October 5 2026 - 7:00am
Ahead of this year’s Conservative Party Conference, Kemi Badenoch gave interviews stressing that she doesn’t care if she’s disliked. If taking a stronger line on immigration makes her “nasty“, then so be it.
But if her new 95-page manifesto is anything to go by, the tough talk only goes so far. Indeed, many of its immigration policies look little different from those proposed by rival parties. Despite taking a more liberal line than Reform UK and Restore Britain on questions of Britishness and integration, the differences are far less apparent when it comes to actual immigration policy.
A year ago, Badenoch announced that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would become party policy. This was a position that Reform and her 2024 Tory leadership rival Robert Jenrick had long advocated, but on which she had previously been more cautious. The ECHR pledge is central to the immigration section of the new manifesto, The Right Way, alongside a vow to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 — another of Reform’s promises. Badenoch’s argument that “foreign criminals should be deported and never allowed to return” follows on from the Labour government’s policy of canceling the visas of foreign offenders, whether the crime in question took place in the UK or abroad.
Fieldwork carried out shortly before the 2024 general election found that the main reason for voters defecting from the Conservative Party was perceived failures on immigration. Badenoch acknowledges those failures in The Right Way, but she may struggle to win back many of the Faragist converts when her own border proposals appear more liberal than his. Where Reform has pushed for net-negative migration, the new Tory document stresses that the party is not seeking “zero immigration” or even net-zero migration, only accepting arrivals at “a level and pace the country can absorb successfully”. Where Reform wants to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain, the Conservatives have suggested doubling the necessary period before an immigrant can claim settlement from five years to 10 — seemingly mirroring plans announced by Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood over a year ago.
Much of what Badenoch proposes in her manifesto would be an improvement on successive Tory governments that presided over record levels of immigration, culminating in a net migration peak of 944,000 in the year ending March 2023. Some of the vagueness around the policy details is politically savvy, too, as she calls for a “Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship Bill” that would enforce a legally binding cap on immigration “determined by the British people”. In doing so, she has avoided naming a precise figure that could haunt her in the way that David Cameron’s “tens of thousands” net migration pledge hovered over his efforts to control Britain’s borders.
The problem is that there is no single immigration policy where Badenoch could argue she is outflanking Nigel Farage, a politician she has previously labeled “socialist”. Her set-piece speech on Wednesday will be watched carefully for any surprises, but the comprehensiveness of The Right Way suggests that it contains the full extent of the Tories’ current plans. Of hundreds of events at this week’s conference, only one is centered on immigration. Badenoch may not care about pleasing people, but she will have to offer more to the voters who left her party primarily because of its inability to stem mass immigration.
