Robert Jenrick has defected to Reform UK, saying the “Tories broke Britain”, after being kicked out of the Conservative Party this morning by party leader Kemi Badenoch, to whom he lost 2024’s leadership contest. Here’s an edited selection of what he told this afternoon’s press conference, courtesy of the Telegraph.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It’s time for the truth. Britain has been in decline. Britain is in decline.
From 1970 to 2007 real wages went down by one-third every 10 years. Since then they flatlined. At the turn of the millennium the average Brit was earning twice as much as the average Pole. By 2031 we are on track to be poorer.
Outside of London and the south-east our economy is closer to Bulgaria’s than to Germany’s. Today 18 to 30 year-olds are the first Britons to earn less than their parents. Houses cost more here than in any other OECD country. We have the highest energy prices in the developed world.
Countless communities in less than 25 years have become totally unrecognisable. The police as we’ve seen this week can’t even police some of our largest cities.
Now my constituents in Newark feel this decline every day. It’s a great historic town. It is the honour of my life to represent it and to represent them in Parliament. They are the best of our country. They are men and women who are getting up at 6am in the morning, 7am out the door… grafting all week but finding nothing left over for something nice with the kids on the weekend.
Their bills, their taxes are surging. Their money is taken to fund hotels for those here illegally in our country or the lifestyle of the guy down the road who everyone knows could be working but isn’t working.
I challenge anyone to argue other than that Britain is completely broken. Those that came before us built a great country, the greatest country in the world. But we are set to lose it. We will for certain if this Government gets re-elected. A suicidal energy policy, crushing workers to fund scroungers on benefits, unions running our public services, payouts to terrorists, prosecutions of veterans, the bravest of the brave. Nine hundred thousand migrants in their first year, 65,000 of them illegally. Ending jury trials, cancelling elections, giving away our territory and £35 billion for the privilege. These people run Britain as if they hate it.
The two main parties are rotten. They are no longer fit for purpose. They both broke Britain and neither can fix it.
It’s a conclusion about the Conservative party that has pained me to reach because I’ve been a member of this party since I was 16 years old. I’ve served it most of my adult life. I have countless good friends in the party not least my own members in Newark.
They are the most decent patriotic people I know and I respect, I cherish the party’s contribution to our country, the party of Pitt and Peel, of Churchill and Thatcher. But our country is in a precarious, dangerous position. And my first loyalty, our first loyalty, must be to our country.
Turning it around will require each and every one of us to speak the truth. And not just to speak it but to act.
Both Labour and the Conservatives broke Britain and both are now dominated without the competence or the backbone needed to fix it.
Both parties if judged by their own actions are committed to a set of ideas that have failed and are failing Britain. Labour started mass migration but the Conservatives ramped it up. After 2019, the Conservatives almost left us without a border.
Five million came, three-quarters not to work. … When I was minister for immigration in late 2022, I fought colossal flights for reductions in legal migration alongside Suella Braverman.
There were 23 people in cabinet back then. Just one or two others were with us. Most of the party ultimately wanted what they viewed as cheap labour. And it’s the same on illegal migration. Blair enshrined the ECHR into British law.
He put the so-called human rights of illegal migrants, of terrorists, of criminals above our national security. But so did the last Conservative government.
It didn’t just keep and execute his plan, it doubled down on it with insane Net Zero targets.
In betraying its principles, the Conservative Party betrayed its members, its voters. … Over time, most of the party in Westminster lost its way. The principles were betrayed because a critical mass don’t believe in those principles at all.
After the last election, I hoped like others that the Conservative Party would change, reckon with our mistakes with humility, that it would repent. I said this after the election and I fought for it. I fought for it every day. That’s why I stood to be leader of the Conservative Party. That’s why I picked myself up the day after I lost the leadership of the Conservative Party because I hoped it would be possible.
But over the last year I realised I was naïve. It hasn’t happened. Most of the Conservative Party are in denial, or worse they’re being dishonest about what’s the party’s done.
The question was put to the [Shadow Cabinet] “is Britain broken?” I said instinctively it’s broken. Almost everyone said it’s not broken.
And we were told that is the party line. A few had a third position. It is broken but we can’t say so. Because the Conservative Party broke it.
If they won’t admit publicly to you, the British people, what they broke, what possible faith can you have in them to fix it? The Conservative Party in Westminster isn’t sorry, it doesn’t get it, it hasn’t changed, it won’t change, it can’t change.
The Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride has rightly attacked Labour for hiking taxes to fund more scrounging. But there’s just one problem. He was the cabinet minister who oversaw the explosion of the welfare bill. And it was him who blocked the reforms that are needed.
Priti Patel, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, created the very migration system that enabled five million migrants to come here, the greatest failure of any British Government in the post-war period.
When asked about it last year she defended her actions. She doesn’t believe she did anything wrong. Now listen, I respect Kemi, but I don’t trust the current Conservative Party on immigration.
Over Christmas, I attacked Labour for bringing the anti-British, antisemitic, terrorist sympathiser el-Fattah here from Egypt.
Senior figures in the Conservative party were angry at me for this because, and I quote, it “exposed the party to criticism for having granted him citizenship in 2021”.
The fact is the Conservative Party is so compromised it cannot speak for the country and oppose Labour’s madness.
So yes, I’m glad she has made getting rid of the rule of European judges Conservative Party policy. But I know from the leadership campaign at least two thirds of Conservative MPs oppose this.
I can’t kid myself any more. The party hasn’t changed and it won’t. The bulk of the party don’t get it. Don’t have the stomach for the radical change this country needs.
In opposition, it’s easy to paper over these cracks. But the divisions, the delusions, are still there. And if we don’t get the next government right, Britain will likely slip beyond the point of repair. Everything is on this.
I can’t, in good conscience, stick with a party that’s failed so badly. That isn’t sorry and hasn’t changed. That I know in my heart won’t – can’t – deliver what’s needed. That’s why I resolved to leave.
Because Nigel Farage has stood, consistently and often alone, for what’s needed.
I walked into a Home Office in late 2022 that was in ashes, that literally could not deliver the most basic function of the British state, securing our borders.
And I worked as hard as I could to improve that situation. When I lost faith in the Conservative government and the prime minister I resigned, the only person who resigned on principle from the last Conservative government.
And then after the last election I made an argument to the Conservative Party and in some respects haven’t stopped making that argument that it failed the country, that it needed to be painfully honest about the mistakes it had made, that it needed to show to the public that it was sincere in that, and then it needed to set out the serious answers to the big challenges that face our country right now.
Over time, I have come to the painful conclusion that the Conservative Party is not sorry, at least many in Westminster are not sorry, can’t change and won’t change. And I would be letting down the people that I represent in Newark and the country frankly if I put my own personal ambition, do I want to be leader of the Conservative Party, do I want to sit around the shadow cabinet table, above the most important thing to me and to everyone else.
Which is how do we get rid of this failed Labour Government and how do we replace it with a government that can actually turn things around for my children, my grandchildren and my constituents? And yes I have resolved to do that, I resolved to do that some time ago.
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