The Home Secretary Suella Braverman has warned the government that it must reduce immigration before the next election as the UK has become too dependent on foreign workers.
According to The Times:
In a speech on Monday, the home secretary will say there is “no good reason” why British workers cannot be trained to fill shortages in sectors such as lorry drivers and butchers.
She will warn that Britain risks “forgetting how to do things for ourselves” if net annual migration remains at hundreds of thousands.
Braverman will hit back at her critics by insisting it’s “not xenophobic to say that mass and rapid migration is unsustainable” because of the pressure it puts on housing supply, public services and community relations.
She will also say more must be done to improve integration, saying that migrants who are allowed to settle in the UK must play their part by speaking English and embracing British values. Integration should be “part of the quid pro quo”, she will say.
Braverman will be the headline speaker at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in central London, which has been organised by a right-wing American think tank to discuss the future of the Tory party.
The conference will pose a fresh challenge to Rishi Sunak’s leadership after the party’s dire local election results, with a string of prominent Tory MPs giving speeches setting out their own visions.
Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, two emerging leaders of the Conservative right, will call on the party to focus on core Tory topics such as lower immigration, tougher sentences and a return to family values.
Kruger, a former political secretary to Boris Johnson, is expected to say the party must consolidate its support among working-class voters in the north rather than “retreat to the southeast, to the managerial class, to the affluent”.
Research revealed by The Times shows the scale of the challenge facing Sunak, with nearly a quarter of Liberal Democrat local election voters expected to back Labour at the general election amid forecasts of mass tactical voting.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary and ally of Johnson, will use a speech at the conference to launch a stinging attack on Jeremy Hunt’s expansion of childcare support, branding it “fundamentally anti-Conservative”.
Braverman’s comments on immigration are carefully timed, coming days before official data is expected to show net migration has reached another record high.
Analysis by immigration experts at the Centre for Policy Studies suggests that the data will show net migration was between 650,000 and 997,000 last year, while the Home Office is braced for net migration to reach a million this year.
