James Cleverly speaking to members for Conservative leadership contest 2024
From: James Cleverly 25th August 9:33am

Labour have no plan to control immigration. I do.

I have said many times that I wish the new Home Secretary well. It’s an important job and one I am proud to have done.

But the first 50 days of Labour in government has been a shocking succession of failures. Scrapping the Rwanda partnership without having the courtesy to tell the Rwandan government. An amnesty for 100,000 asylum seekers who we had banned from staying in the UK. Over 5,000 small boat arrivals. A phantom border command, with Labour’s top choice rejecting the job. And rioting across the country, with a Home Office Minister forced to apologise for a tweet which justified masked intimidation of journalists.

Racist thugs are rightly being jailed, but we cannot tiptoe around underlying issues on immigration. Immigration is now the British public’s number one concern for the first time since the Brexit vote. And Labour simply don’t have the answers to the problems facing this country.

As Shadow Home Secretary, I will keep asking Yvette Cooper: Where are you going to send failed asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iran or Syria? They don’t have a plan, and frankly, I don’t think they care. They are a soft touch on migration and out of touch with the British public. We shouldn’t forget that Starmer is on record as saying there is a racist undercurrent that permeates all immigration laws. No wonder controlling our borders isn’t one of their five ‘missions’ for this government. They're ideologically opposed to border control.

Conservatives know that wanting border control is not racist. Being welcoming to those in need but intolerant of those skipping the queue is fundamentally fair. For Conservatives, getting migration down has to be one of our central missions. If I am elected leader, it will be. Allowing migration to rocket after Covid-19 was a fatal mistake, which is why when I became Home Secretary - I reformed our visa system to drastically cut the numbers within weeks.

And we are now seeing the fruits of those changes in the latest data. Visas down. Illegal arrivals down. Small boat arrivals down. Fewer asylum applications. The asylum grant rate cut, and more decisions made than ever before to smash through the backlog and close 150 hotels.

The job is far from done, and Labour should continue this work, but instead they're doing the opposite. The visa reforms I worked hard to deliver, negotiated with the Chancellor, Education Secretary and Health Secretary, are already being undermined as Labour put the breaks on the next phase of reforms and begin discussions with the EU about increasing visas again. If you thought Starmer negotiated badly on pay deals for militant strikers, just wait until you see his doormat approach to the EU, blasting open the doors to free movement again.

Labour talk the talk, but they definitely don’t walk the walk. Throughout my time in Government, I focused on tough action, not tough talk. I got results and the evidence proves it. A Conservative Party under my leadership would take the bold action needed to regain control of our borders again.

We will start using GDP per capita to measure our economic health - the wealth of each person, rather than the total. That will help us better understand the costs and benefits of migration so we can decide the right level of immigration for our nation and then enforce it.

Labour won’t do any of these things because they are soft and squeamish about migration and won’t take the tough action we need.