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Rishi Sunak has not only failed to keep his promise to "tighten every screw" to stop the boats, but he has now reportedly rejected Braverman's policy packages to reduce legal immigration 6 times in a row.
As autumn approached, Rishi Sunak and the British Conservatives needed a game changer. Their gradual recovery in the polls since Liz Truss bottomed out had stalled not far from the multi-year average, and had even begun to slide in the opposite direction.
Destroying what was left of the party's reputation on the issue most important to its 2019 coalition was not the game-changer many had in mind. Yet this is what has happened since Suella Braverman's impeachment and subsequent developments, both on legal and illegal immigration.
After the Supreme Court's strong ruling on the government's plan to round up asylum seekers in Rwanda, and after near-reliable official statistics documenting the vast scale of legal immigration taking place before her eyes, it was Ms Braverman who revolted against Sunak to implement more effective measures that would strengthen the United Kingdom's borders.
But Rishi Sunak has not only failed to keep his promise to "tighten every screw" to stop the ships, but now he has reportedly rejected Braverman's policy packages to reduce legal immigration 6 times in a row.
The current Prime Minister took office knowing that Boris Johnson had broken his 2019 campaign promise to reduce the overall number of arrivals, and decided to do nothing to remedy the situation.
Given the strong weight of vested interests in favor of running a very liberal migration regime, protecting corporate employers, business lobby groups, the university sector and migration-oriented charities, it would take a determined Prime Minister to put things back in their proper place. But Sunak was never one, as he showed in an interview with Paul Goodman in April for the Conservative Home portal. He told Goodman that the main problem for most people was the small boats, not the total number of annual migrants.
That's what Sunak and those around him wish were true. The former political editor of The Spectator, James Forsyth, now one of his top advisers, presented the thesis in a blog for this website in March 2021, entitled: "Immigration is no longer a political problem".
But it turned out to be an incorrect theory. The Political Affairs Index run by pollster YouGov shows us just how inaccurate it is. Its series on the most important issues facing the country are divided by category, including how Britons voted in the 2019 general election.
Among conservatives, migration and asylum seekers are currently the top issue at 11 percent, even ahead of the state of the economy. There is no reason to suppose that these voters are concerned about only the 5 per cent or so of immigrants who enter Britain illegally.
The large scale of legal migration may be somewhat less of a direct affront to patriotic sensibilities, but it is a far greater generator of problems ranging from housing shortages to rationing of public services, non-increase in wages and loss of social cohesion in communities.
Since 2010, the Conservatives have gone into every election promising voters that the number of immigrants entering Britain would decrease, and then broken that promise in every term of government.
Under the governments of David Cameron and Theresa May, migration was supposed to be reduced to tens of thousands. However, it never fell below 200,000 income per year. The 2019 electoral manifesto promised a general decline in new arrivals. However, the last 2 years have brought record levels of immigrants.
Now it is Labor who promises to bring annual migration back to the level of "about 200,000", emphasizing that the levels of migration during the Conservative government in recent years are "extremely high". For his part, Rishi Sunak seems oblivious to the trouble he's in on the matter.
This week he opposed Denis Healey's bill, praising the extremely liberal nature of the UK's visa regime. There is only 1 year left before the voters give their verdict in the new parliamentary elections.
Almost every Conservative voter I speak to is very angry and now wants their party to suffer an epic defeat. Some of them have even shifted their support to the Reform Party. Mass migration is a precipice where conservatives can die politically. But under the current leader, the bells are already ringing./Taken from The Spectator.
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