Immigration

Ask voters what the most important issue facing Britain is and just 2 per cent say immigration. Even when you expand it to the most important issues, the figure only reaches 6 per cent. This is a dramatic turnaround from 2015 when 56 per cent listed immigration as one of the top issues facing the country. In my Times column today, I ask what explains this shift. The end of free movement and the resumption of border control has taken much of the heat out of the issue In part, it is Covid. Before the pandemic, net migration to Britain was running at 313,000. In the past year, though, hundreds

The Prime Minister has asked the Home Office to remove NHS workers and social care workers from the immigration health surcharge as soon as possible. As Katy Balls reported earlier today, frustrations were growing within the Tory party that healthcare workers could be clobbered with this fee as they work tirelessly to help British patients get through the Covid crisis. It seems Boris Johnson has listened to his backbenchers and u-turned. The fee will be waived for a range of health staff, from doctors and nurses to technicians and cleaners. This exemption is good news for workers in the healthcare sector, but it shouldn’t be the end of the policy review. This

The idea of a flotilla of little ships crossing the English Channel from France to deposit their beleaguered human cargo safely on our shores was born in this country’s darkest hour during the second world war. To say that the method behind the success of the Dunkirk evacuation 80 years ago has been repurposed for the modern age is something of an understatement. These days the little ships are usually inflatable dinghies packed with desperate young men from Asia and Africa who seek to evade this country’s immigration laws. They land at various points between Dover and Hastings and – if undetected – many head for rendezvous points pre-arranged with

Once you accept that Brexit is happening – because, like it or not, the British people demanded it – it is not so very hard to accept that Brexit must come with consequences. In the absence of free movement from the European Union to the United Kingdom, new immigration arrangements must be put in place. As a political matter – which should not be confused with the policy design or practical application of new immigration controls – these must be seen to be tougher than the regime which preceded it. That is the meaning of ‘Take Back Control’. So it is no great surprise that the measures announced today represent,

Jeremy Corbyn – ‘I want a close relationship’ with the EU The Labour leader was Andrew Marr’s chief guest of the day. Marr began by asking for Corbyn’s personal stance on Brexit, something which has proved highly elusive since the referendum result in 2016. Corbyn happily gave the Labour party’s position, but once again refused to be drawn on the issue:   AM: Do you want this country to leave the EU or not? JC: We’re going to put that choice to the British people, and they will make that decision… I want a close relationship with the EU in the future. ‘You don’t know’ who I’m going to negotiate with If

When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise their status so that they could start paying taxes and contributing to the country in other ways? When this magazine reprised the issue last week, the usual objections were recycled: why reward criminality? But the actual cases are more complicated. Trevor Rene is one such case. He was born in Dominica in 1969 when it

This afternoon’s law and order theme to Tory conference did take a bit of a knock when police were called to an altercation involving one of the party’s MPs, resulting in the backbencher, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, being sent home. Not long after this incident, which sent parts of the conference centre into lockdown, Priti Patel walked onto the stage and announced that ‘today, here in Manchester, the Conservative party takes its rightful place as the Party of Law and Order in Britain once again’. Politics today is so tumultuous that it has scarcely been thought remarkable that the Home Secretary is so happy to make clear that her party lost this

Priti Patel is the new Home Secretary. This is likely to attract a fair bit of opprobrium from Boris Johnson’s critics, given she is a supporter of the death penalty. Whether or not she has been given any remit to examine that particular policy issue, she has a big job on her hands. The Home Office is one of the hardest departments to run. Theresa May managed to survive it, largely by micromanaging everyone else into the dust. Her successor Amber Rudd did not, finding that obeying her boss too well led to her being implicated in the Windrush scandal. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, May’s aides in the Home

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is often taught to schoolchildren, who read it as a warning about the fragility of human power. Conservatives should study it now and ensure they take an opportunity to learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration. If there was one issue that helped May become, for a short time, a figure of “cold command” over her party, it was immigration. As home secretary and then Prime Minister, she was the senior figure at the top of the Conservative party who consistently took the hardest line on the issue. By the mid-point of the 2010-2015 coalition government, David Cameron would privately concede that all of his ministerial