Comment
JAMES CLEVERLY
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FINDING Labour’s immigration policy has been like an Easter Egg hunt with no Easter eggs.
In recent weeks, while spouting feigned outrage at our clearly laid out plans to tackle both illegal and legal migration numbers, their total lack of a plan has become clear.
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The criminal people smuggling gangs are ruthless and violent. There’s a not scrap of compassion in them.
They don’t care if people die, including children, just as long as they pay. Illegal small boat crossings are immoral.
Nobody should defend it, and everybody should support stopping the boats. We do, and we will.
Labour’s shadow immigration minister says he wants to “halve the boats,” so they are not even pretending they’ll secure our borders, and the few ideas they’ve offered are pale imitations of our existing work to break the business model of the gangs.
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They’ve voted 100 times against measures we have created to do that, in a desperate attempt to delay or weaken plans they’re terrified will work.
When Keir Starmer chose his five missions for government, he completely forgot to mention immigration.
That’s how little he cares about tackling illegal migration and stopping the boats. Compassion is actually at the heart of why the Rwandans want our partnership to work.
Labour sully the Rwandans’ motivation suggesting it’s about money, whilst avoiding that the costs of the scheme are dwarfed by the £8 million a day cost of hotels.
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Costs they tacitly accept by having no alternative. Meanwhile knowing hotel costs are too high we’ve returned a hundred hotels to commercial use.
One Labour MP told the BBC they won’t use hotels, or indeed specific large sites to accommodate asylum seekers but couldn’t answer where they’d return people if their home country is unsafe.
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On top of this, they vow to scrap the Rwanda scheme – the only real way to stop the boats “even if it works”. After Easter the Rwanda Bill returns to Parliament.
The scheme offers a home and support from a country with a proud record of taking care of refugees.
Labour have painted Rwanda in a bad light. If the Easter message is one of rebirth, they should study the remarkable revival of this country.
The Rwandans have successfully rebuilt society from the worst of experiences showing a strength of collective will that everyone should respect.
They soon commemorate the 30th anniversary of the genocide, and as I saw myself in Kigali, that rebuilding process is why Rwanda see our partnership as both a solution to a global problem but also the right thing to do.
But the Rwanda scheme will also be a deterrent because those seeking coming to the UK illegally will know they won’t be able to stay.
We know once Albanians knew that they’d be returned home if they made the dangerous chancel crossing in a boat, numbers from that country dropped by 90 percent.
Rwanda also answers a question Labour can’t.
When frontbencher Stephen Kinnock “misspoke” in the Commons about returns to “a third country”, he confessed he meant “home” country.
Without an alternative to the Rwanda scheme there is no safe “home country” to return many to and over time Rwanda can take many thousands in an uncapped scheme.
Labour can’t answer the “what?” and they can’t answer the “where?” So why would anyone believe they have a plan?
We returned 24,000 people last year, we remove foreign national offenders weekly, and continue with France and other European partners to drive down the crossings.
Even the Church has said they share our mission to stop the boats.
We have met with the senior Church leaders to explain Christian conversion is no guarantee of asylum being granted and we’ve stressed there is a real difference between welcoming new members to a flock and vouching for a person in an asylum tribunal.
We were right to reject the asylum claims of the Clapham alkali attacker, twice, and believe a light shone on independent asylum tribunal decisions is needed.
Allowing people to exploit the system risks detracting from the invaluable work Christians and the church do every day for our society – today of all days.
This Conservative Government will continue to tackle criminal gangs, frustrating their movement and money flows.
We’ll continue our work with France which saw 25,000 people prevented crossing last year.
We’ll keep working with partners to stop the flow of inflatable boats and engines, and continue to stress as we have successfully in country-targeted online media that if you arrive illegally in the UK, you will not stay here.
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Labour can gripe on the sidelines, waving weak promises, like a cosy “arrangement” with the EU that would see us taking in 100,000 more asylum seekers, and continue with worthless promises to send people to back to countries they can’t. We will stick with our plan.
We’ve never suggested it’s easy but it’s working, and after what I hope for everyone is a happy Easter we will finish the job of stopping the boats.
ABDUL EZEDI
ABDUL Ezedi arrived in January 2016 and claimed asylum but was rejected.
A tribunal dismissed his appeal in 2017, saying his account of Taliban threats if deported to Afghanistan lacked credibility.
In 2018 he was given a Christian baptism before making a new asylum claim in 2019, saying his religion would put him at risk.
It was rejected in 2020, but he appealed, and won when a judge ruled his conversion was genuine.
In 2024, he threw alkaline at his ex-partner in South London. His body was found in the Thames.
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