Immigration: How British Politics Failed (2024) s01e02 Episode Script
Episode 2
1
OCR and Synch by Andante
If I could link in the minds of
the British people immigration
with membership of the European
Union, then everything would change.
We haven't got enough
houses now, as it is.
So where are you going to put them?
Just remember how many immigrants,
like my family, like a lot
of the people in this audiences
family, have built this nation.
The problem has been that
immigrants, asylum seekers
have all been confused in
the popular mind.
Anti - immigration groups
were behind disturbances in several
English towns and cities last night.
One of the protesters told me
the country was full
and foreigners were the problem.
The idea that we had some sort of
open door immigration policy
is just absolute nonsense.
We wanted to see strict limits
at a scale that was not
going to disturb the nature
of our very historic
and peaceful country.
What I saw was the tabloid press
becoming unhinged about this issue.
British jobs for British workers.
Net immigration in the tens
of thousands.
My promise to you - to stop
the boats.
There is a pervasive view that
more immigration
is better for the country.
It was too high.
It wasn't being controlled,
it needed to be controlled.
The fact is, we're not
in control of it,
and to say otherwise is misleading
the public.
I'm Craig Oliver. I was director
of politics and communications
at Number 10 Downing Street.
There was a huge amount of polling
about what was going on
in the country, and "what issues
did people consider
"to be the most important?"
And every week, bar one, immigration
was at the top of that list.
It was a huge issue.
David Cameron felt that it was
his duty as Prime Minister
to address that issue, which is
where his pledge to get
net migration down to the tens
of thousands came from.
One of the aims of my government was
that we should have an economy
that can function and grow and
become more productive
without mass migration every year.
In 2010, 2011, 2012, we were getting
net migration down.
We were making progress.
The Conservatives have adopted
this slogan,
and were clearly not going to meet it.
They felt very vulnerable,
politically, because of it.
And the response was to become,
in some cases, more rationally
restrictive, in other cases
completely irrational and damaging.
But we saw, you know, an element
of panic.
Theresa May and David Cameron
wanted to bring together
all the different departments
to come up with policies
that would be as hostile as possible
for immigrants who they didn’t want
to be in the country.
From where I was sitting, it felt
like a lot to do with appealing
to the right of a political party.
The idea of having a sort of
internal border, where you check
whether people who are using public
services are actually in the country
legitimately, that is a very
sensible policy
and that wasn't in any way
a reaction to anything else
that was going on.
Theresa May - "We're
going to give illegal migrants
"a really hostile reception."
It's an interview in the
Daily Telegraph.
The Immigration
Minister, Damian Green,
said he was working closely with
other government departments
to create a hostile environment
for migrants
to live in the UK illegally.
It's a get-tough policy.
Finding suspected illegal
immigrants and removing them.
So, we've got a warrant to be
on the premises, OK?
The words that were attached to it,
of hostile environment, were
were a bad idea.
But the fundamental thinking
behind it was that when people
who are here illegally want to live
in social housing, or want to use
the health service,
or other public services,
you identify whether or not they
have a right to be here.
This turned ordinary people, landlords,
into immigration officers.
This, you know, turned employers
into immigration officers.
The impact on migrants of those
policies was huge.
People stopped actually renting
to migrants, even those
who have status, who have visas.
Because they are not immigration
officers, they can't tell.
They did not want to take the risk.
It basically brought an awful
lot of people
into the arm of enforcement.
I remember arriving at Finsbury Park
station one evening,
and suddenly the place is full of
immigration officers
stopping people randomly.
Who were they stopping?
Asian people, African people,
Caribbean people.
It was always obvious that
the hostile environment
was never going to just affect
a very small group of people.
People of colour, they were
treated as foreigners, and often
that assumption that they were
migrants or foreigners
was initially based on skin colour.
The phrase "hostile environment"
was used inside the Home Office,
specifically about illegal immigrants
who had no right to be here,
and it was one of those
phrases where political
opponents managed to distort it
in a fairly successful way.
How do you spot an
illegal immigrant?
