it harder for cyber criminals to access energy firms’ data and use it for nefarious purposes.

Furthermore, the government should also expand the requirements for energy companies to report when they are victim to cyber attacks. Reporting these attacks to government cybersecurity agencies is essential for deterring further attacks and alerting them to existing holes in our security. Although there are already reporting requirements in the UK, they are not fit for purpose, and the bill does not go far enough to improve them. The current state of the bill means many cyber attacks will continue to go unreported to the relevant cybersecurity agency, reducing our ability to establish where our energy grid is exposed and to respond accordingly.

The risk cyber attacks pose to the UK’s energy security is clear, as is the government’s failure to address this threat. By amending the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill to secure energy firms’ data and ensure more cyber attacks are reported, we can strengthen our cyber security and make it harder for our enemies to turn off our power.

Saqib Bhatti is Conservative MP for Meriden and Solihull East

4 min read23 min

For decades, China has realised the importance of energy security to its long-term success. It increased electrification, with a corresponding rise in domestic renewables and a massive increase in strategic oil and gas reserves.

Meanwhile, the UK has failed to learn the lessons of energy crises dating back to the 1970s. The dual shocks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East present an opportunity to correct this.

These events have shown in the starkest terms that relying on global markets alone leaves the UK dangerously exposed to external shocks. Energy security is why the government and the oil and gas industry must abandon short-term, distracting arguments around price and tax revenues, and work together.

The physical protection of energy infrastructure is central to national resilience and our deterrence posture. In 2024, the UK relied on imports for 43.8 per cent of its primary energy, up sharply from 28 per cent in 2020, reflecting a significant rise in dependence on external suppliers.

Domestic oil and gas production fell to a record low, declining 6.5 per cent year on year, as output from the UK’s mature continental shelf continued to contract. Production is now around 20 per cent of its 2000 level. Meanwhile, UK gas consumption in 2024 reached 689 TWh, compared to domestic production of just 344 TWh, leaving a substantial structural deficit.

In a world of rising geopolitical tension, that deficit is a strategic weakness. A stable, managed level of North Sea output is not about returning to past production peaks; it is about ensuring the UK retains sovereign access to critical energy supplies when global markets tighten, or hostile states attempt to disrupt or attack our country.

Offshore Energies UK accepts that increased production in North Sea oil and gas would have no meaningful impact on UK energy prices, as that product is sold on an international market, which dictates the price. A secondary claim that increased production would generate tax receipts to bring down energy prices is also questionable. Research by the University of Oxford found that even in the implausible scenario of the UK being able to maximise North Sea oil and gas and use all revenues to subsidise lower energy bills, the impact would be limited, a maximum of £82 per year off a household bill.

However, there are two reasons the future of North Sea oil and gas remains critical and should be supported.

First, given the volatility and increased tension around the world, the government should explore an agreement to allow increased extraction with a binding commitment that a sufficient reserve is created against future shocks and, in the event of a crisis, North Sea oil and gas would be provided to UK markets for a fixed, lower price to protect households and businesses.

Second, we must fully bridge the skills gap between current oil and gas and a more secure renewables future. Around 154,000 workers are employed across the UK’s offshore energy sector. These are well-paid and highly technical jobs protected by trade unions.

The UK recently secured a record 14.7 GW of new renewable capacity, enough to power up to 16m homes. The UK now has an unprecedented acceleration in renewable deployment and a major reinforcement of the UK’s long-term energy security and resilience.

This represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build careers in high-skill, high-wage, union-protected industries. But that opportunity only exists if we preserve the workforce pipeline built by the North Sea.

Skills in the North Sea oil and gas supply chain are directly transferable to the renewable system: subsea engineering, marine operations, fabrication, grid upgrades and home construction. Yet the oil and gas workforce risks falling to between 57,000–71,000 by the early 2030s. Losing that capability would weaken our security and our ability to deliver large-scale clean energy projects.

A stable tax regime matters too. That is why the Oil and Gas Price Mechanism should replace the Energy Profits Levy, supporting investment while ensuring the public benefit when prices are high. The oil and gas industry should be working with government to make the case that a secure, responsibly managed North Sea is essential to national resilience and deterrence, and is the bridge to the skills we need for the UK’s renewable future.

Graeme Downie is the Labour MP for Dunfermline & Dollar

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has confirmed the organization’s commitment to Iran’s participation in the 2026 World Cup finals, emphasizing that there is no alternative plan to exclude them despite the political complexities surrounding the tournament.

