Conservative party/opposition watch

[Mark]

The reason UK immigration is a record high is a proactive political choice by this tory government. The largest numbers of immigrants are coming from India, China (a lot from Hong Kong), Nigeria, Pakistan and Ukraine. ~None of them came on small boats. They came on official visas, the majority to work in health and social care, as students (80% return within 5 yrs) or via humanitarian routes (most of Hong Kong and Ukraine).

The reason migration is 672,000 and not more like 200k is due to decisions this government has made about who to give visas to (and god knows we need all those heath and care workers, and the foreign students are bankrolling the universities) not due to asylum seekers on small boats...

I did say on here at the time, that this would be the natural consequence of Brexit...
Many Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Latvians etc. forced to go back..., but being replaced (and more) by Indians, Nigerians, Pakistanis...
Brexit was supposed to give us back control of our borders, but look at what this has meant in reality....

Brexit was supposed to give us these wonderful trade deals around the world...
However these trade deals seem to include a caveat that we need to relax our Visa rules (a key request in the trade deal with India)
A coincidence that Rishi Sunak is Indian heritage - I think not....

The NHS & Care system has been progressively getting worse under this government....
Rather than training more nurses and carers, their solution was to ease the Visa requirements and import them...
Rather than paying living wages (supermarket work pays more than care work, and is less stress), their solution was to import them...
However, not only do we get the nurses and carers themselves, we also get their dependent families, which we then need to look after...

Agreed clv101 - ALL DELIBERATE GOVERNMENT POLICIES.

[UndercoverElephant]

I did say on here at the time, that this would be the natural consequence of Brexit...

It isn't a "natural consequence of brexit". If the government chose to relax visa rules to get trade agreements then that was a political choice.

[clv101]

Brexit was supposed to give us back control of our borders, but look at what this has meant in reality....

Brexit has given us control of our borders, that's the point. Our government has chosen to exercise that control by issuing hundreds of thousands of visas a year to people who, a decade ago, weren't eligible to them. Then, the government has the cheek to try and associate these hundreds of thousands of government approved immigrants with a few tens of thousands arriving on small boats.

[UndercoverElephant]

Our government has chosen to exercise that control by issuing hundreds of thousands of visas a year to people who, a decade ago, weren't eligible to them.

And they will pay a very high price for this mistake, which amounts to a gross breach of a manifesto pledge. "Get Brexit Done" included "get a grip on immigration" -- the reason the Tories had a huge majority was because large amounts of labour voters in red wall seats "loaned" their vote to the Tories on the understanding that they would "retake control of our borders". Those people will not be voting Tory this time. They will either go back to Labour or switch to the Reform Party.

[UndercoverElephant]

Anyone see Question Time? Fiona Bruce asks the audience whether anybody supports the Rwanda scheme policy. Only one person puts his hand up, and his justification is "Well, barring extreme measures we've got to try everything, haven't we?".

It looks to me like the electorate is now split between those who don't think we should even be trying to send people to Rwanda, and those who think it was a good idea if it could be made to work but it is now obvious that it doesn't work and therefore continuing to pursue the idea is just throwing good money after bad -- it looks like the government has fallen for the Sunk Costs Fallacy. If this is correct, then they are well and truly up shit creek without a paddle. There are only two options -- admit that the policy is a misconceived failure and walk away from it at least £150m down, or continue to pursue a strategy that nobody (apart from the government, apparently) still believes in.

I am now wondering whether we are going to see them completely wiped out at the election. Reports tonight suggest Farage is planning a return to front line politics, and I think it is now entirely possible he could win a Westminster seat.

[Ralphw2]

The country is already 260m down. Comment reccomendations on the BBC news website, which is quite a good measure of the mood of the floating voter, are 10 to 1 against the policy,

[UndercoverElephant]

The Telegraph: It's Over for this Tory Party:

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fww ... -voters%2F

Their electoral strategy has been simple: shower the Tory base with cash and other perceived goodies – in the form of the triple-lock pension, massive increases to NHS spending, Covid handouts and frozen planning laws – and hope that it doesn’t notice when it is betrayed on every other issue. It might have worked once, but no longer.

The One Nation Caucus counts some 106 Conservative MPs, refuses to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and doesn’t want to repeal the Human Rights Act. Most of its members have accepted the Blairite legal revolution, and are in fact substantially to the Left of where New Labour was in the late 1990s on tax, immigration, welfare, and law and order.

The One Nation position is clear: it believes Conservative governments “played a vital role in creating and protecting the ECHR as well as the Refugee and Torture conventions”, and the group not only holds these treaties “dear”, but sees them as a fundamental part of “protecting the UK’s democratic legacy”. Such a vision is incompatible with a more conventional interpretation of British conservatism, but it has now been implicitly accepted by Sunak and James Cleverly.

