THE government’s new plans to tackle immigration will be “incredibly difficult to implement, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately has said.
She told GB News: “I welcome the fact that the government and the Home Secretary herself is now listening to people on immigration and the level of unhappiness there is about the scale of immigration and the small boats. It’s taken them over a year to recognise that they’ve done nothing about it.
“In fact, the situation has just got worse under them while they’ve been in government. So they’re listening, and I welcome any steps that they plan to take to tighten up and stop the boats and control immigration. But the fact is, still don’t think that they’re going far enough.
“I think that the Home Secretary is going to find it incredibly difficult to put some of the things that she’s talking about into practice. She’s going to find it very difficult because of the opposition of Labour MPs, in fact, and even herself. It was only a few years ago that she seemed to be calling for an amnesty on legal migrants.
“So she’s going to find it very difficult with her party, and also because they say, for instance, that they won’t pull out of the ECHR, she’s going to find it difficult to do in practice because of that problem with lawfare, that we encountered when we were in government that made it so hard in practice to do the things you want to do to stop immigration.”
She added: “We will support things that are in the national interest, and we think it’s in the national interest to have stronger borders. So we will support them to make progress on controlling immigration, making progress on stopping the boats.
“And we know that that might be particularly important because we know lots of Labour backbenchers won’t support this, just as we said with welfare, we will support the government because they can’t control the welfare bill, because Keir Starmer’s backbenchers don’t support controls on public spending and on benefits.
“So yes, we’ll support them. But as I’ve said, I simply don’t think that they’re going to go far enough on stopping the boats. I think they’re going to get stuck.
“One specific thing is that they really need to leave the ECHR to achieve proper controls on our borders. Kemi Badenoch looked at that and decided that is going to be necessary. So unless they do that, I think they’re going to get stuck in this lawfare and not be able to make progress.”
