Tory Spokesman Admits What We’ve All Known: ‘We Have Failed’ on Boat Migrants

A Conservative deputy party chair has admitted his government has “failed” on borders, which are now “out of control”, yet despite the apparent moment of clarify the politician said against all evidence to the contrary there were policies in place that would fix the situation.

The remarkable admission of failure by the Conservative politician Lee Anderson — made all the more incredible by the fact the Conservatives have been winning elections on elusive promises of border control for years before going quiet on the subject for the rest of the election cycle — came after his more widely-reported comments on migrants being free to leave Britain if they didn’t like it.

Speaking to Brexit leader Nigel Farage on his headline-grabbing comments, which are part of the government’s overt push to get migration into the headlines this week and they hope come away with some positive spin, MP Anderson was challenged on the UK Conservatives’ appalling record on border control. Rather than weaseling out of the question, however, Anderson took a very unusual step in British politics and admitted failure. He said:

Listen, Nigel. I’m not going to sit here and make excuses to anyone. This is out of control. We are in power at the moment, I am… the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, we are in government and we have failed on this. There’s no doubt about it. We said we were going to fix it, it is a failure.

… We’re up against it Nigel, let’s be honest. We’ve got the lefty lawyers, we’ve got the human rights campaigners, we’ve got the charities. Everything is against us. But I’m not making excuses, it is slowing us down. If the whole of parliament was behind us I’m sure this would have got through by now.

I’m not going to sit here and make excuses. It makes me sick every time I see a boat come across the channel, it makes me furious when I see them put in hotels and aboard barges.

Nevertheless, Anderson plugged the government line that new plans were in place to tackle ‘irregular’ boat migration, saying part of the problem was the government had struggled to communicate their intentions to the public.

While illegal and irregular migration — particularly by boat — to the United Kingdom is an issue and one that has been blossoming for some years, for those worried about overall migration levels it pales in comparison to the huge liberalisaion of immigration to the United Kingdom by the Conservatives. Over the 13 years the party has been in power migration levels have soared to levels that make even the pro-diversity rush of the Blair years seem mild in comparison.

Last year net migration — almost all of which was legal and according to the Conservatives’ hardline pro-open-borders policy — hit half a million, the highest level in British history ever. These record levels of arrivals stand in stark contrast to how the Conservative party speaks around election time, indeed, until very recently the party campaigned on getting net migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’.

The Conservatives had a mask-off moment in 2017 when then-top-Tory George Osborne admitted the party had never actually intended to deliver on the pledge. He wrote, candidly of his time at the head of the government as finance minister: “[N]one of [the Cabinet’s] senior members supports the pledge in private and all would be glad to see the back of something that has caused the Conservative Party such public grief.”