BORIS JOHNSON last night came out swinging after being tarred and feathered as the poster boy for Britain’s border farce.
The ex-PM is back in the headlines as his political enemies attempt to bury him once and for all with a final stake to his heart: immigration.
Ray CollinsComing out fighting, Boris Johnson has slammed Labour for scrapping his Rwanda deportation scheme[/caption]
PABoJo has also blasted his critics who say he opened the floodgates to illegal immigration[/caption]
Yet the ousted Tory chief insisted he gets why people are taking to the streets to protest surging numbers, while attempting a full throated defence of his own fiercely debated border record.
Risking a row with his critics, he declared the public care more about illegal migration, branding it “the thing that really drives the public nuts, and drives me nuts”.
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After days of attacks from Nigel Farage about the so-called “Boriswave” of surging legal migration on his watch, the ex-PM hit back: “You want to kick out the nurses?”
‘People are furious’
Insisting Brexit Britain has the legal means to reduce net migration to zero should it wish — thanks to him — BoJo blasted his critics who say he opened the floodgates.
Despite the number of arrivals exceeding the number of departures by almost a million in the wake of Covid, Boris hit back: “What they voted for was full legal control, and that’s what they got.”
But as Brits take to the streets, raise flags and spray roundabouts, he suggested the blame lies squarely at the door of the current government.
Slamming Labour for scrapping his Rwanda deportation scheme, he said the time had to come for the UK to walk away from the European Convention on Human Rights to get a grip on illegal entry.
Asked if he understood the anger, he insisted “I do”, adding: “I think people are furious about the spectacle of a Labour government that absolutely refuses to do what it could to tackle illegal migration, and, by the way, Labour should be doing the Rwanda plan.
“They should be getting out of the ECHR that actually doesn’t make much difference to the small boats problem.”
He added: “And they should be making greater use of Brexit powers to stop [the boats] and instead what you’ve got is a government that is committed to, as far as I understand it, to going back into some sort of free movement arrangement with the EU.”
BoJo insisted: “The reason why people are so angry is because they can continue to see a government that is absolutely refusing to address the things that are making them cross.
What this appalling Labour government should be doing is, instead of begging the Albanians for a Rwanda solution, we should do the Rwanda scheme
Boris Johnson
“They’re seeing people still coming across in huge numbers, claiming asylum, going into asylum hostels, you’re asking me why people are angry, right? And I’m giving you the reason.
“There is a solution to that, and that is to make sure when they arrive In Kent, they are bounced straight to Kigali.”
Labour scrapped the nascent deportation scheme as one of Sir Keir Starmer’s first acts in office last year, despite four migrants being deported to the African nation.
AlamyThe former PM has endured days of attacks from Nigel Farage about the so-called ‘Boriswave’[/caption]
But Mr Johnson warned the scheme was now being copied by other countries and Britain has been left behind.
He blasted: “It’s painful, Harry, to see people now copying our idea.
” What this appalling Labour government should be doing is, instead of begging the Albanians for a Rwanda solution, we should do the Rwanda scheme.
“That is the way to fix illegal cross channel migration.”
In a defence of his own record when it comes to legal migration, BoJo told The Sun: “People forget what happened during Covid. They forget, for instance, that we had a huge hospital waiting list, we had to deal with that.
I was very proud that we got immigration down in my first year to its lowest levels for 40 years
Boris Johnson
“We had shortages of lorry drivers with shortages of people to stack the shelves and so on . . . if you recall, people couldn’t get fuel, inflation was taking off to double digits because of the problems we had in the supply chains.”
‘Heaped blame’
But doubling down he insisted he was “very proud that we got immigration down in my first year to its lowest levels for 40 years”.
He added: “I’m even prouder, as a result of the steps that we took, this country has the legal ability to decide if it wants to have zero people coming in.
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“Now I perfectly accept that in the difficulties that we faced with Covid, it wasn’t because of the ambiguity about the numbers that we had in this country.
“Plus we had Ukraine . . . we’re talking hundreds of thousands of people. Plus we had a lot of students coming back.”
And he heaped blame on the bungling Home Office for overestimating the amount of Europeans that would leave the UK after Brexit, meaning too many visas were handed over to fresh arrivals.
Boris lamented: “If you remember the rhetoric of the time was that they were going to leave — do you remember? They’re all going to leave and it was the end. And what happened?
“What happened was people believed this nonsense about EU nationals and foreigners fleeing, but they didn’t at all.”
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and The Sun’s Editor-at-Large Harry ColeRay Collins Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
