Britons now believe that immigration is the issue of greatest concern—above even the NHS and the economy. This could be bad news for the Conservative Party, given its record.
In particular, it means that whoever wins the ongoing Tory leadership race—triggered when former PM Rishi Sunak announced he was stepping down because of the party’s horrendous performance in the July election—has a lot of making up to do.
“Put simply” by political academic Matthew Goodwin, “if there’s one issue more than any other that will determine whether the Conservative Party comes off life support and recovers then it is immigration.”
So conservative pundits were concerned when leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch this week refused to commit to a cap on legal immigration numbers, or to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, which has made tackling illegal migration all the more difficult.
“Many,” said journalist Steven Edginton, “would ask if Badenoch takes immigration seriously as a problem (or indeed views it as a problem), or understands the solution.”
This is the same Kemi Badenoch who has long been hailed as the “darling of the Right,” which should speak volumes about the immigration positions of the other leadership candidates.
James Cleverly has also refused to commit to imposing an annual migration cap, which is hardly surprising given his own record as former home secretary.
Some of the other Tory leadership candidates—including former work and pensions secretary Mel Stride, former security minister Tom Tugendhat, and former immigration minister Robert Jenrick—have pledged to introduce a cap should they win the race.
But can they be trusted on this issue?
Stride, said Goodwin, “might talk the talk but he never walked the walk” while he was in government.
Tugendhat—like a number of the other candidates—supported Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum, in which immigration was a key issue, and talked at the time against “cutting yourself off from migration.”
And Jenrick, in the not-so-distant past, has been taken up far more by empty rhetoric than by substantive measures on immigration.
Under the ministerial watch of the final leadership candidate, Priti Patel, the home office “lost control of immigration and let numbers explode.” It’s not—as Migration Watch UK put it—that Patel didn’t have “the tools” to deal with the issue when she was home secretary. It’s that she didn’t use them.
If the Conservatives do finally get a grip on immigration, they might begin to give Nigel Farage’s Reform party a run for their money on this most important of issues. But as things stand, it appears they have little to worry about.
