Fool Me Once, Shame On You.

Fool me twice, of course, and it's shame on ME. Now let's have a round of applause for Olukemi Badenoch, who's betting the Tories can fool us all on immigration for a record-breaking FIFTH time.

Mass immigration to Britain has been an unqualified disaster. In the space of just 28 years we’ve gone from being a relatively homogenous country with a welcoming but sensible immigration policy to a rapidly-balkanising multicultural mess. Our public services are overwhelmed by people who haven’t contributed to them and, often, don’t even speak English. Swathes of our cities have been transformed into alien landscapes, to the bafflement, discomfort and (increasingly) anger of the people who grew up there. Society is being ripped apart by imported barbarisms - acid attacks, forced marriage, jihad, female genital mutilation, rape gangs.

And our useless government never does anything to stop it.

Has Olukemi Badenoch really changed her pro-immigration views, or is she just running scared of Reform UK?

Labour Created This Problem…

Our catastrophic experiment with mass immigration began under Tony Blair. Until 1997 net immigration - people in minus people out - was generally below 50,000 people a year. In fact it was often negative; in 1992, for example, it was -13,000. That all changed under New Labour. In 1997 net immigration was 48,000; in 1998 it was 140,000, and since then it’s trended relentlessly upwards. This was a deliberate policy choice. In 2009 Andrew Neather, a former Downing Street official, admitted that Labour had set out to change Britain’s demographic makeup “to rub the right’s nose in diversity” but hid that fact from the public, because “it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.” Well, quite. In 2013 Lord Mandelson, one of the key figures in the Blair government, confirmed that Labour had been “sending out search parties for people” who could be persuaded to move to Britain. Immigration exploded. By 2010 net immigration was running at around a quarter of a million people a year, and growing discontent at rapid demographic change nobody had voted for was becoming a factor in elections.

…But The Tories Made It Worse

David Cameron capitalised on this in 2010, running for election on a pledge to cut immigration to “the tens of thousands”. Of course, he was lying. Over the next five years net immigration rose from 256,000 in 2010 to 329,000 in 2015. That didn’t stop Cameron from, again, prioritising border security and repeating his pledge to bring net immigration below 100,000. More lies. Cameron petulantly resigned in June 2016 after losing the Brexit referendum - where frustration at open borders was a major driver of the Leave campaign - and over the previous twelve months net immigration had added 321,000 people to the population.

Cameron was replaced by Theresa May, who as Home Secretary had consistently failed to do anything to actually reduce immigration. Nevertheless she committed, yet again, to the “tens of thousands” target and made it a manifesto pledge in 2017. And she wasn’t telling the truth. May did manage to bring the numbers down somewhat, but when she resigned in July 2019 it was still a far too high 206,000.

Then Boris Johnson took over, and in his 2019 election manifesto promised a new points-based immigration system that would attract “the brightest and the best”, and reduce the number of low-skilled immigrants coming to Britain. Naturally, he was lying. Under Johnson, immigration exploded to numbers undreamed of under Blair. By the time he was forced out by his disintegrating party in 2022 net immigration was a staggering 789,000.

Liz Truss wasn’t in office long enough to do anything much, and then came Rishi Sunak. In 2023 net immigration hit a new record, of 906,000. Then, in 2024, Sunak promised in his doomed manifesto to introduce a legally binding cap on numbers and reduce total immigration “significantly”.

We all know how well that worked, and now we have a Labour government that’s busily dismantling most of the few creaking, ineffective barriers to immigration we have. The Conservatives meanwhile decided to rebuild their devastated credibility by electing Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch, a Nigerian immigrant, as their new leader.

If Badenoch Is The Answer, It’s The Wrong Question

So far Badenoch has been notable mainly for her refusal to say what policies she would pursue if she somehow won the next election. Predictably, the collapse in Tory popularity that began under Johnson has continued - and Reform UK is exploiting that to ruthlessly cannibalise the Conservatives’ disillusioned former voters. When Badenoch took over last November the Tories were in second place in the polls, on around 26%, with Reform trailing on 18%. The Tories had around 132,000 members and Reform less than 100,000. However, Reform’s membership overtook the Tories on Boxing Day and as I write is standing at 205,532. Meanwhile the latest polls are showing Reform with somewhere between 24% and 29% - either neck and neck with Labour or slightly ahead, while the Tories are now relegated to third place on 21-23%.

It seems to have finally dawned on Badenoch that with border control remaining a potential election-winning issue, and the resolutely anti-immigration Reform quickly building support, her “strategy” of not having any policies isn’t working. Last Wednesday she eventually announced something she would do in the vanishingly unlikely event she ever becomes prime minister. I’m sure the fact it’s about immigration is just coincidence, and not a desperate attempt to out-Reform Reform.

Anyway, what Badenoch is proposing certainly sounds good. She says she would double the period immigrants have to live in Britain before they can claim Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) from five years to ten. Only immigrants who had worked, and not claimed social housing or benefits, for the entire ten-year period would be allowed to apply. Those whose earnings - and tax contribution - didn’t exceed the cost to the state of services provided to them and all their dependants would also be barred from applying. So would anyone who entered Britain illegally, or arrived legally then overstayed their visa.

If this was actually implemented it would have a huge impact on immigration. The fact is, despite the endless government claims that immigrants carry out essential jobs, most of them don’t work at all. Of the immigrants who have arrived since 2018 just 16% came on work visas. There are around 1.7 million recent immigrants in Britain who aren’t working; paying for their benefits, housing and other services costs British taxpayers around £8.6 billion a year (and that’s not including the £5.4 billion we spend on hotels for asylum seekers). Even low-skilled immigrants who do work are a drain on this country; the Office for Budget Responsibility says every low-skilled worker who comes here costs taxpayers £150,000 by the time they reach the age of 60 and £465,000 of they live into their 80s - and, again, that’s the ones that work. In 2023 Britain issued 100,000 visas for care workers, mostly low-skilled; they each brought an average of 1.2 dependants with them, who are even more of a burden on taxpayers.

The truth about immigration: Most of them are bad for our economy.

So if the Tories really did put this new policy into effect it would take a big bite out of our immigration problem, but this is where we run up against that other problem. Yes, despite Badenoch’s own record of trying to remove controls on immigration, the Conservatives are saying the right things about fixing our borders. But they were saying the right things in 2010, too. And in 2015. And in 2017. And in 2019.

They were lying then. So why should we trust them now?