“She’s right. It’s the wrong decision,” Keir Starmer told Kemi Badenoch last week, endorsing her outrage at a court ruling that allowed a family in Gaza to enter the UK.
It was a stark move from a man who, we are often reminded, was a human rights lawyer, a stickler for rules and a constitutionalist who values the independence of the judiciary.
And yet, when challenged at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, he chose unambiguously to side with the Conservative opposition in publicly criticising a judgment that lets a British citizen welcome his sister to the UK from Gaza, along with her husband and four children.
It kicked off days of fervid debate, during which Declassified itself became a target. Quite why Starmer thinks it was the “wrong decision” remains opaque. He spoke of a “loophole” being closed.
While much of the debate has focused on the supposed use (or “abuse”) of the long-closed “Ukraine Family Scheme” (the institutional epitome of how the British state can use immigration policy to support its military objectives), this should have been swiftly identified by Starmer as an obvious red herring.
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Following the rules
The Home Office itself advises applicants from abroad to “apply on the application form for the route which most closely matches their circumstances and pay the relevant fees and charges”.
That is because there is no “form” for applications for entry clearance on the basis of family life outside the immigration rules, even though the Home Office knows full well that such applications are legitimate.
Applicants therefore have no alternative but to use the family migration routes available, legal practitioners have told me.
It’s a procedural gateway online to a decision and nothing more. There is no “loophole”. What matters is the substance of the underlying application: whether something truly “compelling” or “exceptional” justifies a grant of a visa.
If the application is refused and human rights are engaged, then there is a right of appeal to the immigration tribunal. An independent judge decides if refusal of leave is disproportionate in all the circumstances.
This is precisely the sort of rules-based approach you would expect Starmer, an author of two books on the Human Rights Act, to acknowledge.
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Flooded in Gaza, but not opening the floodgates
No one could surely disagree that the family members’ position was bleak: their house was destroyed by an Israeli missile strike soon after October 2023, they fled to the Mawasi “humanitarian zone” and, at the time of the hearing in early 2025, were struggling to survive in a tent in Nuseirat.
As the Judge found: “We find that the tent has been hit by heavy machine-gun ammunition and that this allowed heavy rain to flood the space”.
They had a British family member in the UK willing and able to care for them. According to the judge’s findings, he desperately tried to send them funds and other assistance. The only way to give the children a chance was to get them out.
The Home Office has been briefing that the Gaza decision risked the “floodgates” being opened to “the admission of all those in conflict zones with family in the UK”.
The barrister representing the government at the upper tribunal hearing tried this argument too and was given short shrift by the judge, who concluded: “Even if it was capable of relevance, the figures simply do not support a contention that applications from Gazans represent what might in principle be described as a ‘floodgates’ scenario.”
Pandering to the right
An immigration minister said in December 2024 that 148 entry clearance applications from Gazan residents had been approved since the conflict began. Two others died before a decision had been made. The judge said “the figures appear very small in the context of the Gazan population as a whole.”
What he ultimately identified was a shocking set of individual circumstances and a strong tie to a British citizen. What the UK’s political class and the mainstream media saw, however, was a chance to pander to the right on immigration, attack a vulnerable family and deny the reality of conditions in Gaza.
With his own attorney general, Richard Hermer, increasingly under attack from the same newspapers frothing over the Gaza decision, Starmer may come to regret the week he openly put populism above any pretence at legal principle.
