Kemi Badenoch is the only candidate to break silence on migration issue, says ALP MEHMET
FINALLY, the eerie silence has been broken by Kemi Badenoch, on an issue of real and continuing concern to the public and, especially, to members of the Conservative Party. Her fellow candidates should now be challenged to make reductions in net migration.
Kemi Badenoch may be 'Labour's worst nightmare' says Hunt
Bar a few references to the asylum problem and to the proposal to engage with Rwanda, there has not been until now any serious attempt to tackle net migration which is a far more important issue – indeed, it is about five times the asylum inflow into the UK.
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Kemi Badenoch touched on the issue - when she said in the Conservative Home hustings that immigration numbers must also be tackled if the housing problem is ever to be solved. She has now gone further in a Daily Telegraph article. All credit to her.
It was very encouraging to hear this also from one of the aspiring Prime Ministers:
“…we need to consider the demand side of housing, not just the supply side. People – rightly – recognise that building more homes while doing nothing to bring immigration down is like running up the down escalator.”
And this:
“….controlling immigration is important to managing the pressures it puts on housing and public services. Building confidence in the Government’s ability to control immigration is an important foundation for ensuring a cohesive society. “
These are most remarkable words from someone with a real chance of becoming leader of the Conservative Party and our next Prime Minister and show the guts that have been conspicuously absent from the race to date.
She and I are both immigrants to the UK. Perhaps this is why we recognise the serious risks to the future of our country by uncontrolled, runaway immigration. Yes to immigration but an emphatic no to the uncontrolled, and growing, mass immigration that we still have.
Of course, other major issues have been centre stage in the past year or two – Covid, Ukraine and the cost of living have dominated the headlines but the public still name immigration as one of the top issues. According to a YouGov poll, 54% want immigration reduced. That is thirty million adults, including 77% of Conservative voters.
The importance of uncontrolled and rising immigration is beyond dispute. The recent census has confirmed that the UK population has increased by eight million over the past twenty years. Seven million of that increase is due to immigrants and their children. Yet England, the main UK destination for immigrants, is already nearly twice as crowded as Germany and three and a half times as crowded as France.
The pressure is being felt on all our public services and especially on housing where we will have to build a new home every six minutes, night and day, to house new migrants. That is what Kemi Badenoch alluded to when she pointed to the need to address high immigration if we were to solve the housing conundrum.
It is not surprising that housing is a real issue, not just in the south, but also in the Red Wall Constituencies. MPs will know that, in many parts of England, there are strong feelings on this but people are still cautious about raising aspects of immigration in the public debate.
So far, the Conservative record on immigration has been extremely disappointing. At the general elections of 2010, 2015 and 2017 they undertook to get immigration down to tens of thousands a year but failed to do so. In the 2019 election the government promised to control and reduce immigration which, before Covid struck, was averaging about 230,000 a year. Again, they failed to do so.
Indeed, Mr Johnson’s government has increased the scope for future immigration. The “Australian style” points based system turned out to be camouflage for lower salary and qualification requirements. They also abolished the requirement that jobs first be advertised on the domestic market.
As for students, they will now be allowed to stay on for an extra two years in which they will be able to simply stack shelves or, indeed, do no work at all. In a nutshell, the government under Boris Johnson, and Sajid Javid as the Home Secretary at the time, surrendered completely to the Immigration Lobby.
So I now issue a challenge to the other candidates to come clean with their immigration policies. Will they make a clear undertaking to make a reduction in the scale of immigration? To date, only Kemi Badenoch has had the gumption to say she will do so. Let us now see whether the other candidates will have the courage to address one of the most concerning issues of domestic policy.
