Trouble for Rishi Sunak mounts as the globalist PM sees approval rating fall into negative among Tory members for the first time, this coming as a group of his own rebel lawmakers launch a campaign to push the party to the right from within.
Amid failures to deliver on fixing the economy and stemming illegal — and perhaps more importantly to the Tory voting base — legal migration, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak now has a negative approval among the Conservative party membership, according to the monthly survey conducted by Conservative Home.
Support among the party membership for Sunak has seen a steep decline in just the last month, with the PM previously holding a positive rating of 21.6 in June before falling to -2.7 this month. While this is still higher than the lows hit by his two predecessors, Boris Johnson at -33.8 and Theresa May at -50 per cent, Sunak’s government has hit a record nine ministers in negative territory, the Times of London reported.
The precipitous drop for Sunak comes after he attempted to claim that his administration had successfully slowed the small boats carrying illegal migrants across the English Channel. Shortly after he made this claim, the prohibitive weather conditions broke and saw thousands more illegals once again reach British beaches, revealing the lie.
Last week, his government was dealt another blow when its main deterrence strategy of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda was shut down by the London Court of Appeals, throwing into question the government’s entire plan to slow illegal migration. Over 11,000 have arrived since the start of the year.
While the failure of the government to stop illegal migration has become more apparent this month, it is perhaps still the failure to reduce legal migration that has hurt Sunak’s and the Conservative Party’s credibility with the country more than anything else. Post-Brexit immigration reforms — despite many having voted for Brexit to take back control over the borders — resulting in record-high levels of net migration in line with the orthodox beliefs of the globalist-minded Tory establishment.
This is the main motivation behind the launch of a new bloc of Tory lawmakers who have dubbed themselves the ‘New Conservatives’. The group of around 25 MPs, led by former Boris Johnson aid Danny Kruger and strident pro-family parliamentarian Miriam Cates, launched this week. The group is calling on the government to implement immigration restrictions to bring down net migration to around 200,000 per year, compared to the record-breaking 606,000 seen last year — yet still a far cry from the ‘tens of thousands’ promised by the party in previous elections.
Speaking at the launch of the group, Cates said:
If we as Conservatives are to prove that we believe in democracy… then we must honour our promise and dramatically cut immigration before the next election.
The same people who berate our woeful productivity levels also call for more immigration to prop up the labour market. [It is] a position akin to turning up the hot tap to warm up your bath while it is already overflowing and flooding your home.
While mass migration has increased overall GDP — the size of the pie — it has not increased GDP per capita, the size of the slice. Low-skilled immigration has asserted downward pressure on wages and living standards and upwards pressure on housing and public services. Wages, housing, and public services are all key issues for our voters, and these are being caused rather than solved by immigration.
While the new group’s target of 200,000 is still a far cry from the desired cuts from the base and the promises the Tories themselves made at election time within very recent memory, there does appear to be a recognition within some in the party that more populist measures will be needed going forward to confront the open borders agenda shared by many in the Tory and Labour parties.
One such figure to recognise the need for stricter migration controls is Professor Matt Goodwin, who just a decade ago was shot to prominence by trying to “explain” the motivations behind the populist revolt that ultimately led to the Brexit vote. Now, it appears, Goodwin has been convinced by many of the same arguments that he once studied and warned against.
Goodwin, whose new book Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics was published this year and comes to the same conclusion that many Brexiteers surmised long ago, stating this week that the reason for mass migration, woke indoctrination in schools, and the breakdown of the British family is a direct result of the reality that “the people who run Britain no longer care about the rest of Britain.”
“They are reshaping the country, they are reshaping its institutions around a small university-educated minority who simply don’t share the values and the concerns of the rest of the country,” Goodwin said.
The evolution of Goodwin to this line of thinking has earned him hit pieces in publications such as the globalist New Statesman, however, the growing sense among party establishment figures and even some in academia, denotes a shift in political realities for Sunak and the Conservative Party going forward, that merely miming platitudes about Great Britain will not be enough unless they are willing to actually defend her.
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