The Supreme Court judgment on Rwanda demonstrated that Britain, under current treaties, cannot lawfully control its borders. The principle of non-refoulement reigns supreme. The choice is thus either the status quo promoted by the One Nation folk (tweaked slightly by Sunak), and political oblivion, as Braverman warned yesterday, or a Brexit-style disentanglement from international treaties that no longer work.

Tragically, Sunak’s approach will satisfy nobody, and won’t change the country noticeably before the election. This disaster is on the Tory Left: they have declared war on their own voters, and will be held responsible for the catastrophe about to engulf the party.

[Ralphw2]

Rwanda is not exactly a garden of sweetness and light. The genocide in the 1990s has left deep scars, many people fled to the Congo to the west, and has resulted in several wars and continual unrest across the border. The current government is still funding rebels and is probably eyeing up gaining control of some of those lovely minerals and other resources. There is a very high probability that some of that 250m will be spent on weapons to forment war.

[UndercoverElephant]

Rwanda is not exactly a garden of sweetness and light.

If it was then the whole plan would be unviable for that reason. It is supposed to be a deterrent. Rwanda doesn't actually want these people -- its purpose in the deal is to be an unwanted destination.

[UndercoverElephant]

Anyone watch Laura Kuensberg?

Robert Jenrick: "The new legislation won't work. It is not strong enough. Anybody who understands the situation will agree. Everybody we try to send to Rwanda will challenge it and it will end up hopelessly bogged down by legal challenges like the last two attempts. I cannot associate my name with a doomed flagship policy."

Michael Gove: "The new legislation will work. Anybody who actually reads it can see, and some top lawyers agree. Only a tiny minority will challenge it. This time it will work, I promise. Let's get behind the Prime Minister."

So that is two senior tory MPs directly contradicting each other on something which is absolutely crucial. There is an actual reality here -- Gove and Jenrick cannot both be correct. I cannot recall ever seeing a UK government in this much trouble.

For what it is worth I think Jenrick is probably right and Gove is just offering public support for Sunak's position. It looks very much like the only way to make this strong enough to prevent all the legal challenges is to withdraw from some international treaties, but it also looks like the left wing of the tory party won't support that and the Rwandans would walk away from the deal even if it could be pushed through parliament.

Sunak's position is bordering on untenable. The chances are the bill will pass its second reading, but only because some of his skeptical MPs are granting him a bit more time. If it fails to pass its third reading because of a tory rebellion then his position will be completely untenable -- his options will be:

(1) Resigning as tory leader because he's been betrayed by the left of his own party.
(2) Calling a general election on this issue.
(3) Continuing as lame duck PM with no viable strategy for the election, which would presumably result in a leadership challenge.

[Ralphw2]

As far as I can see, he will have been betrayed by the right of his party, as it is them that would vote down the third reading.

I do not know why you consider this policy so critical to the Tory party future, it has got such a bad press that public opinion is increasingly against it in the middle ground swing voters.

[UndercoverElephant]

I do not know why you consider this policy so critical to the Tory party future

Immigration, especially the illegal variety, is critical to their core vote and their membership, and the problem is that if this scheme collapses then those people are likely to give up hope that the tories can actually deliver on the promise to get immigration down. It will also destroy any remaining belief that they are fit to govern -- there can be no excuses for wasting £260m on a scheme which was never going to work.

I suspect it is going to turn out to be a major problem for Labour too. Not in the forthcoming election but maybe in the subsequent one.

[Potemkin Villager]

Rwanda is not exactly a garden of sweetness and light.

This is not a problem. The mad hatter, Kool Aid consuming government
is trying to pass a law that magically makes everything tickety boo! The high levels
of increasingly obvious delusional thinking going on in the tory party should seriously
be worrying folk.

If it were an individual it would be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

[UndercoverElephant]

https://www.thenational.scot/news/23981 ... migration/

Keir Starmer set to attack Tory 'broken promises' on immigration from the right

“Yes, Brexit was a vote for lower immigration - of course it was,” Starmer will say.

"But it was also a vote for the idea that we need to renew; that hard work should be rewarded with a wage people can live on. And for the Tories, that’s the rub.

“Seven years they’ve had to make Brexit work.

"But every time they run up against a choice of whether to raise skills and improve working conditions or issue visas, they choose higher migration. It’s who they are.”

This is how to win an election, IMO. It is absolutely true.

[UndercoverElephant]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67684785

So the ERG aren't going to support bill. They want the courts eliminated from the process. Meanwhile the centrist "one nation" group has made clear that it won't support a bill that eliminates the courts in order to break international law. That looks like checkmate to me -- Sunak does not have the numbers to get his compromise position through parliament, and there is no way to fix it because he's being pulled in two opposing directions and there's no middle way: either the courts are removed from the process or they aren't. Either it breaks international law or it doesn't.