My aim in this chapter is to examine the work involved in representing appellants, and deciding appeals concerned with the primary purpose rule, which became part of British immigration law in the early 1980s, and was abolished by the Labour government that won power in May 1997. Even when it existed, some legal textbooks described this rule as a “sordid episode in immigration history” (Bevan, 1986), or as “this cruel rule” (Sachdeva, 1993), and expressed the hope that it would quickly be repealed. Now this has actually happened, this chapter is of only historical interest, although I can perhaps provide a more dispassionate account of the legal work involved in deciding particular appeals than would have been possible when the rule was a live political issue in the 1980s.

I begin the chapter by providing a short history of the rule, and then describe some aspects of the legal and evidential issues in six appeals, drawing upon my record of the hearings, and the determinations. I then discuss some factors taken into account by adjudicators in their decision making, drawing upon these case studies.

The history of the rule

The primary purpose rule can be understood as a successful attempt by successive governments to restrict or delay secondary immigration to the United Kingdom through marriage, following the end of most primary immigration after the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. It has particularly affected, and been directed against, further immigration from Asia, although white men have also experienced problems in marrying women from Third World countries such as the Philippines.

A detailed history of the rule can be found in Sachdeva (1993), which is especially useful in explaining how restrictions on immigration through marriage were revised, or in his words, “fine-tuned”, a number of times during the 1970s and 1980s in response to changing political pressures and circumstances (see also Dummett and Nicol, 1990). I will now provide a short summary of this history to provide some context to how the rule was being used in the last year of its existence in 1996.

Restrictions on marriage in the 1960s

There were no attempts to restrict immigration through marriage while Britain was still admitting primary immigrants during the 1960s. However, after 1968 commentators began to suggest that men from the Indian subcontinent, who were refused entry under the Commonwealth Immigration Act, were using marriage as a means of circumventing immigration controls.