In London, it's probably nigh on
impossible.
The Government says this pilot
poster campaign
will target illegal immigrants.
This is just the latest in a
series of immigration initiatives.
I think it's a fantastic idea.
We need to clean up the mess,
because it's creating a lot of
problems here.
And, also, the people who are
legally entitled to work
are being deprived of jobs.
When I saw that van
Actually, I saw it on the street.
I mean, my heart sank.
We felt so low, so depressed.
It took us by surprise how low the
Government could actually go.
And because all of us migrants,
we lived here for many, many years,
we should feel British.
We felt this is targeting us.
This area, I've always said about
immigration is what is required,
is calm and moderate and
sensible language,
and tough, robust action.
And all too often in British
politics, you've had tough language
and weak action.
Got it the wrong way round.
There was always a tension between
David Cameron and Theresa May,
and there was a particular issue
with her department
and her special advisers, who often
would do things that I think
that David Cameron should have been
a lot clearer about saying,
"Look, you shouldn't be doing
this kind of thing."
And sometimes things would burst
into the open, that we discovered
had happened, that we would not
have sanctioned.
I don't think I was aware of the
Go Home vans at the time.
We ended up looking as if somehow
that this was playing to
the gallery, rather than actually
having a serious solution
to a problem.
There were some returns achieved
as a result of that.
But I think politicians
I think politicians should be
willing to step up to the plate
and say when they think something
actually hasn't been as good
an idea, and I think they were
too blunt an instrument.
When I first met Nigel Farage,
he was a telephone call
into my own home when
I was watching Spooks on TV.
And I remember thinking that it was
just a joke from my brother,
making up that this person
was calling me,
and it turned out that it was Nigel.
When we met, he was affable.
But there was always this sense
that it was never his true self
that was talking to you.
I think always Nigel's main point
was that he wanted to leave
the European Union, and the
immigration wasn't a big issue
for him in so many ways.
Nigel picked up on the very clear
message coming from those people
that immigration was becoming
a big issue in the UK.
Immigration enabled Nigel, then,
to start talking about
other issues that impacted, say,
poorer sectors of society.
And that was the great opening gap.
Without that, UKIP wouldn't
have grown.
UKIP emerged as a
separate political force,
and were taking a position
on immigration, with which,
of course, we agreed.
With Migration Watch being rational
and logical about what the impact
of this massive increase in
population would mean for schools,
roads, access to GPs, and everything
else, I think to some extent
it did help to make wholesale debate
amongst the British public
respectable.
Nigel relied on them a lot himself.
He had more private meetings
with them than was allowed
by people like myself.
With the help of people like
Andrew Green, Nigel was then able
to start, develop an argument that
talked about EU migration
and the numbers coming across.
That allowed pressure onto
the Conservative Party.
FARAGE: Why are so many foreign
people entitled to benefits at all?
And, of course, the reason is, we're
all members of this European Union.
And now we've given them total
freedom to use our benefits system,
our health system, our schools.
Migration Watch were a very
important group.
They were producing numbers,
none of them were ever wrong.
Their predictions were also
incredibly good.
That legitimised everything
I stood up and said.
It was important to have them there.
So, Migration Watch, yeah,
a big part in all of this.
Nigel Farage, he's a very, very
skilled campaigner,
and he very effectively used
immigration as an issue
and put it front and centre
in terms of his aim of getting us
out of the European Union.
Down every street in Eastleigh,
the chase for votes continued.
The postal vote is very
Squeezing every last chance to
get their message across.
UKIP think they could
do well, possibly come first,
maybe beat the Tories to second.
They've put immigration
front and centre.
Thanks very much for stopping there.
There needs to be a moratorium on
immigration for a period of time
to allow this country to absorb
what is here already.
The Conservatives are
deploying their big guns
to try to stop that happening.
There's no doubt the Conservative
Party and David Cameron
had underestimated UKIP.
It was clear that they were
a presence and a force
and a problem for the
Conservative Party.
That only grew over time.
There was a massive pressure on
David Cameron in and around Europe.