ESPN quoted Infantino as saying during an interview with the Mexican channel N+ Univision:

We want Iran to play… they will play in the World Cup. There is no Plan B, C, or D; there is only one Plan A.

Infantino explained that FIFA remains committed to holding the tournament as scheduled, with the participation of all qualified teams, stressing that the organization seeks to “build bridges” through football, far removed from political tensions.

These statements come amid escalating geopolitical tensions, particularly with the United States, along with Canada and Mexico, hosting the next World Cup. This has raised questions about Iran’s potential participation or the possibility of moving its matches to another country, given the escalating US-Israeli conflict with Iran.

According to the agency, the Iranian Football Federation had proposed playing its matches outside the United States, but FIFA has not yet shown any inclination to amend its organizational plans.

The 2026 World Cup is scheduled to take place between June 11 and July 19, marking the first edition to feature 48 teams and be held across three countries.

Featured image via the Canary

Keir Starmer spoke from Downing Street on Wednesday morning as the Iran war entered its second month (Alamy)

3 min read52 min

Speaking on Wednesday morning, the Prime Minister said that while the Iran war “will impact the future of our country”, the UK is “well placed to weather it”.

“I want to reassure the British people that no matter how fierce this storm, we are well-placed to weather it, and that we have a long-term plan to emerge from it a stronger and more secure nation.”

Starmer announced that Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper will host a meeting with 35 nations on the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz later this week, with military planners to also “look at how we can marshal our capabilities and make the strait accessible and safe after the fighting has stopped”.

But he said: “I do have to level with people on this. This will not be easy.”

The PM said “the most effective way” to alleviate the cost of living in Britain is to push for “de-escalation in the Middle East, a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz”.

Significant proportions of the world’s oil and gas supplies pass through the Strait of Hormuz, making it a vital shipping lane.

However, traffic through the lane has plummeted since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, with Tehran threatening to attack ships passing through it.

The disruption is causing energy prices to increase around the world, and there are also concerns about the impact it could have on food prices. The Food and Drink Federation has estimated that food inflation will hit 9 per cent in the UK this year as a result of the conflict.

On Wednesday, several measures aimed at tackling the cost of living come into force, including increases to the national living wage and the national minimum wage, support for households using heating oil, and money off energy bills.

However, the government is expected to announce further support for households most exposed to rising energy prices in the coming weeks, with household bills expected to rise significantly when the Ofgem price cap expires in July.

The war in Iran has now entered its second month, after the US and Israel began a series of strikes on Iran in February this year. US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the US would pull out of Iran in “two or three weeks” and is set to give an “important update” on the war in the early hours of Thursday morning.

On Tuesday, Buckingham Palace confirmed that King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit to the US would go ahead this month, despite Trump having repeatedly attacked the UK in public over its refusal to play a greater part in the US and Israel’s war with Iran.

On Monday, Starmer reiterated that the Iran conflict is “not our [the UK’s] war”.

PM says Iran war shows UK must be closer to EU

Speaking from Downing Street this morning, Starmer said that it is “increasingly clear” in light of the war in the Middle East that the UK’s “long-term national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe and with the European Union.”

The Prime Minister indicated that he wanted to take the UK even closer to the bloc’s single market as part of a major reset, announcing that there would be a new summit with the EU later this year.

“We want to be more ambitious, closer economic cooperation, closer security cooperation, a partnership that recognises our shared values, our shared interest and our shared future, a partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together, a world where this government will be guided, at all times, by the interests of the British people.”

Sara Hagemann unpacks the results of the recent elections in Denmark and argues the distribution of votes speaks to broader patterns of political change across Europe.

Denmark went to the polls on 24 March, and the result was, by any measure, historically striking. The Social Democrats under Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen won the most seats — 38 out of 179 in the Folketing — but with just 21.9% of the vote, this marks the party’s worst result since 1903. Their two coalition partners, centre-right Venstre and the Moderates, also lost ground significantly: Venstre fell to 10.1% and 18 seats, its worst result in the party’s 156-year history, while the Moderates ended on 7.7% and 14 seats. Neither the left-leaning “red bloc” (84 seats) nor the right-leaning “blue bloc” (77 seats) secured the 90 seats needed for a majority. It is clear that the ongoing coalition negotiations will be protracted and complex, with Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s Moderates occupying a decisive kingmaker role.

The elections can hence be described as a muddy outcome, yet with a clear message from the voters: the incumbent centre parties may have performed well on the international stage as they handled the unwelcome attention from the US over Greenland, and also delivered on a stellar EU presidency last year, but they did not convince the Danes on domestic issues. Indeed, the campaign exposed a deep divide over two issues in particular: environmental policy and immigration. Taken together, the results show a set of structural dynamics worth examining carefully — not least because they speak to broader patterns of political change across Europe.

