THE Home Secretary spent the back end of last week personally writing a fiery foreword to help today’s 69-page immigration clampdown plan land with a thud.
Legal migration chancers in the university and care sectors are in her sights and she is calling time on “my kids don’t like foreign chicken nugget”- type excuses for criminals and illegal immigrants to dodge deportation thanks to the absurd European Convention On Human Rights.
Yvette Cooper spent the back end of last week personally writing a fiery foreword to help today’s 69-page immigration clampdown plan land with a thud
GettyLegal migration chancers in the university and care sectors are in the Home Secretary’s sights[/caption]
The paper, Restoring Control Over The Immigration System, is all good stuff — if Labour can get it through the legion of woke types and hand-wringers on their own backbenches.
But it appears there is another blocker to migration reform in Yvette Cooper’s sights: Chancellor Rachel Reeves and two decades of Treasury group-think.
Cooper certainly had something to get off her chest on the eve of publication, taking aim directly at the fairytale belief that more foreigners is a magic pill for our economic woes: “If that approach was right we would have seen . . . soaring growth alongside it, and we didn’t.”
She told the BBC: “Actually what we saw was the economy flatlined because, by failing to invest in UK workers, that also undermines productivity, it undermines the ability to get people back into work . . . so alongside those record highs of overseas recruitment, we also have this big increase in people just not working here in the UK. Those things are linked.”
By jove, I think she gets it.
Finally, someone in this Government is willing to shoot some sacred cows of the progressive mind.
No one ever leaves the Home Office more left-wing than they entered it, so it appears Cooper has been on a bit of a journey in the last ten months.
Long may it continue, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and there are plenty of battles ahead for the Home Secretary.
I hear there has already been significant kickback from the Treasury at today’s Immigration White Paper that will now go through months of consultation before being legislated over.
It’s a good opening salvo from Cooper, but one already at risk of being strangled at birth by a Treasury still addicted to the sugar-rush of cheap imported workers as it battles to breathe life into already anaemic growth forecasts for the coming years.
And the Treasury has other plans for growth, too, namely unpicking Brexit in return for better access to EU markets.
Yesterday, the Home Sec was talking in terms of tens of thousands for what these new plans could do to reduce legal migration in the coming year or so . . . just as the Government finally admitted — after months of lying — that they will offer up similar numbers to the European Union.
In a bid to unblock the PM and Chancellor’s quest for a Brexit reset and a new defence and security deal with the bloc, free movement is back on the table.
Ever since the EU’s request for a Youth Mobility Scheme for the under-40s was revealed last August, the Government had insisted they had “no plans” to engage with such a proposal.
A return of free movement for the under-40s is the basic gist, allowing younger Europeans to once again pour into the UK to study and work.
Again and again, ministers and spinners insisted on the record that there were “no plans” for such a scheme.
Yet all the while they were secretly and misleadingly engaged in negotiations with Brussels around accepting it.
Now they tell us “a smart, controlled youth mobility scheme would of course have benefits for our young people”. It was the plan all along.
Leaving aside the rampant dishonesty, what will this do for legal migration figures?
What is the point in taking away with one hand, only to dish out tens of thousands more visas with the other?
No10 insiders insist that such a scheme will be tightly capped, but we all know the British state is pretty useless at keeping track of this stuff.
Remember when we were told there were only three million EU citizens in the UK during Brexit, only for closer to SIX MILLION to apply to stay after the Leave vote?
‘Wary of promises’
The bungling Office for National Statistics has no idea how many foreigners are really here, dramatically scaling up its predictions last year after finding an extra 166,000 migrants down the back of the sofa.
Or what of the news that the bill for asylum hotels was actually not the £4.5billion projected, but was some £10billion more?
The British state is crap at counting this stuff, so be very wary of promises of strict oversight, control or watchful eyes and numbers caps.
Yvette Cooper may be on the right path, but her biggest fights are still to come.
If we are simply going to cave in to Brussels and let tens of thousands of Europeans back into the country, this must come at the price of even tighter restrictions on visas elsewhere.
Anything less than that renders today’s migration “clampdown” purely performative.
Someone had better tell the Treasury, though . . .
ANOTHER one to add to the “JD Vance was right” file.
The combative US Vice President upset lots of right-on types when he warned in a punchy speech earlier this year that free speech was under threat in the UK.
Well, just wait until he hears about ex-cop Julian Foulkes, 71, who was lifted from his home by his own former Kent Police colleagues after tweeting about Gaza protesters.
Cops were shocked to find “Brexity books” in his house, and articles by Douglas Murray, which puts any Sun reader in trouble too.
“Free speech is clearly under attack,” Foulkes said after battling to have his crackers caution dropped.
WHEN the Tories floated the idea of using armoured jet skis in the Channel to help stop migrant boats three years ago, Labour raged: “That the Home Secretary is even considering these dangerous proposals shows how badly she has lost control of this situation.”
And Sir Keir Starmer chirped up: “It’s not about wave machines or armoured jet skis… It’s about doing the basics better. The mundane stuff. The bureaucratic stuff.”
PAThe PM said: ‘It’s not about wave machines or armoured jet skis… It’s about doing the basics better’[/caption]
Well, the mundane stuff isn’t working and the bureaucratic response is not enough.
Now on course for the worst-ever year of crossings, there is a grim irony at The Sun’s revelation this weekend that jet skis are back on the Home Office drawing board under Labour.
It’s a slightly different plan than using them to simply turn around the boats and send them back to France.
Instead, the idea is to fire netting at the dinghy propellers to stop them ever leaving the shallows.
Obviously that will require the French to pull out le doigt a bit and actually use the technology in their waters, but you can’t keep a good idea down for long.
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