Public disillusionment with the EU
is at an all-time high.
That is why I am in favour of having
a referendum.
Oh, there was elation that
we'd applied pressure now
on the Conservative Party,
that they had actually gone so far
as to say that they needed to
have a referendum.
And that was a clear recognition
that UKIP had come of age.
To say, " Look, it was all because of
pressure from UKIP,"
that's complete nonsense.
I first started writing and thinking
about the need for a sort of reset
in Britain's relations with Europe
in January 2012,
when UKIP were barely polling.
They were, like, 4% or 5%.
So, of course they grew, and of
course I thought they were going to
grow as we went into a European
election in 2014.
But the motivation for trying to
sort out Britain's relationship
with Europe was not so much
about UKIP.
It was more about that I thought
the relationship wasn't working.
There was no way that Cameron would
ever have offered a referendum
had it not been for the rise
in UKIP.
All the press say, "Well, that's
it, the UKIP fox has been shot."
No, all he done was legitimise us.
Nonsense.
I mean, it really is nonsense.
If you read the speech, it actually
barely mentions immigration at all.
In fact, I don't think it does
at all.
It probably should have done,
but it didn't.
The UK Independence
Party may have come second,
but those smiles tell you they think
they've made the big time.
For the Conservatives, they were,
I think, shocked that UKIP,
who had been trying to build up
hostility to immigration,
effectively broke through in
that by-election,
and that really sent alarm bells
ringing in the Tory Party.
From that point onwards,
there was a huge energy.
And you saw, then, us winning
seats in local elections
up and down the country.
The political party once
dismissed by the Conservatives
as loonies and clowns has tonight
sent a shock wave through
the Westminster establishment.
We need to show respect for people
who've taken the choice to support
this party, and we're going to work
really hard to win them back.
What then happens,
which I hadn't foreseen,
was, of course, you get
the euro zone crisis.
Unemployment across the eurozone
remains stubbornly high.
In Madrid tonight, protesters
clashed with the police
after the announcement that
unemployment had reached
another record level.
LOUD BANG
For those under 25,
the jobless rate has reached
a staggering 57%.
You get this huge influx of people
coming in to take in the jobs
that my government
was successfully creating.
The euro zone crisis
was a real setback,
and that wasn't something
I had predicted.
By the time we got to 2013-2014,
people had realised we didn't
have any control over numbers
coming into Britain whatsoever.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: Our first question
from Danny Rose, please.
Is it time we defied Europe
and closed our borders
and say we're full?
The main concern in immigration
is that people come over here
and they work for three months.
Once they finish a three-month
contract, they're then out there
and they claim benefits from that.
I was the director of strategy
in Downing Street.
Every weekend we asked one
completely open, unprompted question
in an opinion poll of 2,000
people all over the country.
And the question was -
if you could raise just one issue
with the Prime Minister David
Cameron, what would it be?
And every weekend,
with one exception,
that word cloud was dominated
by the word "immigration".
This is a leaflet that
Nigel Farage's party distributed
in the recent Eastleigh by-election,
you may remember it.
It says here that 29 million
Romanians and Bulgarians
may come to this country.
There aren't even 29 million
Romanians and Bulgarians
Bulgarians living in Romania and Bulgaria.
It is simply not true.
Nigel Farage
grinning because his dream
of topping a national vote
came true.
It is an earthquake
in British politics.
It is a remarkable result
and it does have, I think,
profound consequences for the
leaders of the other parties.
The Conservatives have defied
all the pundits
and won a majority of MPs
in Parliament.
Decisive, clear cut, emphatic.
This was a sensational victory
for David Cameron.
UKIP took 13%,
but their leader failed
to win a seat.
I will now form a majority
Conservative government.
And, yes, we will deliver
that in-out referendum
on our future in Europe.
If he had not said that there
was going to be a referendum,
Nigel Farage would have
continued his march.
Hundreds of refugees
poured onto the platforms.
They race towards a train.
Children were hauled up
into the carriage,
others climbed on the backs
of those hoping to squeeze in.
