The devil really is in the details, and the UK’s latest immigration consultation shows just how ruthless London can be when it wants to shut the door without saying so out loud.
Last Thursday (20 November), the UK Home Office rolled out what it bills as the biggest immigration shake‑up in half a century, a “earned settlement” overhaul designed to slash migrant numbers and drag out the road to permanent residency from five years to as long as twenty.
First, around two million legal migrants who have arrived in the UK since 2021 will see their settlement bar raised from five to ten years, instantly doubling their wait.
Second, some 610,000 people who previously entered on health and social care visas, along with their families, will be pushed onto a 15‑year track before they can even dream of permanent status.
Third, legal migrants who depend on welfare, together with asylum seekers, are shoved to the back of the queue with a brutal 20‑year wait.
BN(O) Route: Carrot Up Front, Stick Behind
The Home Office then stresses that those who moved to the UK under the Hong Kong BN(O) visa route will not face further consultation on their existing “5+1” settlement path, which sounds generous at first glance.
First of all, the English language and tax requirements for BN(O) migrants.
Dig into the mandatory conditions and the trap becomes obvious: settlement applicants must now hit English level B2, have a clean criminal record, and show no unpaid taxes, no outstanding National Health Service bills or other government debts.
Previously, the bar was B1 – roughly GCSE level, similar to Hong Kong’s old Form Five HKCEE English – but B2 is closer to the old Form Seven A‑level standard, meaning applicants must speak comfortably and write clear, well‑structured English essays.
This B2 bar actually sits above today’s HKDSE (Form Six) English level in Hong Kong, and in practice it is like demanding a pass in A‑level English – something even top students did not always manage back in the A‑level era.
The writer remembers a science‑stream friend who scored straight As in three science A‑levels but failed English and therefore could not use that stellar record to apply to the University of Hong Kong – a classic example of how even high‑flyers, especially in science, might fall short of B2, let alone ordinary Hong Kong people.
If the UK really enforces B2 to the letter, most Hong Kong BN(O) migrants could simply slam into the language wall, and how tough this rule becomes will depend entirely on how the government of the day decides to play it.
On top of that, the consultation says every settlement applicant must, for each of the past three to five years, earn more than £12,570 a year – around HK$128,000 – the UK personal tax allowance level, and show matching National Insurance or tax records.
That immediately creates a built‑in trap: if a couple emigrates and only one spouse works, the non‑working partner fails the individual income rule on day one.
So Hong Kong people should not hear that the Home Office is “keeping the 5+1 BN(O) route” and naively assume London is being kind; how many can actually clear these hard language and income bars is anyone’s guess, but large numbers of elderly parents who followed their children to the UK almost certainly cannot.
Asylum Hope Turned Into A 20‑Year Tunnel
Let’s look at point number two: political asylum applications pushed into the distant future.
Under the new UK blueprint, asylum seekers are pushed onto a 20‑year track before they can settle – a timeline so long it is effectively a life sentence of uncertainty.
After 2019, many people people who were not born in Hong Kong and therefore did not hold BN(O) passports – and could not get on the BN(O) bandwagon – chose to claim political asylum in the UK instead, citing their involvement in the 2019 riots, and now they find themselves sucked into a dark 20‑year vortex.
Even for those who left for the UK immediately in 2019, a 20‑year wait runs to 2039, and no one can predict what kind of world they will be facing by then.
The bigger sting is that the Home Office openly states that if it decides the asylum seeker’s place of origin no longer faces political persecution, it will order that person out, meaning that the authority has the the power to deport hangs over them at all times.
Reading this Labour government consultation paper, it is hard not to conclude that the British approach is genuinely devious.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is preparing to visit China and clearly would not want to provoke Beijing, which helps explain why London has been stalling since 2018 on China’s vast “super embassy” plan in the UK – a project that reports now say Starmer is finally set to approve.
On BN(O), Starmer wouldn’t risk provoking China either. Thus, under fierce lobbying from various Hong Kong opposition groups in the UK, he has devised this neat trick: on paper, he keeps the “5+1” unchanged, but in practice Hong Kong migrants are boxed in by tighter language and income rules, while asylum seekers are locked into 20‑year temporary status.
When Starmer sits down with the Chinese leadership, he can claim he has done his utmost to clamp down on Hong Kong people’s settlement bids; when he meets their representatives in the UK, he can say he has fought hard to preserve their “5+1” route.
Britain’s Promise Comes With An Asterisk
The UK has a long record of breaking its word, starting from the days it handed out 50,000 right‑of‑abode passports to Hong Kong people and their dependants.
Later, many right‑of‑abode holders did not go to Britain themselves but sent their children there to study, and because right of abode came as a full British passport, those children could pay local tuition fees.
Then, without warning, the UK government simply rewrote the rules, demanding that all such parents must have paid UK taxes for two years before their children could enjoy home‑student status.
In Britain, nobody ever seems to answer for all that moral grandstanding; take their word at face value and don’t be surprised when it blows up in your face.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** The blog article is the sole responsibility of the author and does not represent the position of our company. **
Ignorance is not an alibi you can pull out after breaking the law. The maxim that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” matters even more when national security is at stake, because those who gamble on “not knowing” usually do so after reading the headlines and deciding to ignore them.
On Monday (24 November), the Secretary for Security exercised section 60(1) of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance and issued an order proposing to prohibit the operation of the “Hong Kong Parliament” and the “Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union” in Hong Kong, with separate written notices sent to both groups as required by the statute.
According to the Security Bureau’s explanation, these two organisations have an openly declared aim of subverting state power: they push “self‑determination”, talk about drafting a separate “constitution” for Hong Kong, and seek to overturn or undermine the basic system of the People’s Republic of China as laid down in the PRC Constitution, including the organs of state power of both the Central Authorities and the HKSAR.
