UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to waste no time in tackling illegal immigration as he faces growing criticism about the direction of his government from the right wing of the ruling Conservative Party.
(Bloomberg) — UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to waste no time in tackling illegal immigration as he faces growing criticism about the direction of his government from the right wing of the ruling Conservative Party.
Sunak told the Mail on Sunday that he’s chairing meetings of a special panel twice weekly to discuss the immigration crackdown as new legislation makes its way through Parliament. A month after contracting the first accommodation barge to house people who cross the English channel illegally, he promised to use “as many as it takes” to reduce the current bill for housing arrivals in hotels.
Ending crossings in small boats — which Sunak blames on criminal gangs and people smugglers — is one of the prime minister’s five core pledges to voters, alongside halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing National Health Service waiting lists and getting the national debt falling.
The premier faces an enormous challenge to turn around the prospects of his fractured party, which has cycled through five prime ministers since 2016 and has trailed the main opposition Labour Party by a double-digit margin in national polling for months. This month, the Tories shed more than 1,000 seats in a set of local elections that suggested Labour is on course to win a national vote that Sunak must call by January 2025 at the latest.
Former Home Secretary Priti Patel on Saturday blamed “bad decisions” and Tory “infighting” for the poor results. Without naming Sunak, she lamented that his ascent to power replacing Liz Truss without a vote of the party grassroots had undermined trust.
“Some parts of Westminster and colleagues have done a better job at damaging our party than the opposition,” Patel told the meeting of the Conservative Democratic Organisation, which seeks to expand the powers of rank-and-file Tory members. “We’ve got to stop this decline.”
Patel’s criticism followed a week in which other right wingers had slammed Sunak for retreating from a pledge to scrap all legislation inherited from Britain’s membership of the European Union by year-end. Former Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg compared him to the Borgias, a renaissance Italian family that became a byword for immorality. He sought to clarify that remark on Sunday, telling Sky News that Sunak “broke a promise, that was the point.”
When he stood for the leadership last summer, Sunak pledged to scrap 2,400 bits of legislation. Since then, officials have uncovered hundreds more pieces of EU law, taking the total to around 4,000. Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch last week said ministers would now publish a list of about 600 to be ripped up as part of the Retained EU Law Bill, which will be debated for two days in the House of Lords this week.
Rees-Mogg is due to speak again on Monday at NatCon UK, another conference of the Tory right. Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Housing Secretary Michael Gove and Conservative Party Vice Chairman Lee Anderson are also due to address the three-day event.
‘Morally Unacceptable’
With recent disquiet in the Tory party also centering on housing policy and the high burden of taxation, the prime minister’s strong language on immigration is aimed at shoring up support from the party’s right, as well as angering moderates and the opposition.
His immigration bill is working its way through Parliament, and in the House of Lords last week, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England whose position affords him a seat in the UK’s upper chamber, described it as “morally unacceptable.”
Plans include sending people who arrive in the UK illegally to Rwanda and banning them from ever claiming asylum or citizenship in Britain. Officials say the accommodation barges are part of a larger strategy aimed at deterring people from making the crossing in the first place. Sunak told the Mail on Sunday he wants to begin implementing the legislation as soon as possible.
“We have put in place a new government committee structure, a bit like how we ran things during the pandemic, where I chair meetings twice a week so that we can get everything ready so that from the moment that we have the green light we can crack on and deliver it,” he told the paper.
Looming on May 25 for the prime minister is a set of official statistics on the level of legal net migration for the year to December. The Centre for Policy Studies estimates it could be as high as 997,000, eclipsing the 504,000 for the year to June 2022, already a record. That would probably spark fresh criticism from Brexit backers that the government is failing to deliver on its promise that the UK’s EU divorce would allow the country to rein in immigration.
Energy Secretary Grant Shapps on Sunday said that he doesn’t think the figure will hit a million, and pointed out that British programs to accept Ukrainian refugees and UK nationals from Hong Kong accounted for about 300,000 people. That’s a record the country “should be proud of,” he told Sky News.
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