Immigration came onto the
public agenda very strongly,
and I think a lot of that
was the Syrian civil war.
I think people feared that a lot
of that migration ultimately
was going to end up
in the United Kingdom.
Groups of migrants
are breaking through
Calais defences using watchmen,
wire cutters and force of numbers.
More than 100 extra police have been
brought in to help keep control,
but the lure of the UK is stronger.
A lot of the concern about
immigration in the country
was about people from
outside the European Union.
But that problem got conflated
with people from Eastern Europe.
And so it was a debate
that was not just toxic,
but it was also very confusing.
I provided all of the
private polling
and was one of the strategy
advisers to that campaign.
Most people in Britain thought
that the scale of people
coming to the UK from the EU
and the fact that we couldn't limit
or control that was a problem.
If that was the primary issue
in their mind when they voted,
we would lose.
It’s getting too much, you know,
there’s too many people coming in.
You know, they've opened the doors,
haven't they, practically?
Because there's no work for us.
So how can we survive?
There's too much people come in.
Britain's relationship with Europe
is going to need to change.
A renegotiation accompanied
by a referendum will be necessary
to get it back into place.
As David Cameron left
last night confident his reforms
would make a difference, critics
already claimed this deal was weak.
Within hours of this
crucial summit ending,
it seems the referendum campaign
is just starting.
I negotiated that you shouldn't get
full access to the welfare system
for four years.
But it wasn't a slam dunk,
because it wasn't no benefits for
four years,
it was a sort of sliding scale.
So it was complicated
and it was second best.
And so on the subject of immigration
in the referendum campaign,
you know, we knew we were
on ground
weaker than we would have liked.
It fell far, far short for anybody
who was really concerned
about the issue of the
straightforward simplicity of
"take back control".
Hi. Good morning.
Good morning.
This is a choice for a generation,
potentially for a lifetime.
Do we stay in or do we leave
a reformed European Union?
Both sides are now
stepping up their efforts
to persuade you of their arguments.
David Cameron said
he would get net migration
down to the tens of thousands.
That became a massive stick
to beat him with
during the referendum campaign.
The issue is an open door
to 500 million people,
and net migration running at a third
of a million people a year.
And this under a Prime Minister who
promised us he’d reduce migration
to tens of thousands a year.
The genius of Nigel Farage
was to link THE most salient issue
in the minds of the public -
immigration -
with the issue on which he was
trying to wage a referendum -
the European Union.
And I think that linkage
was very, very skilfully done.
When we were talking about Britain's
access to the single market
and how it was good for business
and good for jobs,
when we were talking about that,
we were winning.
And when we were talking about
immigration and the fact that
with free movement of people,
you couldn't effectively control
who was coming into your country,
we were losing.
This whole debate
is about democracy
CHEERING
and our ability to speak up.
And we won't be drowned out,
will we?
No!
I think it definitely made the task
of the Remain campaign harder
that there were two Leave campaigns.
You had the official Vote Leave
campaign run by Dominic Cummings.
That was able to steer away
from some of the more
inflammatory language on
immigration, because they knew
that the other campaign,
Leave. EU run by Nigel Farage,
would go there.
When I first met Cummings -
"Immigration? Oh, no, no, no, we're
not discussing that.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no."
The Leave campaign, the mainstream
designated Leave campaign,
certainly at first at least didn't
talk about reducing immigration,
they talked about controlling
immigration.
From the moment that the ONS figures
on immigration numbers came out
at the end of May 2016,
that changed.
Net migration
to the UK has risen
to its second highest level
on record,
according to the
latest official figures.
Look at the immigration
figures today.
Look at the sheer numbers
that are coming in.
That needs to be got under control.
The real thing that swung the
European Union referendum,
and it was 333,000,
there was the man, David Cameron,
who said we’d get it down
to the tens of thousands
leading the campaign, if you like,
to remain in the European Union,
he was finished from the time
that statistic came out.
Is it not time we took back control
of our immigration policy?
It felt a difficult argument,
because the fundamental point
about free movement is
you didn't have You know,
any number of people from
EU countries could come to Britain.
