The issue of immigration is a simple one for the Conservative Party: we need to crack down on it in every form, both legal and illegal.
For me, this is about basic fairness. Britain today seems to work more favourably for those who jump the queue, who break the rules, who get into our country illegally but then denigrate our customs and our culture.
And those of us who work hard and do the right thing, hoping one day to leave a better life for our children, are left footing the bill.
ADVERTISEMENT
The billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money we are spending to put asylum seekers up in hotels, for example, is well known.
Less well known, however, is the fact that low-paid immigrants and refugees who stay here for five years qualify for ‘indefinite leave to remain’.
This allows them to claim the same benefits British citizens are entitled to, such as social housing and Universal Credit.
They become automatically entitled to make such claims regardless of whether they’ve paid taxes or have simply lived off the state throughout those five years.
To my mind, that is fundamentally unfair to all the hard-working Brits who have dutifully paid into the system – and I’m determined to stop it.
The billions of pounds of taxpayers¿ money we are spending to put asylum seekers up in hotels, for example, is well known. Less well known, however, is the fact that low-paid immigrants and refugees who stay here for five years qualify for indefinite leave to remain.
But it’s likely to come as no surprise that the Labour Government has no such interest.
It voted against our Deportation Bill last month, which would have introduced a strict cap on the number of newcomers to these shores, as well as doubling the time it takes for immigrants to be able to claim benefits from five to ten years.
The same ten-year rule would also apply to people seeking the privilege of British citizenship, up from the current five years.
And, to make sure those who come here are serious about contributing to our society, rather than just ripping it off, the Bill would have barred anyone who’d claimed benefits from getting indefinite leave to remain.
It would also have given the government the power to remove settled status from those who commit any crime – preventing them from claiming that precious British passport.
ADVERTISEMENT
All in all, that Bill was designed to protect our borders and uphold fairness in our benefits system.
But thanks to Labour, it was shot down. To be honest, many – if not all – of the measures it contained would probably have ended up going the same way as the former government’s abandoned scheme to deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda.
That became bogged down in our courts and frustrated by unnamed foreign judges interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Other potentially transformative policies of ours have floundered in similar ways.
Mel Stride, when he was Work and Pensions Secretary, came up with reforms to the welfare system that would have saved £5billion, but those, too, got stuck in the courts – giving Labour all the excuses they needed to quietly ditch them. I call this lawfare – the use of litigation as a political weapon.
Even if these legal activists aren’t successful, the costs and delays they incur are crippling to democracy. It is turning us into a country afraid of its own shadow.
This must change. I have asked distinguished barrister and shadow attorney general Lord Wolfson KC, and the shadow solicitor general Helen Grant, to lead a commission to establish, once and for all, if the things that we need to do – get control of our borders, protect our welfare system and restore fairness – can be done if we remain a member of the European Convention on Human Rights.
They will get to the bottom of how we got into this legal quagmire, and the challenges to getting us out.
If their conclusions are that we cannot enact reasonable policies to put British citizens first when it comes to social housing and scarce public services, then I will know that we need to leave.
The commission’s findings will also help me make a workable plan to get us out of the ECHR, while taking into account the need to ensure essential human rights remain protected.
The greatest danger we now face is allowing lawfare to make this country less fair, less safe and less democratic.
But I’m determined that, under my leadership, the Conservative Party will protect our values, our democracy, our country – and, ultimately, our people.
