THE Conservatives wanted to achieve more than they have done whilst in government, Home Secretary James Cleverly has said.
He also described Nigel Farage’s comments about Vladimir Putin and Russia as “victim blaming of the worst order”.
Asked about the party’s credibility by Camilla Tominey on GB News, he said: “I can only do what I can do and can only do what candidates can do, which is to continue to take the message to the British people.
“We are determined to protect them from Labour tax [rises]. We are determined to protect our borders and bring down immigration and we’ve started doing both of those, Labour would reverse all of those things.
“The simple truth is, I get the frustration, I share the frustration. Of course, all of us in government would wish to have achieved more but there were some unprecedented events which put barriers in our way.
“But we are absolutely determined to continue to bring down taxes as we’ve started to do, continue to bring down immigration as we’ve started to do, and protect the British people from the disaster that would be a Labour government led by a man who has been so inconsistent even to his own party that we cannot take for granted any of the things that he has said.”
He said: “Since we had our last manifesto, we have had two once in a century events back to back. We had Covid, which was an event of such magnitude that no one could have predicted it. We dealt with it actually by international comparisons pretty well.
“We also have Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the impact that that had on fuel prices, on inflation. We have taken action to bring inflation back down to 2%. We’ve started cutting taxes for working people because that is in our DNA.”
On immigration, he said: “Keir Starmer made a series of explicit commitments to the Labour Party when he ran for the leadership and he ditched every single one of them. He campaigned tirelessly to make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister and then claimed he didn’t really mean it.
“The simple fact of the matter is the Labour Party would be soft on immigration, will ramp up taxes, and they will cut a deal with the EU which we’ll see as being brought back into the gravitational pull of the European Union and be the net recipient, as I say, of 100,000 migrants.”
Asked about Nigel Farage’s comments on Putin, he said: “There was a strong track record of Western leaders and Western countries trying to bring Russia into the into, as it were, to try and show Russia and Russians that there was a peaceful, prosperous future for them.
“Time and time again, now we’ve seen Putin reject the peaceful, more prosperous options and he’s waged conflict in Ukraine, and Russian troops in Georgia, Russian troops in other countries around Eastern Europe, and to suggest somehow that those countries brought it upon themselves I think is victim blaming of the worst order.”