And they had been coming in
very large numbers.
On a Saturday afternoon,
I was called up by the Sunday Times
and told
that there was going to be
a 5,000-word letter
penned by Michael Gove
and Boris Johnson,
and the headline that they were
going to use was that David Cameron
had been deeply disingenuous
in saying that he wanted
to cut net migration
to the tens of thousands.
Two senior Conservatives,
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove,
have called on David Cameron
to accept the failure of his
pledge to cut immigration.
And I remember we were very deep
into the campaign at this stage
and phoning the Prime Minister.
He was very angry, so much so
that he put the phone down.
And he called me up three
minutes later and he said,
"I'm sorry about that,
but I just can't believe
"that these two people, one
of whom is godparent to my children,
"is claiming that I'm being deeply
disingenuous about this.
"I'm not, I care about this,
it's a huge issue
"and yet every opportunity they're
accusing me of being a liar."
I think one of the final points
for me in terms of my views
on immigration and Nigel
was in relation
to the Breaking Point poster.
We’d won the argument.
We didn’t need to push it any more,
we didn’t need to go down that line.
I remember saying
A conversation with Nigel,
I said, " I don’t think
that was necessary to do that."
And his view was
it was absolutely necessary.
It's an extraordinarily
incendiary poster
to suggest Britain is somehow at
breaking point because of migrants.
Well, what it says,
it says "Breaking Point",
and beneath it, it says
the EU has failed us all.
I put it to you that we are not
part of the Schengen Area,
and therefore these migrants
are not coming to Britain
and it is nothing to do
with EU migration into the UK.
The EU has failed us all.
That poster was coming out
and unfortunately we had Jo Cox die
on the same day.
I think he believed it was just
unfortunate,
but he believed
that we needed to get the issue
of immigration
back out there, and I didn't.
The Breaking Point poster worked.
Why?
Because it got the argument back
onto immigration
in the last few days,
and that was very difficult
after the murder of Jo Cox.
It wasn't true to say that all
the people fleeing Syria
or fleeing war-torn countries
were coming to Britain.
They weren't.
Would you agree with Nigel Farage's
poster this morning launched
saying, "Breaking Point"
and that huge queue?
It's not our campaign.
It's not my approach.
I think the official Leave campaign
was happy that Nigel Farage existed.
They were able to say,
"He's not part of us,
"he's over there, we can't take
responsibility for him"
while being very happy to travel
in the slipstream of his borderline
and sometimes overtly
racist statements
about what was going on
in terms of migration.
The Breaking Point poster, I think,
was the object example of that.
I've been demonised for daring
to talk about these subjects.
I've never, ever, ever wanted
any form of violence,
any form of racist ideology.
The polls opened
at 7am this morning,
and the faces who've dominated
this referendum campaign
were up early, too.
I went to vote at 11 o’clock.
A poll came out showing
that Remain was ten points ahead.
I convinced myself we’d lose.
You had to mentally prepare
yourself to lose.
And then, of course, we saw
Newcastle and Sunderland
and realised that
it might be different.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: The British
people have spoken
and the answer is we're out.
Out! Out! Out!
Out! Out! Out!
I felt desperately disappointed.
I felt I'd thrown everything
I had into that campaign.
I was 100% for the position
I had set out,
and that's why I thought
it was important
to leave office afterwards.
But obviously it was
deeply, deeply disappointing.
If you're born poor,
you will die on average nine years
earlier than others.
If you're black,
you're treated more harshly
by the criminal justice system
than if you're white.
The government I lead will be driven
not by the interests
of the privileged few, but by yours.
The arrival of more than
400 happy Jamaicans.
They've come to seek work in Britain
and are ready and willing
to do any kind of job
that will help the motherland
along the road to prosperity.
We came in 1961.
I was three months old.
So, yeah, we've been
from the early stages
until Mummy and Daddy managed to
purchase a house in Hackney,
and then my two youngest siblings
were born.
I had always wanted
to be a secretary.
That's obviously why my parents
paid for me to take private
typing lessons.