One of the most striking features of this election was the degree to which the traditional left-right axis has become blurred among the larger centre parties. The outgoing government was itself an unusual creature: a cross-bloc coalition of the Social Democrats, Venstre, and the Moderates, straddling the historic red-blue divide. Its formation in 2022 was widely seen as an anomaly; the 2026 result suggests it may instead signal something more structural.

The Social Democrats have spent years migrating rightward on immigration while maintaining a strong welfare-state platform, and in this campaign moved further still — proposing a new wealth tax while simultaneously competing with Venstre on deportation policy. Venstre, in turn, entered the election supporting VAT cuts on food, a traditionally centre-left position, while promoting corporate tax reductions. The result: it became increasingly difficult for voters to locate clear ideological distance between the major parties on core economic questions.

This convergence in the centre of the main parties has now fed a flight of voters towards alternatives at both ends of the spectrum. The Green Left’s rise is the clearest expression on the left: around 15% of former Social Democrat voters switched to the more left-wing Green Left (SF) — a single shift that accounted for close to half of all Social Democrat losses. Conversely, the resurgence of the Danish People’s Party reflects a mirror image on the right, all based on a campaign to get even tougher on immigration (where Denmark is already a notorious hard-liner in Europe).

Hence, what this election makes clear is that Danish politics is increasingly organised around two cleavages that cut across the old left-right axis: immigration and environmental policy. This pattern is well-documented in comparative European politics — the transformation from one-dimensional left-right competition to multi-dimensional contestation around cultural, communitarian, and ecological values is a central finding of the past decade’s scholarship on Western European party systems. The common term is GAL-TAN: indicating the endpoints of a new “scale” based on ‘Green-Alternative-Libertarian’ and ‘Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist’ values.

On immigration, the competition across the spectrum was striking. The Social Democrats campaigned on a package of measures Frederiksen herself described as the strictest immigration regime in Europe, including proposals for a new Deportation Agency to handle cases through an administrative rather than judicial track, and continued support for offshore asylum processing in partnership with other EU countries. Venstre matched this with a stricter deportation reform as a central plank. The Danish People’s Party went further, calling for “remigration” — the large-scale removal of immigrants, particularly Muslims — and leader Morten Messerschmidt stated publicly that his party would only support a government committed to actively reducing the number of Muslims in Denmark.

The effect of this cross-party bidding war was paradoxical for the Social Democrats: having moved substantially rightward on immigration — a strategy that alienated some left-leaning voters — they were nonetheless attacked from the right as insufficiently tough. Immigration, once primarily the terrain of the radical right, has become a contest across the whole party system.

The environmental dimension is equally revealing. The 2026 campaign became, improbably, as much about pigs as about any other single domestic issue. Denmark is Europe’s most pig-dense country, producing close to 30 million animals annually, and the environmental consequences — nitrate pollution of groundwater, pesticide contamination, and threats to drinking water quality — became a major campaign theme in the final weeks, driven by new research and a citizens’ initiative that gathered over 80,000 signatures. Green organisations launched what they called a ‘svinevalg’ — pig election — framing the vote as a choice between agricultural interests and environmental and public health.

Alongside farming policy, opposition to large-scale onshore solar development emerged as a distinct political fault line — particularly among rural parties on the right, pointing to a broader urban-rural dimension in environmental politics. The Denmark Democrats campaigned against the siting of solar farms on agricultural land under the slogan “yes to fields of wheat, no to fields of iron,” framing Denmark’s rapid renewable energy expansion as a threat to rural landscapes and agricultural communities.

Coalition negotiations will now revolve almost entirely around the Moderates. Løkke Rasmussen’s call on election night to stop talk of “corner flags” and come play “in the middle” was both a negotiating position and an accurate description of his strategic leverage. A continuation of some form of centrist arrangement — whether under Frederiksen or Venstre’s Troels Lund Poulsen — remains the most likely outcome.

For observers in the UK and across Europe, the most important question is what this means for Danish foreign policy. Here, the answer is considerably clearer than the domestic picture. On Ukraine, European defence, and NATO, Denmark has been among the most consistent and vocal European voices — and this position enjoys cross-party consensus. Regardless of who leads the next government, Denmark’s commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty, its support for European defence investment, and its role as a reliable EU partner will not waver.

By Sara Hagemann, Professor, University of Copenhagen, and Visiting Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science.