Latest news with #politicalclass
Times
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Former Tory chairman defects to ‘real opposition' Reform
A former Conservative chairman has defected to Reform UK and accused the party of 'abandoning the British people'. Sir Jake Berry said that the Conservatives had 'lost their way' and no longer stood for low taxes, free enterprise or secure borders. Writing in The Sun, he said: 'British politics has become a grotesque pantomime, with the British political class competing to do our country down, telling us we should be ashamed of our history while at the same time putting us on a path to managed decline.' Berry, who lost his Rossendale & Darwen seat in the general election last year, said that Reform is now 'the real opposition' rather than the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He said that Nigel Farage and Reform represent 'one final Hail Mary to pull Britain back from terminal decline'. 'That's because Reform gets it,' he said. 'Reform listens. Reform fights. And with Nigel Farage leading we've got something this country can actually trust.'
Telegraph
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Labour has betrayed its promise to stop the boats
Immigration policy is the single biggest avoidable failure of the political class in the past generation. It is one of the main reasons Labour won a landslide one year ago and is likely to be one of the main reasons it fails to get re-elected four years hence. Labour made extravagant, and in this case justified, attacks on the Tory record – a useful way of signalling it had become a normal party again after Corbyn – while, as in so many other areas, merely replicating that Tory failure, at least in relation to ' smashing the gangs '. Moreover, despite having so long to prepare for Government it seems to have done no original thinking on either legal or illegal immigration. That said, Labour's record on legal migration has been better than I expected, and the immigration white paper remains an extraordinary volte face for a pro-immigration party, eloquently making the case that mass migration sceptics have been making for 20 years. The biggest story of the past year has been the almost halving of net immigration to 431,000 in 2024, almost entirely due to measures taken by Rishi Sunak's government. But the white paper measures will build on Sunak in three important respects: the complete ban on social care visas, extending the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain from five to 10 years, and raising the skill threshold for skilled work visas that will make it much harder to bring in people for middle-skill jobs. The biggest disappointment was cutting the two year post-study work option for international students to 18 months rather than abolishing it or restricting it only to students at elite universities, especially as international students at lower status universities turn out not to contribute much to the cross-subsidy of domestic students. Nevertheless, Labour has probably achieved three, and maybe four, of its five pledges on immigration, a better record than most areas, though mainly thanks to Sunak government decisions. The pledges were: bring down net immigration, reduce reliance on overseas workers, tackle smuggling gangs, clear the asylum backlog and accelerate the removal of people without legal status in the UK. The asylum backlog initially went up after July 2024 when Sunak's Illegal Immigration Act was repealed but is now probably a little below the inherited level. Returns have continued the gentle upward trend that began in 2021 but only 3 per cent of small boat crossers have been returned and most of those are accounted for by the deal with Albania signed by the previous Government. There are some less promising signs too. The recent industrial strategy paper talked ominously about using the soon-to-be-revised temporary shortage list to plug skill gaps. There is the failure, too, to clamp down on the nearly half of food delivery drivers who the Home Office reckons are working illegally. And we should be reading headlines about training boot camps in the many skill shortage areas, akin to the way the HGV crisis was dealt with after the pandemic. But the great failure of Labour's first year was to repeal the Rwanda off-shoring plan with nothing to replace it. For all the talk of reset with the EU it is an astonishing breakdown of international co-operation that no agreement has been reached to automatically return all Channel crossers – now at a record 19,000 for the first six months of the year and more than 170,000 since 2018 – either to France or a coalition of European countries. A hard stop consistently applied to all crossers for just a few days would end the flow immediately; why pay $5,000 to a people smuggler to bring you to the UK if you are automatically returned? This is clearly in France's interests too as at least a proportion of those queuing at Calais would not arrive in France at all if the UK option was removed. On top of a guarantee that all those accepted back by France after the hard stop, surely no more than a couple of thousand, would be matched by someone taken from the French asylum lists, the UK would have to offer an extra sweetener to enable French politicians to sell the idea. Simple enough? Various plans for such a Rwanda-style off-shoring, but within Europe, have been floating around for months, some involving France others involving a broader coalition of the willing. A plan is finally expected in the next week or so, but it's unlikely to involve the kind of hard stop that is necessary. And why is there no plan to stop using asylum hotels within 12 months, rather than at the end of the Parliament (also unlikely to be achieved). Why not a new version of Homes for Ukraine or calling on diaspora groups to house their co-nationals? More generally Labour is zig-zagging on immigration, as on so much else, between a new toughness, in response to the Reform surge, and its old liberal instincts. The latter is symbolised by Keir Starmer's extraordinary expression of regret at his 'island of strangers' comment. Expect more zig-zagging ahead. This week The Telegraph is running a daily series on a Year of Labour, marking the anniversary of Starmer's election win on July 4. Come back at noon tomorrow to read Aaron Bastani on why Starmer isn't ready for the return of the Corbynistas