I worked for the NHS
for a long time.
My various other siblings
got into other departments.
It was like NHS, Post Office,
London Transport, you know,
or the police force.
He said, " No," you know,
"we're not happy with you
"not having a British passport.
"There's other people here
"who are looking for the work
and who are British."
And then I realised, "Wow,
what are you saying to me?
"You know, this doesn't sound
right."
The only passport I've got is
a Dominican passport.
But I never thought I was illegal,
cos I'm British.
I got terminated from my job.
I couldn't get benefits.
I didn't have any money.
I just couldn't understand.
The immigration officers
rigorously screen the passengers.
The questions were put kindly,
but the answers
were listened to keenly.
Already, the Home Office's
new instructions
were being strictly carried out.
The Home Office has always been,
um, negative and unyielding
on questions of migration.
I first became aware of this issue
because I do so much
immigration casework.
And it started to be a pattern
that I was dealing with.
The migrants
which came before 1962
came as citizens of the
United Kingdom and colonies.
So, as far as they knew,
they had freedom of movement,
but the hostile environment
brought them up short.
Suddenly the state was telling them
that they weren't really British.
So I first became aware of it
in October 2017.
I went on to interview dozens
of people affected by this,
who were wrongly classified
by the Home Office
as being illegal immigrants,
and that erroneous classification
impacted on their lives
really catastrophically.
The policy was predicated on an idea
that the Home Office would be able
to really clearly distinguish
between who was in the country
legally and who was in
the country illegally.
It became obvious that, actually,
it's much harder to distinguish
between people's immigration status
than it sounds like in the abstract.
Some people were detained and
some people were wrongly deported
to countries that they'd left
as children decades before.
And he got stopped at the airport.
So he's called me and
he's panicking on the phone,
"They're not going to let me
back into the country."
And then two hours later, he came
through the door and he said,
"They've only given
me two months, Mum."
So straight away that just put him
in a state of depression.
And he just became depressed
and I became depressed and
and I did contemplate suicide,
cos I thought, " It's my fault
"why I've got us both
into this situation.
"I put us both in this."
"So if you take away me,
"then perhaps someone
will listen to him."
SHE LAUGHS RUEFULLY
But
Glenda is somebody whose life was
really seriously affected by what happened.
And I think her case, like so many
of the other people we interviewed
in The Guardian, really shows
the extreme cruelty
of the officials
that she came into contact with.
Before publication,
you have to contact the Home Office
and ask for a comment.
And to begin with,
the comments were quite blunt,
so there was no sense of apology
or unease, really,
from the Home Office at all,
just a sense that they were
doing the correct work
in trying to get people
who were in the UK illegally
out of the country.
So, in late 2017,
we started getting these
reports through the media,
The Guardian, of really terrible cases
of people who had been badly treated.
There was a response to them
and ministers were involved.
What we didn't do then,
and what took far too long,
was to understand
that this was a systemic issue.
Thousands of people who
arrived from the Caribbean
with their parents after 1948
must now prove they have
the right paperwork
to remain here in the UK.
They came at the invitation
of the British government.
They were citizens
of British colonies
or newly independent
Commonwealth countries.
Their passports were stamped
"indefinite leave to remain."
But for some who were children
then, that was a false promise.
There's always a moment in a crisis
when you realise that it's a crisis,
and the system,
the organisational system,
moves into a different gear.
For me, in this case,
that was on a Monday morning.
Diaries were cleared, people were
told that we had to focus on this
above everything else.
If only that had happened
three months before.
But it didn't.
How many have been detained
as prisoners
in their own country?
This is a day of national shame
and it has come about because
of a hostile environment policy
that was begun
under her Prime Minister.
I am concerned that the
Home Office is becoming,
has become too concerned
with policy and strategy,
and sometimes lose sight
of the individual.
Both sides of this House need
to accept the need
for a proper debate
about immigration.
It's not just the Windrush
generation, but it's generations
over centuries of immigrants that
have contributed in a positive way
to all aspects
of life in our country.
I got a call from my sister
and she said to me,
"Would you want to speak
to, like, the media about it?"