Before any final prohibition order is made, the two organisations have been given the statutory chance to make representations, and only after considering these will the Bureau issue its final decision, in line with the procedural safeguards spelled out in section 60.
Who Built This “Parliament”?
Two fugitives wanted by the Hong Kong Police, Elmer Yuen and Victor Ho, set up the so‑called “Hong Kong Parliament” Electoral Organizing Committee in Canada on 27 July 2022, marketing it as a “parliament of Hong Kong people” with the explicit goal of pushing Hong Kong “independence”.
From February to May this year, this committee staged what it called “parliamentary elections” and selected 15 so‑called “members of parliament”, a made‑for‑camera exercise designed to dress up a separatist political project as if it were some kind of alternative legislature.
Another wanted exile, Keung Ka‑wai, created the “Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union”, which likewise openly advocates Hong Kong “independence” and feeds into the same overseas network challenging China’s sovereignty over the city.
Seven members of this group announced early this year that they would stand in the “Hong Kong Parliament” Electoral Organizing Committee elections and called on the public to vote.
Debunking The “No Operation In Hong Kong” Myth
After the Security Bureau moved to prohibit these two organisations from operating in Hong Kong, online critics immediately jumped in, claiming that the groups do not actually operate here and that the Secretary for Security’s move is therefore pointless – a claim that collapses the moment you read the Ordinance and the facts in existing cases.
Such arguments are textbook examples of “legal illiteracy”. By invoking the National Security Ordinance to prohibit these organisations, the first concrete effect is that every part of their operation in Hong Kong instantly becomes illegal.
Before any prohibition order, if these organisations carried out activities in Hong Kong, the Government had to analyse their conduct under both the Hong Kong National Security Law and the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance to see whether particular acts crossed into defined offences, which made enforcement slower and more complex.
Take a simple example. If some members of such an organisation – who are not themselves wanted persons – came to Hong Kong and ran a “how to invest in virtual currencies” event, using it as a recruitment tool and then gradually radicalising participants into anti‑government activists, the crypto‑investment seminar, viewed in isolation, would not obviously be unlawful.
But once the organisations are expressly designated as prohibited, every activity in Hong Kong undertaken in their name becomes unlawful by definition, closing off the tactic of hiding political mobilisation behind seemingly neutral subjects.
The second major effect is that section 62 of the National Security Ordinance criminalises participation in the activities of a prohibited organisation.
Under section 62, once an organisation is designated as prohibited, anyone who serves as an officer, claims to be an officer, or manages the organisation commits an offence and faces up to a HK$1 million fine and 14 years’ imprisonment on conviction.
Even an ordinary member who participates in the organisation’s activities or assemblies, or who pays money to it or provides other forms of assistance, also breaks the law and risks, upon conviction, up to HK$250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison.
From Grey Area To Clear Line
Think about how this worked in the past. When these organisations tried to recruit in Hong Kong, there was a grey area over whether ordinary participants were committing any offence, and prosecutors had to prove that participants knew the organisation was engaging in activities to subvert the government or split the country before laying the related charges or relying on the lesser “aiding and abetting” route.
Now that these two organisations are expressly designated as illegal, prosecution becomes far more straightforward: simply becoming a member already constitutes an offence, and anyone claiming to be an officer risks a heavy sentence of up to 14 years in jail.
Since the Secretary for Security has publicly named these organisations and moved to ban their operation in Hong Kong, defendants can no longer credibly argue that they “did not understand” the nature of the groups or pretend they thought they were just joining some harmless civic club.
The Bettie Lan Wake‑Up Call
There is already a concrete case connected to these illegal organisations. Court records show that one of the wanted persons, Lam Chin‑gan (Tony Lam), instructed his former girlfriend, Bettie Lan Fei, to record promotional videos for the “Hong Kong Parliament” in Canada between March and May this year and use social media to urge the public to join the so‑called “Hong Kong Parliament” vote. When Lan later returned to Hong Kong, she was arrested and charged with one count of doing an act with seditious intention under the National Security Ordinance.
Lan eventually pleaded guilty, calling herself naïve and saying she only offended because she was incited by her ex‑boyfriend.
When passing sentence on 13 November, Chief Magistrate Victor So Wai‑tak stressed that the defendant had clearly supported the “Hong Kong Parliament” as a so‑called “overseas regime”, spreading slanders against China internationally, seriously misleading overseas audiences and promoting extremist ideas – aggravating factors that justified adding two months and jailing her for one year.
Lan’s case shows the real cost of ignorance. For each promotional video, she took 100 Canadian dollars; in exchange, she now has to spend a year in custody and carry a criminal record tied to national security‑related sedition.
At the same time, her case highlights that while her openly seditious videos clearly satisfied the offence of acts with seditious intention, there may be many other participants in these two illegal organisations who have not yet been prosecuted under the earlier legal framework, simply because the tools were less sharply defined.
Once the Secretary for Security designates the two groups as illegal organisations, any participation in their activities – even something that looks as casual as “liking” their content online, sharing their messages, or donating money – can fall within section 62(2)(d) of the National Security Ordinance as “making payments to the organisation or providing other forms of assistance”, exposing the person to potential prosecution.
Ignorance is not a defence, especially not after the authorities have publicly named and moved against these organisations. People should not be misled by “legally illiterate” commentators claiming that the Secretary for Security’s plan to ban the two groups from operating in Hong Kong is meaningless, when the Ordinance expressly turns their activities and support networks into prosecutable conduct.
In reality, tightening the legal net is both highly effective and badly needed to protect national security, defend China’s constitutional order, and send a clear message that dressing up separatism as an “overseas parliament” will not escape the reach of Hong Kong law.
Lo Wing‑hung
