Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick has spent much of the past week in the headlines for his various plans to bring a sense of control back to Britain’s borders. But experts in the field have told The European Conservative that neither this Conservative nor the (likely) next Labour government will seriously consider them, because they “simply don’t share the same concerns about mass migration as the British public.”
Jenrick, alongside former housing minister Neil O’Brien, last week warned in a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank that mass migration under the Conservatives, and Labour before them, has made integration impossible and placed “enormous pressure” on national services.
Among his proposals to start turning this around was to split up the Home Office, creating a special department focused solely on migration, and leaving policing and national security to other officials, as well as to introduce an annual cap on each different visa route.
The Home Office was quick to highlight that it had no plans to break up the department, while a government source insisted that its ‘plan’ to reduce migration was already “working.”
Jenrick has also called for details of nationality, immigration and visa status to be recorded whenever a criminal is convicted. He argued that this would allow ministers “to apply a higher level of scrutiny to nationalities that are higher risk.”
But here too, officials have been unwilling to budge, with civil servants reportedly “trying to block plans.”
The problem, said Robert Bates, who is research director at the Centre for Migration Control think tank, is that the Conservative Party has been “hijacked by advocates of managerial liberalism who simply don’t share the same concerns about mass migration as the British public.”
Describing Jenrick’s set of proposals as “a valiant effort to reorient the Tory party towards sensible, centre-ground politics,” Bates told this publication:
I doubt anyone in Downing Street or the Home Office has given a single thought as to how migration can be brought down to the tens of thousands, let alone anything lower.
A cross-party consensus has emerged in Westminster that sees the distribution of one and a half million visas a year as perfectly normal. It is difficult to see how this changes.
Matters are no brighter when it comes to illegal migration.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a speech on Tuesday that “illegal migration is placing an intolerable strain on our security and our sense of fairness, and unless we act now and act boldly this problem is only going to grow.” Act now? The Tories have been in office for 14 years; the whole issue has exploded under their watch. Sunak himself has been PM for more than a year-and-a-half, and however many times he’s promised to “stop the boats,” still not a single migrant has been deported to Rwanda under his flagship policy to deter Channel crossings.
In fact, worse than this, The Guardian highlighted on the same day as Sunak gave his predictable speech that the head of the Home Office department tasked with detaining illegal migrants ahead of (unlikely) Rwanda flights has “halted recruitment and is drawing up plans for staff cuts.”
It’s no wonder that Conservatives are feeling so uncomfortable—or, indeed, are jumping out of their seats—ahead of this year’s general election.
