Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel has been rebuked by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch after she defended sky-high immigration under the Conservatives when she was Home Secretary. The Telegraph has more.
The Shadow Foreign Secretary – who was Home Secretary at a time of rising immigration – declined to apologise for the increase during an interview with the Sun.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said it proved that the Conservatives were “proud of mass migration”.
Dame Priti’s comments were in stark contrast to those of Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, who made a speech in November to admit that the party had “got it wrong” on immigration.
On Thursday evening, in response to Dame Priti’s interview, a spokesman for Mrs Badenoch said: “As Kemi said when she committed to a hard cap on visas in November, under her leadership the Conservative Party will tell the truth about the mistakes we made.
“While the last Conservative Government may have tried to control numbers, we did not deliver.”
Appearing on the Sun’s Never Mind The Ballots YouTube show, Dame Priti was challenged over the fact that 1.2 million people entered the UK last year.
The former Home Secretary under Boris Johnson from 2019 to 2022, said: “We should first of all recognise that we ended free movement…
“It’s legal migration. People who come here and work and contribute to our economy, the brightest and the best.
“Look at the points-based immigration system: for the first time ever we have a points-based immigration system, counting people in and out. You can turn off the immigration system at any stage in terms of what our economy needs and doesn’t need.”
The show host Harry Cole, the Sun’s Political Editor, asked whether Dame Priti, who played a leading role in the 2016 EU referendum, wanted to apologise for vowing to tame immigration only to “throw open the borders”.
She replied: “That’s totally distortionary and that’s not true. And to be quite frank, we made it quite clear it would be people from the rest of the world, people with skills based on our economy. I think people should apologise for saying…
“People in the pandemic came here, health and social care visas, what would have happened to our NHS? Are we now saying we don’t need those people in our NHS?” …
On Thursday night a spokesman for Mrs Badenoch said: “We are now developing a detailed plan on immigration to put before the British public before the next election, so voters have a clear choice: Labour, who will keep immigration far too high; or a new plan and a hard cap on numbers with Kemi’s Conservatives.”
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Except of course, the Conservatives never really tried – did they?
Pandemic….
Patel was all for clamping down hard on “covidiots” who broke “lockdown” rules.
If Badenoch thinks she got it wrong, why is she keeping her in the shadow cabinet?
Badenoch the covidian; I must have missed the bit where she apologised for pushing lockdowns, “vaccines” and promised not to do it again.
Her real name: Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, WEF acolyte. The gap toothed Nigerian leading the party of Churchill. Yeah, no decline in evidence.
Olukemi will never apologise for the Rona Fascism. Neither with the ‘Tories’.
They will never apologise for open borders or netard zero.
Uniparty and all that.
The Conservatives can protest they tried… but we know that governments in the UK do not have power to make and keep decisions.
Unless a government takes back control from the myriad QUANGOs they are powerless.
Agreed, but they do have the power to take back control from the QUANGOs, they just don’t have the desire to do so. QUANGOs are a useful device to hide behind while they are gaslighting us about their efforts to control immigration.
All of these people pretend they are working for us. No they don’t. They work for the UN and WEF and they are all financed by the Central Banks. We are simply a nuisance to these people. They have an agenda and that agenda is not ours. They may convince half of us that mass immigration is great, Net Zero is great, EDI is great etc but most ordinary people do not want their country filled with migrants, or the highest electricity prices in the entire world or men in their daughter’s toilet. Badenoch is just like a Sixth Former in the School Debating Society that earns her living being another handwringer. Only by having Politicians like Trump does anything get done
Hear, hear.
We just don’t believe the Tories anymore.
And never will again. Patel was extremely vocal about how she was doing her best to control immigration. She was falling out with everybody in the Home Office, very convincing. Now we find out that her idea of control is mass immigration. I don’t believe Badenoch either. Tories, never again.
Indeed. Never again.
Well, control means you can keep out people you don’t like, white people from continental Europe, to bring in more people you do like, brown people from the Indian subcontinent. That’s Patel’s idea of controlled mass immigration to benefit the British economy, as she explicitly states in the text. It’s probably not what the typical Brexit supporter believed to be voting for but this intention was never really hidden, cf May’s queue jumpers¹.
¹ Ironically, people from continental Europe with or without right to reside in Britain can still ‘jump’ immigration queues because the software running the automated entry gates will happily accept British and EU passports as it’s likely identical to the software used for such devices in continental Europe.
Liar Patel, liar Badenoch, liar Philp, liar Johnson, liar Sunak, liars the lot of them. Never believe a word the fake Tories ever utter. Liars, liars and liars.
Matt Goodwin’s tweet when Kemi appointed Pritti Patel
If you think that a Badenoch Conservative Party which just gave the no.2. job to a Remainer who rules out leaving the ECHR & the no.3 job to somebody who presided over the wholesale liberalisation of the immigration system is serious about changing Britain then you’re a fool.
As our failed legacy media can only cope with one story a day, the air crash in a foreign country pushed the report from the BRC on the huge surge in stealing from shops out of the news. Buried within the report is the evidence of the mass theft from shops by gangs that are…yes, you guessed it – immigrants. The shop theft is just the tip of a crime iceberg run by immigrants from eastern Europe as well as Pakistan.
Congratulations to GB News for celebrating the 5th anniversary of UK independence. I hope later on they will recognise the 1000th birthday of England.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said it proved that the Conservatives were “proud of mass migration”.
He’s right. The Tories can’t be trusted.
Patel is of Indian descent and unsurprisingly, to her, less Europeans moving to the UK for work (people exercising treaty rights never had a right of free access to the British welfare state, they were always required to be able to support themselves) so that more Indians can move to the UK for all kinds of reasons is obviously a huge improvement. The Indian’s Brexit dividend, so to say.