Tories Accused of Betrayal Over Immigration

After 13 years of Tory governments pledging to cut immigration while presiding over record numbers of new arrivals, Rishi Sunak has expressed his “clear view” that entrance into Britain “must be legal, it must be controlled and it must be fair.”

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, he said last Wednesday that “fundamentally net migration needs to come down.” The prime minister added:

My starting point is simple. It should be this country—and your government—that decides who comes here. That’s why I have made stopping the boats one of my five priorities … But it’s not just a question of legality. We can’t have uncontrolled legal migration either. That’s unfair too. It leads to unmanageable pressures on housing, schools and hospitals in many of our communities. And when it is too high and too fast, it can make it difficult for communities to integrate new arrivals.

The same paper earlier this month released the contents of an official Home Office document sent directly to Downing Street last year, warning that without immediate action, a further 1.1 million foreign workers and students could enter Britain before the next general election. (In 2022 alone, the UK witnessed a net migration number of more than 600,000, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics.) The forecast contained 12 “policy leavers” which would help enable the government to stick to its long-help promise of bringing the numbers down. Steven Edginton, a journalist at The Daily Telegraph, highlighted that this proves Tory politicians are more than capable of action, and that “all that is needed is political will.”

Yet, Tory officials seem instead to be obsessed simply with pinning the lack of movement on “The Blob,” which is supposed to consist primarily of left-wing civil servants and the media. Bow Group Chairman Ben Harris-Quiney said this was simply a “distraction.”

While attending the National Conservatism conference in London earlier this month, one journalist from a mainstream paper told me that old party grandees never need to be pushed to complain about this attitude, which they say results in politicians spending more time moaning about government workers than pushing for policies to be enacted. (Recent reports have suggested that immigration plans have in fact been stalled by splits within the Tory cabinet.) 

Home Secretary Suella Braverman spoke at the conference about the importance of “secure borders” and the need to “get overall immigration numbers down,” as though these matters were not her responsibility. A number of speakers also suggested that the Conservative Party should return to the politics of Boris Johnson to resolve this and other related issues, though his actual post-rhetoric approach to immigration (both legal and illegal) was—like that of the Tory leaders who came before him—thoroughly liberal.

The official document released by the Telegraph also presented ministers with two possible approaches to immigration: “Pursue actions to reduce total inward migration (or net migration),” as the party has promised to do for well over a decade; or to create the impression that “our policy is that we have control of inward migration” (whether reduced or not). The government was told it would need “a strong narrative … to explain the rationale” behind the second option. (That is to say, more spin.) Mr. Edginton commented that given the repeated reference to “control” in his article, the prime minister “has clearly chosen option two.”

(This point, incidentally, gets to the crux of the problem with “Vote Leave’s” slogan, “take back control.” A good portion of those who voted for Brexit, many of whom had not voted Tory or Labour in some years, hoped that this would result in immigration numbers coming down. But it is of course possible to “take back control” of borders while continuing to preside over higher and higher figures.)

Responding to the prime minister’s remarks on reducing immigration, Mr. Harris-Quinney told The European Conservative:

A Bow Group study in 2016 found that 82% of new British citizens were the result of immigration. Extrapolated over decades, this level of demographic shift is unprecedented in history, and entirely unsustainable.

When George Osborne left office he admitted the Conservatives never had any intention of reducing immigration, and despite concern over immigration being the main motivation of the Brexit vote, Conservatives initially attempted to confect the lie Brexit was a signal for even more global immigration.

Whilst Conservative rhetoric on immigration has hardened in recent years, even if enacted the proposed Rwanda policy deals with only a few thousand people per annum, whereas the problem extends into the millions. The truth is that the Conservative Party have spent 13 years using distraction, trickery and lies to defraud the public on the issue. Letting in more immigrants than Labour, or any government in history, and failing their own modest targets by over eight million people is one of the greatest betrayals of the British public in history.

Mass immigration has never been in either Party’s manifesto, yet continues whether Labour or Conservatives are in power. After three decades mass immigration will have changed Britain more than any other state policy in the entire history of these islands.

He added that “the great scandal is that not a single person ever voted for it, and the vast majority oppose it.”