Mr Brexit Nigel Farage has warned that the Conservative Party leadership hopefuls are ignoring the issue of immigration to their own peril, warning that there is growing anger over failures to take back control of the border outside of the London bubble.
Commenting on Monday evening’s one-on-one debate between Tory leadership hopefuls Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Nigel Farage noted that neither the BBC moderator nor the two candidates discussed the issue of illegal immigration, let alone the scale of mass legal migration to Britain.
“That is a huge failing on the part of the BBC, not that I think either would have had any answers… we should be declaring an emergency but the BBC didn’t think to discuss it and it probably suited Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak to not debate it,” Mr Farage said.
While both candidates have attempted to wrap themselves in the flag of the Brexit mandate, so far Sunak and Truss have refused to commit to lowering legal immigration and have shied away from promising to remove Britain from the European Court of Human Rights, which blocked a deportation flight from the UK to Rwanda in June.
“I don’t think London gets the level of anger over this issue. Brexit was about getting back control of our borders and those dinghies coming across the channel every day say that we’ve failed completely and utterly in it,” Farage declared.
The Brexit campaigner said that he has been travelling throughout the Red Wall areas of the country — those that traditionally voted for the Labour Party but backed Boris Johnson to deliver Brexit — and said that a key message from constituents is that they feel the government has forgotten their plights while spending billions to house migrants in hotels across the country.
“I keep being told look you know our son is on the waiting list for social housing it’ll be at least a year and yet the hotel down the road has just filled up with young men who’ve crossed the English Channel… young men, incidentally, who we learned just the other day, in many cases, aren’t even being documented and then absconding into our community.”
The growing disconnect between the public and the political leadership in Westminster, and indeed the two candidates vying to become the next prime minister, was demonstrated this week by a survey conducted by the Migration Watch UK think tank that found that 60 per cent of Britons want to see less immigration and 34 per cent believe it should be reduced by “a lot”.
The poll, which surveyed 1,480 adults between the 14th and 19th of July, showed that the sentiment against mass migration was more prevalent among Conservative supporters, 73 per cent of whom are in favour of reducing immigration, and 49 by “a lot”.
Signalling the strain on the 2019 Red Wall voting coalition secured by Boris Johnson, the survey showed that among those who voted for the Conservatives in 2019 but who no longer support the party, 86 per cent want to see less migration, which Migration Watch suggested means that the government’s failure on immigration was a likely reason for abandoning the party.
When questioned on the specifics of immigration policy, 40 per cent said they were in favour of a substantial reduction in migration, while 19 per cent supported the target of tens of thousands, and 18 per cent said that they would be in favour of halting all immigration to the country.
In comments provided to Breitbart London, Migration Watch UK chairman Alp Mehmet said: “Both leadership candidates are focussing on asylum which is only a small part of the wider immigration issue. This survey underlines the failure of both contenders for the Conservative leadership to address the real issue, the sheer scale of immigration, which is of vital importance for their supporters as well as the general public, not to speak of the future of our country. I have written to them both calling on them to commit to a substantial reduction in net migration.
“This remarkable poll shows very clearly that such reduction is desired by just over three-quarters of their supporters and by 60% of the country as a whole.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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