A Labour government in Britain would lead to open borders, Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak has warned – a paradoxical approach to an election given that the Conservatives in power have already achieved exactly that.
With the first day of the UK general election campaign underway, the Conservative Party’s long-standing strategy of hoping voters don’t realize they’re being lied to is already well underway. Just hours after Chancellor Rishi Sunak kicked off the campaign with a speech accusing the left-wing opposition of planning to increase immigration, the government’s own statistics agency revised immigration figures upward again.
The numbers for 2022 are Already revised A recount in autumn 2023 put net migrant arrivals at between 606,000 and 745,000, but it is now again deemed too low, with the actual figure at 764,000. This figure was already the highest level of arrivals in UK history, but is now even higher.
“…immigration to the UK is ‘soaring because of deliberate Tory policy’; this has been achieved since, as another puts it, ‘we have brought in the most liberal government ever’. It was.” https://t.co/g55mkb3HEd
—Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) June 5, 2023
Net immigration is calculated by subtracting the number of departures from the number of immigrants, leaving the total change. For example, the UK will welcome more than 1.2 million new immigrants in 2023, but over the same period 500,000 people will leave abroad, of whom 98,000 were British nationals. This leaves net immigration at 685,000, a typical figure for recent years but highly disproportionate to the rest of Britain’s peacetime history.
The Conservative Party has been pitching itself to the public for decades as the border control party, promising successive election victories and reducing net immigration by the tens of thousands, or less than 100,000 each year. promised to reduce it to Instead, the party has used the promised opportunity to enact post-Brexit border controls to massively liberalize immigration rules, instead adding a net 1 million new people every 18 months. It is imported.
Yet the Conservatives insist Labour is worse, and Mr Sunak warned on Wednesday evening after calling a general election that Labour would reverse the progress the Conservatives claim.
As he was introduced by Home Secretary James Cleverley, who has responsibility for border control in the government, Mr Sunak walked onto the stage high-fiving each other, before leaning up to embrace his government colleagues. If Mr Sunak’s comments as a firm and managerial figure may have seemed out of place, what he had to say about mass immigration was even stranger.
There is so much “Conservative” missing in the UK. The left reliably attacks Conservatives on taxes and too high immigration.https://t.co/X2DIHzPEKF
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 6, 2024
Sunak warned of global instability, saying that “migration is being weaponised by hostile nations to undermine the integrity of our borders”, which is true, but then he continued, “…it is us, the Conservatives, and we alone, who have the plan, and we are prepared to take bold action to secure a better future for this country”, questioning why they hadn’t done so in 14 years in power – they just never thought to start until now.
While Sunak could not boast about his record or promise any policies to crack down on legal immigration, which makes up the vast majority of arrivals and has reached an all-time high since the Conservative government fully opened the borders, he tried to differentiate on illegal immigration. He cited his government’s Rwanda plan to send some migrants arriving in Britain by boat to live in East Africa at taxpayer expense.
He said: “Look at our plans to cut immigration and stop boats with the Rwanda plan. The penny is falling across Europe and we are right in our approach. But if Labor is next… A new government would abolish the Rwanda Plan, enact a de facto amnesty for asylum seekers, and make our country a magnet for all illegal immigrants from across Europe. It would make it less safe.”
Fair enough perhaps, but there are some obvious problems with this assertion. The Rwanda Plan has been much talked about since it was first mooted by two years and two Prime Ministers in April 2022, yet it has yet to deport a single plane or a single migrant. Indeed, today, just hours after making the Rwanda Plan a key plank of his election campaign launch, Sunak was forced to humiliatingly admit that even the much-delayed first scheduled deportations have not materialised at all before the election.
No way. They’re not lying. Britain is in recession despite record immigration.https://t.co/Td5l9uDeGc
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) February 17, 2024
The flights were promised to be in service this spring, and by the next election. Now, with an early election called, Sunak said the long-promised but never-delivered flights could only happen “if I’m re-elected”. The British public is effectively left in a wait-and-see game to see whether the Conservatives are lying again this time, while the two main parties hold the position that they absolutely want to scrap the plan.
Meanwhile, Labour today criticised the Prime Minister for the setback on Rwanda. Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper added: “The Prime Minister doesn’t believe this plan will work, which is why he is calling an election now in the desperate hope of not being exposed.” On fundamental party issues such as immigration and taxation, the Conservatives have once again found themselves in the awkward position of leaning hard left and certain to be attacked from the left.
This is not to say that the Conservative Party is not challenged on these issues by the right. In fact, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is seriously hurting Conservative votes. The Conservative Party has responded to this threat from the right by denying the propaganda that acknowledges its existence. Mr Sunak has repeatedly said since yesterday’s general election announcement that it was a choice between him and Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer.
Mr Farage himself is not standing in the election but has quit national television to focus on campaigning against the Conservative Party, which Reform UK is calling the “immigration election”.
“Make no mistake, this is a very important election… More people have come to this country in the last 25 years than in its entire history before that,” Ben Habib said Thursday morning.
Opinion poll shows supporters of major parties want UK government to cut immigration https://t.co/BSw8G6bhWc
—Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) February 22, 2024
