The Conservative Party has “run scared” from its pledges to cut migration numbers because they are “afraid”, the chairman of Migration Watch told Breitbart London.
Alp Mehmet, the chairman of the mass-migration sceptic think tank Migration Watch UK, told Breitbart London that the Conservative Party has not been “courageous enough” to implement policies capping the flow of migration to the UK.
“The Tories have frankly run scared of their previous commitments and promises that they would reduce immigration. ‘Get it down to tens of thousands’ they said, which frankly was not a bad objective,” Mehmet said.
“They couldn’t do it, largely because they were afraid,” he added.
The 2019 Conservative manifesto aims to introduce an Australian points-based system for immigration, which the Tories claim will reduce the number of migrants coming to the United Kingdom.
Mehmet said that the idea that this policy would reduce migration is “nonsense”, saying that “it’s going to do no such thing. Unless they intend to include the sort of elements in the system that will reduce numbers and that’s having caps.”
“A cap on the number of workers coming in. The Australians have it, why not we… if we are going to introduce that sort of system?” he concluded.
Under Conservative-led governments, the United Kingdom has seen a drastic increase in the level of migration, with numbers hitting near-record levels, according to figures released in February.
The Tories pledged to reduce net migration from “the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” ahead of the 2010, 2015, and 2017 general elections. But this pledge was left unfulfilled after each of the last three elections and in June, Prime Minister Boris Johnson scrapped the pledge to cut numbers altogether.
In 2017, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne revealed that the Tories never supported “the pledge in private and all would be glad to see the back of [it]” and admitted that the party could have reduced non-EU based immigration but refused to.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also hinted in the past at giving amnesty to illegal aliens who have been in the country for over 15 years.
At the time, Alp Mehmet said: “An amnesty for them would be manna for traffickers. It would encourage further illegal inflows, reward illicit behaviour, be costly to UK taxpayers and be grossly unfair to migrants who follow the rules.”
Before Britons head to the polls to cast their ballots in the upcoming general election, Breitbart London, in a series of interviews with Migration Watch UK Chairman Alp Mehmet, will break down the immigration policies of the four major parties.
On Monday, Breitbart London reviewed the ‘Disastrous and Absurd‘ immigration policies of the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats.
On Wednesday, the immigration plans of the Brexit Party will be reviewed.
Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka
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