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August 17, 2024 - 8:00am
In recent years, each successive Tory leadership election has felt like a new and exciting way to find out who is going to disappoint us next. But on the back of the Conservatives’ greatest ever election defeat, this year’s contest has taken on a new dimension. What the candidates delivered in office is, if anything, more important than what they promise in Opposition.
Chief among these failures was immigration, and no candidate will be more vulnerable as a result than Priti Patel. In her four-year stint as home secretary, she designed and implemented Britain’s most liberal immigration system ever, under which legal migration trebled, small boat crossings increased by nearly 25 times and student dependents rose by 750%.
Facing sustained criticism of her record — including from Community Notes on X — Patel this week took to Chopper’s Political Podcast to defend it, arguing that the immigration spike was caused by the need for doctors and nurses. It would be a wonderful argument — if it were true. Yet the reality is that under her system (in place from 2021), health and care visas for doctors and nurses barely rose.
The Tory failure to deliver easily-promised decreases in immigration has left the party’s Right flank consistently exposed for the last 14 years, allowing Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to capture large parts of the usual Conservative base. In this leadership race, the commitment and record of each candidate on reducing immigration may be the most important single element of their CV. The membership will be unforgiving to those who show what they perceive as mealy-mouthed commitments to reducing immigration — or, for that matter, a weak record in office.
Regardless of what attracted them to other parties, the voters who left the Conservatives — in whatever direction — were driven primarily by the same fundamental failure. Not that Rishi Sunak’s party was too Left-wing or too Right-wing, but that there was too large a difference between its pledges and its actions. The Conservatives’ primary problems in government were simply a competency crisis and an inability to keep promises.
But this betrayal stretches far beyond 2019, as James Vitali has pointed out. “Over the past fourteen years,” he writes, “the Party has pledged to the public that it would reduce the size of the state, grip immigration, roll back identity politics, drive up productivity and secure better standards of living for everyone in our United Kingdom. It has failed on each one of these commitments.”
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SubscribeThe article presumes that an individual can change the direction of the blob. But the blob is not for turning.
Ms. Patel complained about her officials in my hearing. She seemed to think that the Home Office was out of control when she took over, and she succeeded in bringing officials to heel. I was not impressed.
For one thing, she was attacking people who are not allowed to hit back. It left a nasty taste in the mouth.
For another, ministers who do as they’re told by their officials are known as ‘housetrained’. It’s a phenomenon that’s been around for centuries. Competent ministers tend to speak highly of their officials.
Are you assuming that Home Office officials have no political molecules in their body?
The membership has to reward her by ensuring she finishes a pitiful last in the contest. Then they should do the same for Miss Badenoch who petitioned for every new measure to liberalise immigration and then voted for the legislation.
It looks like PP won’t make it through to the stage where the membership vote.
Pledge are not practical policies. It was remarkable how long the Tories, and the Right more generally who must share the blame if nothing else for being so gormless, stayed fixated on Pledges without any real underpinning strategies to deliver them. You get away with sloganeering for a while but not when you’ve been in power 14yrs.
On legal migration – they just failed to take the actions some years ago to reduce our needs for it. This of course was because it wasn’t without consequences (in access to certain services, costs or goods), and they didn’t want to level with the Public what those consequences would be. They still don’t (Nor does Farage of course whilst he fans the flames). Of course thinking Brexit solved the fundamentals a total nonsense that they took a while to fess up to too.
On illegal migration they were short sighted on the Dublin Agreement whilst naffing off the EU and the French. Berks. And then put all their eggs in the Rwanda basket that even if it had come off would have only had a limited impact. In the meantime they failed to build processing capacity, decent holding facilities and engage in the realpolitik on return deals. They also failed to target the criminals doing the smuggling whilst also allowing the data sharing and partnership with French and European crime agencies to deteriorate under a wave of anti-EU rhetorical twaddle. You couldn’t make it up.
If the Dublin Agreement was worth the paper it was written on we wouldn’t have a single illegal immigrant here in the UK as ever single one has passed through one or more EU countries before turning up on our shores and therefore were required to apply for asylum in one of those coutries. Whetheror not we are signatories to the e agreement was and is irrelevant.
Not quite and suspect the finer details not something you’ve checked out. We would still be taking asylum claims and we couldn’t have just removed all legal means of claiming asylum and hid behind the Channel – which was the Tory plan essentially until rubber boats circumvented that. It would still have left us with some responsibilities. But we’d have been able to return far more than ever were going to Rwanda. Germany returns thousands. No reason we couldn’t have as part of the deterrence strategy.
It is inevitable that tackling the problem of illegal migration will require more partnership working, including the sharing of data (which we pulled out of, doh!). We’ve had our childish phase on it and now need to grow up fast and work with others. We all want it reduced.
You couldn’t make it up.
I think you just did.
You think? Not sure are you. Read up on it HB, and more than one view so it’s rounded before you come to a position yourself
So the essence of this argument is that when you make commitments you need to keep them or there are consequences. Who knew?
