Brexit boss Nigel Farage has said that the public should no longer expect to believe anything said by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government given what he termed as “Tory Lies” on immigration.
Last January, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — fresh from being installed as leader against the will of Conservative Party members — took to a Downing Street podium emblazoned with the phrase “stop the boats” in bold letters. The newly minted PM vowed to introduce legislation that would prevent illegal migrants who cross the English Channel from France in dinghies from being able to claim asylum in Britain, requiring instead for them to go through the legal processes.
Sunak vowed to the public that his legislation would ensure that “if you come here illegally, you can’t claim asylum, you can’t benefit from our modern slavery protections, you can’t make spurious human rights claims and you can’t stay,” adding that the government would detain and remove illegals within “weeks” upon their entering the country and ban them from ever returning.
However, despite the definitive declarations from Sunak, it appears that the Conservative government has once again failed to deliver on a promise to the public, with Sir Matthew Rycroft, the Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Development, admitting that foreigners who have arrived illegally after the passage of the Illegal Migration Act are currently going through the asylum process in Britain, despite supposedly being prohibited from claiming asylum.
Rycroft told the Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee: “Their status is, they are claiming asylum and they are in different stages of the of the asylum caseload”, to which Conservative MP Tim Loughton noted that they are not recognised as being legitimate asylum seekers and therefore should not be classified within the asylum system.
Responding to the admission, Brexit leader Nigel Farage said: “So you can see, none of it was true, literally none of it was true. Nobody that has come across on a boat has been told because of the legislation they can’t stay and been sent anywhere. This is deception by government on the most astonishing scale and they keep on doing it.
“This is an utterly dishonest prime minister an utterly dishonest government don’t believe a single word that they say,” Farage added.
Dan Hobbs, the director-general of the Migration and Borders Group at the Home Office later claimed that while the migrants who arrived following the act are inadmissible for the asylum system, they have been allowed to remain in the country “on bail” because the scheme to send illegals to Rwanda continues to remain in legal limbo.
Hobbs went on to confirm that the government would continue providing financial support to those migrants who claim to be “destitute” while they are in the UK.
The latest apparent backtrack from the government comes just days after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that mostly as a result of mass legal migration, the UK population is expected to grow by 6.6 million people by 2036 to 73.7 million, a near 10 per cent increase over just 15 years.
The projections undercut a key promise from the Conservative Party in their 2019 election manifesto that the “numbers will come down” under their watch. Despite reclaiming control over the country’s immigration system following Brexit, net migration in fact hit record highs under their leadership.
Three previous manifestos from the Conservative Party pledged to reduce migration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands,” yet the promises were never delivered upon.
In 2017, David Cameron’s right-hand man, George Osborne, admitted that the Tory governments never actually intended to fulfil their pledges to cut migration, with “none” of the top members of the government believing in what they told the public.
Farage’s response this week to Rycroft’s committee appearance is not his first run-in with the top civil servant. Farage called for Rycroft to be sacked last year amid claims he was “undermining the government”, persuing his own priorities on migration — which is to say increasing it — in the face of the government’s stated aim of cutting numbers.