Britain’s governing Conservatives have decided it is now time to do something about the historic levels of migrants arriving in the country due to their immigration policies, prompting opposition Labour to quip: “who does the Home Secretary think has been in charge for the past 13 years?”.
Home Secretary (Interior Minister) James Cleverly announced an emergency package of measures to reduce migrant arrivals to the United Kingdom on Monday afternoon, a move he claimed would cause the largest reduction in migrant arrivals ever.
Among the changes planned are reforms to end “abuse” of visas and those arriving for legitimate reasons bringing large numbers of family members as ‘dependents’ with them, and increasing the salary level at which is becomes possible to obtain visas for work. Speaking in Parliament, Cleverly said these changes would see “around 300,000 fewer people… in future years than came to the UK last year”.
On one hand, the changes represent a massive leap forward in the migration debate in the United Kingdom, which for years has been totally obfuscated by obsessive concern with the comparatively small numbers of migrants arriving in the country illegally, while totally ignoring the historic levels arriving with permission from the government through an extremely liberal visa regime. The new rules described by Cleverly would be a material change to the immigration system which has seen arrival levels absolutely soar to the point where more people are arriving to Great Britain now than at any other time in human history.
On the other hand, the Conservative Party have been in power for the United Kingdom for over a decade and the historic levels of migration now are the direct result of Tory party policy, which only generally bothers to speak about bringing down overall levels of migration when elections loom. With the next British general election less than a year away the rhetoric has returned, but any cut now, no matter how large, is unlikely to have any real impact given the years of soaring levels it follows.
Cleverly said: “immigration to this country is far too high and needs to come down” and that the government would take “more robust action than any other government before”. Welcome words for right-wing minded voters, perhaps, but as the opposition left-wing Labour Party remarked after the statement, “today’s statement is an admission of years of total failure by this Conservative government. Failure on the immigration system, and a failure on the economy… who does the Home Secretary think has been in charge for the past 13 years?”.
Commenting on the changes announced today to the UK’s immigration system, Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch UK said: “These measures are an admission that Conservative immigration policy has collapsed. If the government’s aim is now to reduce immigration by only 300,000 a year this will simply normalise what, until recently, was record breaking levels of net migration. The result will be a rapidly growing population with all the costs involved.”
The Conservative Party has promised reductions in migration at every general election for decades. This century, they long campaigned on the promise to reduce net migration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands a year. Instead, once in power, they actually increased it to a point where over a million gross arrived a year, approaching one and a half million net every two years.
The attitude of the Conservatives to this solemn election-time promise may go some way to explain how it is actions have so spectacularly misaligned with the rhetoric. Once out of power co-architect of the rebirth of the Conservative Party as a neo-con, globalist force George Osborne reflected how, actually, nobody of importance within the Party actually supported pledges to reduce migreation and were glad to see it eventually dropped.
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