Doesn’t really matter who the Tory mp’s favour because the electorate have already passed their verdict on the party and, by extension, all of the candidates. Highly unlikely many will change their minds in the foreseeable future (me included).
That doesn’t let labour off the hook either as they will be put under a microscope by an electorate who have already tasted blood (metaphorically).
There was palpable relief at getting 120 odd seats instead of the lowest predictions of under 50, and the blasé reaction has been: we’ve been here before (Blair), we survived and came back to power. They are now hoping for pretty much a mirror of the Labour result – that the win falls into their lap after a few years of turmoil under Labour. So I honestly don’t think the Tories realise how close to extinction they are – and not just because they are incapable of attracting younger members or younger voters, but because a sizable proportion of the support they have lost is not coming back anytime soon.
There are no untainted candidates (each of them have been in government posts), none of them show any signs of star quality, we’ve all seen what they delivered when in power, and there is no reason whatsoever to trust any of them to do any different in the future. What the Tory high circle don’t seem to catch is, what these candidates are offering has no appeal to an ever growing number of their past bedrock, especially on migration, but across the board, so they will keep losing support. If they did, the pitches the candidates are making would be very different. None are willing to repudiate wholesale the governments they served in and offer decisive change (cf the Patel interview and excuses), instead they are all offering varieties of BAU with a few sops. No one, for example is suggesting a near hard stop on inward migration for a few years (and the depressing thing is none of them are even willing to debate this, let alone acknowledge why this is needed). They have also, all of them, offered a totally pathetic response to Starmer’s authoritarian turn in response to the riots. None seem at all keen to acknowledge the multi-tierism blatantly visible in the application of the law, policing and sentencing, not least, no doubt, because they and their colleagues were instrumental in embedding those policies, and they are all hopeless about defending freedom of expression.
To me, the contest is an irrelevance. It matters not what Patel or any of the candidates say or do, because they are a lost cause.
Couldn’t agree more. I had a quick look at Conservative Home after the election, and the attitude of those posting was astonishing. Anyone who was a member of the previous government ought to begin with an apology, a humble admission of personal failure and a firm purpose of amendment.
My specific impression of Priti Patel was of nastiness; being abusive to migrants while refusing to take any effective action. Hard to think of anything worse.
The ‘always voted Tory’ demographic kept them above 100 seats this time, but that support is ageing and dying (in spite of Attlee’s NHS which has kept them going all these years). In 2029 their potential voter base will be quite different.
Your comments makes me wonder how people in countries without “Attlee’s NHS” survive past middle age. The UK ranks 40th in the world for life expectancy, far below countries like Greece and Portugal. Maybe it’s all these years of “Tory austerity”!
I am not a fan but Peter Hitchens made a good point on TV last week. He said that just because you vote for somebody doesn’t mean that you get what you want. Voting and hoping is the lazy way to get something.
He then went on to say that everlasting local community action was the only way. So, if you want speed bumps outside your house you don’t just vote for somebody who says the right thing and it happens magically. You agitate, appeal to the local press, stand in the road to slow down the traffic, obstruct council meetings, do things to get on local TV, etc. And you never stop. (my example).
Last year a hotel in Llanelli was set aside for immigrants. Local people set up a ring around it, lived in tents, appealed to anyone crossing the line, got in local TV, had newspaper support. They did this for months in a very peaceful way. Then the order was rescinded.
It so happens that Priti spoke to my constituency association last Thursday. I asked her a hard question on immigration, and from her answer, came to the same conclusion as Tom Jones.
She’s as soft on legal migration as Labour, but hides it behind bloodcurdling rhetoric. Shame really: I had a long chat with her after the meeting, and she’s a likeable soul. But she should be kept as far away from power as possible.
The existing Tories are toast. Patel is toast for the reasons cited. All of the meek runaway wets who bowed to the ruling State credos – toast. This is the politics of 2024. But in 4 years everything will be so very different. The Tory growth/low inflation legacy will quickly be burnt toast. In the autumn Reeves will declare war not just on poor pensioners and every ‘customer’ of the broken monolithic health service & all public sector services starved of resources by non stop striking 22 percenters staff. She will set her class hating redistributive tax wolves on the already stressed tax whipped middle classes…millions of them..and also attack the whole business SME sector with punitive taxation and 1970s union regulations. Employers will very soon be reeling from Askeffy union power, deranged Birmingham City race and equality laws and Millibandite energy mega cost inflation and blackouts by 2029. I suggest this hardcore socialist Anti Growth onslaught will break both the lockdown roasted economy and our de facto bankrupt Big Soviet State by 2029. At which stage the only viable political manifesto will be one delivered by a Kemi within a brand new purged centre right ‘New Conservatives’. The Progressive State 1992/7 – present will be toast too. The millions who made up the 2019 majority – Tory/UKIP – were repelled by Corbynite Leftism. They will unite again to jettison these Leftist fanatics under a broad centre right flag. The cold eyed Starmerites are like the last Kamikaze pilots in 1945 heading out in their Zeros to sea to take on vast US armadas. They will not be coming back. There are five years to prepare. First – watch the meltdown.
It’s not unusual