Former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has admitted that his government was not in a position to actually fulfil his promise to the public of ending the illegal migrant crisis in the English Channel while expressing regret over the “stop the boats” slogan.
In yet another admission from the so-called Conservative Party of misleading the public on promises to cut immigration, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak admitted this week that his “stop the boats” pledge was “too stark” and that it couldn’t actually be delivered.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking With Nick Robinson podcast, Sunak appeared to have more regrets over his messaging rather than his failures to deliver on promises, saying of his government’s handing of the boat migrant crisis: “The way it was communicated wasn’t quite right. It was too stark, it was too binary and I probably should have put those priorities, which I still believe were the right priorities, in a better context for exactly how challenging it was.”
“The communications were too stark… I thought there was a value in clarity,” he said.
After being installed in October of 2022 against the wishes of the Conservative Party membership following a Westminster palace coup against short-tenured PM Liz Truss, Sunak vowed to the public that his government would “stop the boats”, with the slogan often being emblazoned on podiums during speeches to the public.
The vow relied heavily on the failed Rwanda scheme first floated by Boris Johnson’s government, in which illegal boat migrants would be sent to detention centres in Kigali rather than being put up in hotels across Britain, as has become commonplace following the Chinese coronavirus crisis. The plan was pitched to the public as the only means of deterring further illegal aliens from crossing the Channel from the beaches of France.
However, after initially being shut down by a ruling from the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) the plan was mired in lengthy legal challenges within the broadly illegal migrant-friendly judiciary in Britain and thus never came to fruition before ultimately being scrapped by the Labour Party after Sunak’s blowout loss to the leftist party in the July general election.
Rishi Sunak Pledges to Cut Inflation and Stop Illegal Migrants… Eventuallyhttps://t.co/htllbtwalu
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 4, 2023
Critics, such as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, argued that Sunak should have simply turned back the boats to France and to have withdrawn Britain from the ECHR, which the UK is still bound by despite Brexit as it is technically a separate institution from the EU, even though it is so closely aligned as to share the same flag, anthem, and campus in France.
Despite his refusals while in office to leave the ECHR, Sunak admits now that it may be the right move after all, telling the BBC this week that the court has “taken on new powers. There’s been mission creep… It does need to reform, or we should leave.”
In addition to failing to stem the tide of illegal aliens landing on British shores during his tenure, the former prime minister also oversaw the highest levels of legal immigration in recorded history, with net migration soaring to over 900,000 in the year up to June of 2023.
In his first major interview since his historic defeat, Sunak claimed that he “took very strong action to bring the levels of legal migration down” but should have “done them sooner”.
The admission from Sunak falls in line with previous statements from top Tories of the hollow nature of the party’s immigration promises to the public. Despite having pledged in their election manifestos in 2010, 2015, and 2017 to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” the party never followed through, and migration continued to rise. In 2017, right-hand man to David Cameron, George Osbourne, revealed that none of the party leadership ever intended to fulfil the promise and that behind closed doors, they were against cutting migration.
The party’s refusal to implement promised migration cuts not only resulted in a landslide loss in last year’s elections but has seen the traditional party of government relegated to the third-strongest party in the UK, having been leapfrogged in the polls by both Labour and the anti-mass migration Reform UK party of Nigel Farage, which has rocketed to the top of the polls in recent months.
‘Horrendous’: Immigration to UK Hits Record High of Nearly One Million https://t.co/N89NITWUtP
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 28, 2024
