Why we shouldn’t trust the Tories on immigration again.

MATT GOODWIN

This week was the week in which the national polls in Britain started to point to some truly historic change.

Across six polls this week, Nigel Farage and Reform finished in first place or joint first in no less than four of them, averaging nearly 26% of the vote, and finishing ahead of the Conservative Party, the Tories, in all but one of them.

Far from turning the Titanic around, Kemi Badenoch and the Tories averaged just 22% this week, lower than what they polled at the election last July, when they were nearly wiped out. And shockingly, in one poll, they plummeted to just 18% of the vote.

Increasingly, then, as I pointed out on X, unless something changes the narrative at the next general election will not be ‘Vote Reform, Get Labour’, but rather ‘Vote Tory, Get Labour’ —a highly significant change from previous general elections.

Which is no doubt why, yesterday, Kemi Badenoch and the Tories felt the need to throw out a big new policy offer on immigration, to try and fend off this rapidly rising revolt on the right and stem the Conservative Party’s ongoing decline.

And what is the offer, exactly?

Well, to be honest it’s a perfectly good offer.

Building on arguments that have been doing the rounds in one of the most influential Westminster Whatsapp groups on immigration policy—of which I am a member—Kemi Badenoch and the Tories want to make it harder for foreign nationals to be granted what is called ‘indefinite leave to remain’ (ILR).

Currently, immigrants become eligible for indefinite leave to remain in the UK after just five years of settlement. This means they have the right to live and work permanently in the country —to claim things like universal credit, use the NHS, move into social housing, and bring relatives into Britain.

Under a Badenoch-led Conservative government, however, this indefinite leave to remain would not be granted unless an immigrant has been in Britain for at least ten years, up from the current period of just five years.

Leave to remain, furthermore, would be withheld from migrants who have not made a ‘net contribution’ to the economy through tax payments —an acknowledgment of what we have shown right here on this Substack, namely that far too many of the low-skill, low-wage immigrants who have been flooding into Britain in recent years are taking more out of the economy than they are putting in.

Restricting indefinite leave to remain to a much smaller number of immigrants who actually make a net contribution to our country, who are helping to create prosperity and economic growth rather than eroding these things, is the right way forward.

So too is withholding indefinite leave to remain from any immigrant who breaks our laws, such as by arriving illegally on the small boats or overstaying their visas, as well as immigrants who rely on social housing and other benefits.

This, too, I agree with.

As I’ve written many times before, in recent years immigration policy in this country has become a total joke, an insult to the hardworking, tax-paying British people.

Instead of reshaping our immigration policy around a much smaller number of people from culturally compatible nations, who play by the rules and contribute to the collective pot, our hapless leaders in Westminster prioritised the opposite —they’ve flooded Britain with large numbers of people from radically different nations who often break our laws and make no meaningful contribution at all.

Which brings me to what I see as the main problem with Kemi Badenoch’s policy. And it’s simply this. It’s being offered by the Tories.

That’s right.

It’s being offered by the very same people —the very same shadow cabinet ministers, the same politicians, the same advisors—who have given us the disaster zone of a country that you see around you today, who put mass immigration on steroids.

The same politicians, like Priti Patel, who oversaw the wholesale liberalisation of our immigration system and then went on television, only last week, to say they don’t really see much of a problem with what they did when they were in office.

The same Tory parliamentary party that, with the notable exception of a handful of genuine conservatives, is heavily dominated by members of the Tory elite class which on virtually every major issue, from foreign aid to immigration and border security, is indistinguishable from the new elite —Tory MPs who, as surveys show, lean much further to the cultural left than most voters.

Nearly ten years ago, the vote for Brexit, remember, was supposed to be a promise to end the current era of mass uncontrolled immigration or, in the words of one Boris Johnson and a Conservative Party manifesto, “to lower the overall numbers”.

But the Tories didn’t do that, did they?

No. They lied. They lied to their voters. They lied to the hardworking, tax-paying British people who took them at their word. And they lied to the country.

What we got, instead, was what nobody in this country has ever voted for —an extreme policy of mass uncontrolled immigration that has been jammed down our throats and reflected in some truly astonishing and appalling numbers.

Net migration soared to nearly one million a year while our country was completely overwhelmed by millions of low-skill and low-wage migrants from mainly outside of Europe, only about one in five of which actually came in on worker visas.

In fact, we now know that because of this enormous wave of immigration which began under Boris Johnson and Priti Patel —the so-called ‘Boriswave’—each of these low-skill migrant workers, on average, will now cost hardworking British taxpayers around £465,000 over the course of their lifetime. Just think about that.

Enormous economic costs that will now only get larger and larger as the Boriswave filters through the system, undermining prosperity and further dividing our nation.

Consider just one truly shocking statistic.

Such is the scale of the disaster that the Tories have imposed on the rest of us that, in the first half of 2024, our country issued 15,000 visas to people who came to Britain to work in the health and social care system but 60,000 visas to their relatives. 60,000!

Read that again. It is utterly insane.

And it is also unforgivable. Lying to voters about what you will do when you take power is one thing; but lying to them while also saddling them with enormous fiscal costs that will trickle down to their children and their children is simply outrageous.

And this is exactly what will now happen because Labour will almost certainly not change the rules around granting the Boriswave migrants indefinite leave to remain, which means, once again, it will be the British people who have to pay the costs.

The blunt reality is that it was the Tories who not only made our immigration system the laughing stock of the world but also, at a deeper level, broke the social contract between the people and those they elect to speak on their behalf in Westminster.

It was the Tories who promised one thing only to deliver the very opposite. It was the Tories who looked after themselves and their friends in big business rather than the people and the country they were elected to serve.

And it was the Tories who have left so many people in this country wondering what on earth is happening to the country they once loved and called home.

Now fast forward to today and Kemi Badenoch, flanked by many of the same Tories who preside over this utter disaster, is asking us to trust the Tory party again. But my question, the question millions of people in this country who are having to pay the spiralling costs of this disaster will also be asking themselves, is why should we? Why on earth should we ever trust the Tories on this issue ever again?

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This article (Why we shouldn’t trust the Tories on immigration again.) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Featured image: nieuwsblad.be

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