Reform UK has declared the July 4th general election “the immigration election”, and has gone on the attack against the two legacy parties which have seen “More people… come to this country in the past 25 years than in all of history before that”.
Standing in front of a stylised time graph showing immigration to Britain as low and stable for all of British history from 1066 to 1997 before going into a massive vertical climb, Reform UK — formerly Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party — launched its general election campaign on Thursday. Moving into the vacuum left by Labour and the Conservatives, neither of which have much to say about soaring levels of mass migration, the Reform speakers made clear they were going to make the campaign about precisely that.
That highlighting the Conservatives’ border control track record is deeply embarrassing to them is already clear, given the Party seems to have released almost as many attack ads against Reform as it has their main opponents Labour in the first 24 hours of the campaign. After all, The Conservatives won three consecutive elections on a promise to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands, but put it up to one million every 18 months instead.
Campaign material revealed at the launch will tell the public: “Who voted for mass migration? Who voted for hundreds of thousands more? Who promised to bring the numbers down to tens of thousands, but lied? … the Tories have broken Britain and Labour will give us even more mass migration. But there is an alternative, only Reform UK will freeze immigration.”
Party leader Richard Tice hammered home the well-worn point that, on the fundamentals, there isn’t a great deal of difference between the left-wing Labour Party, which is polled to win the July 4th election, and the ostensibly right-wing Conservatives, who in practice have governed as crypto left-centrist globalists despite the rhetoric. He said: “The choice for everybody is whether you vote Tory or if you vote Labour, you’ll get the same form of socialism. You will get higher taxes, lower wages, and mass immigration that will make us all worse off, and our quality of life will diminish.”
Both party leader Tice and deputy Ben Habib, both businessmen, struck similar points on their broader messaging on the decades of decline from the Blair era, and its inheritors in the re-invented Conservative Party of David Cameron and beyond. Tice said:
…all these experts. Well if they’re so expert, and I just want you to think… how come we’ve ended up with the highest taxes in 70 years, the highest government spending, much of it wasted, with the worst public sector outcomes in 70 years. The highest waiting lists since records began, 70 years ago. The highest debt in 70 years, the lowest growth decade in 70 years. You’re getting the picture! And the longest recession per person in 70 years, and per person is what matters. Do people feel better or worse off, and everybody feels worse off after 14 years of Tory failure.
Likewise, Habib intoned:
The country is in dire straights. Biggest debt level since world war two, highest taxation since world war two, GDP flatlining… the longest recession of GDP per capita in all of recorded history, immigration through the roof. More people have come to this country in the past 25 years than in all of history before that. An inability to enforce our borders, and I could go on, and on, and on.
As reported, the Conservatives have spoken about illegal migration in this election campaign this week already, incredibly attempting to make it a point of differentiation between them and their Labour challengers at the ballot box. While it is true that Labour would do away with the Rwanda migrant deterrent scheme while the Tories promise to at least try, nothing is said about soaring legal migration, which has been permitted by the Conservative government throwing the border wide open.
As reported on Thursday:
The Conservative Party has sold itself as a party of border control to the public for decades, and promised at several elections in a row that it won that it would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, in other words fewer than 100,000 every year. Instead, the party used the promised opportunity to enact border control after Brexit to instead massively liberalise immigration rules, and instead is importing one million new people, net, every 18 months.
… [the Prime Minister said] “…it is we Conservatives, only we Conservatives who have that plan, who are prepared to take that bold action to ensure that better future for our country”, begging the question why in 14 years of power it hadn’t occurred to them to start until now.
Sunak was unable to boast of any record or even promise a policy on controlling legal migration, which makes up the vast majority of arrivals and is in an era of historic, all-time highs after the Tories threw the borders wide open…
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