Home Secretary Suella Braverman lashed out against the UK’s soaring immigration levels, as she staked out a claim to succeed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in a potential future Conservative Party leadership contest.
With official statistics next week expected to show record net arrivals in the UK last year, Braverman urged to bring down numbers that she said threatened the “national character.” Britons should be trained to take roles currently being filled by immigrants, she told NatCon UK, a conference of the Tory right organized by the Washington-based Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute.
Britain has relied for decades on waves of immigration to fill jobs in the health service and other industries. Braverman’s own parents are of Indian origin and emigrated to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius in the 1960s.
“It’s not racist for anyone, ethnic minority or otherwise, to want to control our borders,” Braverman said. Britain can’t have “immigration without integration,” she said, adding “we have a national character to conserve.”
Braverman, who oversees immigration policy, is seen as a standard-bearer for the Tories’ populist right. The speech puts down a marker as party members increasingly look to who might succeed Sunak after the next general election.
The governing party has trailed the main opposition Labour Party by a double-digit margin for months, and appears on course to lose a national vote that must be held by January 2025.
Her remarks also point to a split in government between those on the right who want to deliver on Brexit promises to greatly reduce immigration — and others who see the need for foreign arrivals to fill jobs in agriculture and road haulage that Britons won’t take.
With high vacancies and low unemployment, industry groups are also among those calling for more immigration, especially after Brexit cut off the free passage of workers from the European Union.
“There is no good reason why we can’t train up enough truck drivers, butchers or welders,” Braverman said. She also said that “rapid migration is unsustainable in terms of housing supply, public services” and community relations.
Census data from 2021 shows that almost one-fifth of people in England and Wales were born abroad, up from 13% in 2011. More than 60% of workers in packing and bottling were born abroad, as were almost half of specialist medical practitioners, two-in-five generalist doctors and more than one-quarter of mental health nurses.
Conservative governments for years have struggled to rein in immigration, despite a long-standing pledge through the 2010s to get it down to the “tens of thousands.”
Instead, net immigration rose to a record 504,000 in the year to June 2022, and Office for National Statistics data due on May 25 is expected to eclipse that. The Centre for Policy Studies estimates it could be as high as 997,000, a figure that’s likely to heighten criticisms that the government is failing to deliver on its Brexit problems.
Energy Secretary Grant Shapps on Sunday said that he didn’t think the figure would hit a million, and pointed out that British programs to accept Ukrainian refugees and UK nationals from Hong Kong accounted for about 300,000 people. That’s a record the country “should be proud of,” he told Sky News.
Sunak has said that he wants to get immigration down “over time.” Wary of criticism from his right, he has focused on reducing the number of people arriving on Britain’s shores in small boats. Braverman is at the center of that effort.
The government says criminal gangs and people smugglers are at the root of the boat migration problem. Ministers are trying to end the crossings through deterrent policies including sending arrivals to Rwanda and banning them from ever claiming asylum or citizenship in Britain.
Legislation to deliver on that is working its way through Parliament, and during a debate in the House of Lords last week, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England whose position affords him a seat in the UK’s upper chamber, described it as “morally unacceptable.”
Nevertheless, Sunak remains undeterred by the opposition, telling the Mail on Sunday that he was leading meetings of a special panel twice weekly to discuss the immigration crackdown as the legislation progresses.
Ending small boats crossings is one of Sunak’s five core pledges that he’s asked voters to judge him on as he tries to turn around the flagging fortunes of the governing Conservatives, who have trailed the opposition Labour party by a double-digit margin in national polling for months.
A month after contracting the first barge to house people who cross the English channel, he promised to use “as many as it takes” to reduce the current bill for housing arrivals in hotels.
Sunak’s preparations for the incoming law mean that “from the moment that we have the green light we can crack on and deliver it,” he told the paper.
--With assistance from Ellen Milligan.
