Fewer than one in ten Britons think Rishi Sunak will meet his pledge to stop asylum seekers reaching the UK by small boat, according to a YouGov survey that underlines the prime minister’s failure so far to match rhetoric with results on immigration.
Sunak started the year by making five key pledges on the economy, immigration and health care that he’s asked voters to judge him on — including the promise to “stop the boats.” But so far this year, more than 15,000 asylum seekers have arrived on Britain’s shores — a rate that’s lower than last year but still exceeds all previous years.
Just 9% of Britons are “confident” or “quite confident” that Sunak’s policies to cut arrivals will work, and 80% lack confidence in the measures, YouGov said on Tuesday in a statement. Almost three quarters said they think it’s unlikely the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda will ever come to fruition, after the policy was declared unlawful in late June. The government is appealing that decision.
The Conservative government has prioritized cracking down on cross-channel immigration in an effort to close a double-digit polling gap on the opposition Labour Party.
This week, Britain is beginning to move asylum seekers to a barge in southern England in an effort to cut down on the cost of housing arrivals in hotels. The government is also setting up a task force dedicated to taking action against the “small minority” of “crooked” lawyers who it says encourage illegal migrants to make false asylum claims in order to stay in the UK, the Home Office said on Tuesday in a statement.
The decision came after the Solicitors Regulation Authority, an industry watchdog, closed down three legal firms named in a Daily Mail investigation into immigration services.
--With assistance from Alex Mortimer.