And I went straight to my room
and I got
The files that I had was that big.
And I was like,
" Right, there you go."
You've been delegitimised
as a British citizen.
It hurts me, because I'm a mother
of four British children, you know?
And so why am I not British?
What did I do wrong?
I didn't do anything wrong.
And it's not my mistake.
You know,
it wasn't so much about me,
it was more about my son.
Giving him his freedom
in his own country.
That's what he needed,
his freedom in his own country.
What we have to remember is
that successive governments
put this in place.
It's not only one government.
And I don't hold I don't hold one
political party responsible,
I hold them all responsible.
So Hostile Environment was one
of the worst policies that ever
came up, because we shouldn't have
been wrapped up in it.
We were British citizens.
It is shameful that this government
has treated this generation
in this way.
It took far too long for the
Home Office to recognise
that these individual cases
were not just injustices
in their own right,
but were part of a wider story
of injustice that affected,
ultimately,
some thousands of people.
I was glad that in the end,
belatedly,
the Home Office was forced
to address the issue.
But, sadly, very many victims
still have not got
their compensation.
JOHNSON: I have just been
to see Her Majesty the Queen,
who has invited me
to form a government,
and I have accepted.
Now, in truth,
nobody in the Home Office thought
that made very much difference,
because no government since 2010
had been able to achieve it.
We were very strongly opposed to
Boris Johnson's decision
to scrap the pledge
to reduce immigration to 100,000.
Did you know
Boris Johnson at all?
I've never met him.
He has no useful policies
on immigration.
Quite the reverse,
it's very dangerous.
So can you guarantee that numbers
will come down?
Yes, I can I can make sure
that numbers will come
Numbers will come down, because
we'll be able to control the system.
So once we had the Boris Johnson
government in place,
it was very clear that the message
about control,
Brexit enabling control
of the border,
the politicians seemed to be very
happy that that was completely
compatible with having
potentially more.
It wasn't about having fewer.
Whether ministers chose to explain
that quite so clearly to the public,
erm, I don't know.
I can barely remember immigration
being debated in Cabinet
during that period.
Many of the greatest proponents
of Brexit
took their foot off the pedal.
Some misread the Brexit
referendum result
and saw the public's demand
merely for control,
and that taking back control
of the levers of immigration
was an end in itself.
The May government had proposed
a more liberal approach
to people coming as skilled workers
to the UK post-Brexit.
But with Johnson, with the
Johnson administration,
that was effectively
put on steroids.
Well, no-one no-one believes
more strongly than me
in the benefits of migration
to our country.
For years, politicians have promised
the public an Australian style
points-based system,
and today I will actually deliver
on those promises.
CHEERING
Boris was always concerned
about skilled labour,
about making sure the City
got the people it wanted, making
sure manufacturing got the people
it needed, and that's where the
points-based system came from.
We would allow numbers in
up to a cap within the categories.
That would enable us to have
immigration that was necessary
for the country’s economy,
but at the same time
strengthen our position to say
absolutely no to everybody else.
"Immigration revolution" is the
big frontpage headline in the Mail.
Boris's border blueprint,
we're told.
I mean, no messing around.
The system that was created
was neither points-based
nor Australian.
It did precisely the opposite
of what politicians had argued
during the referendum.
Policymakers couldn’t have
predicted the numbers of people
who would be coming on the visa
route, or the number of people
that would be coming through
the special schemes such as
Hong Kong or Ukraine.
Net immigration from
the rest of the world,
the light blue line here,
has risen sharply.
Now, whether immigration from this
source will remain high is unclear.
The immigration policy put in place
after Brexit, in my view,
was not the right one.
I don't think treating EU neighbours
in the same way as people
coming from the other side of the
world is good or sensible policy.
If people are coming over to work,
if you're coming from Latvia
or Poland or Spain,
you're more likely to come over
and work and then return home.
If you're coming from Pakistan
or West Africa or wherever,
you're more likely to come,
bring your family
and the pressure on
public services grows.
If you look at the Health
and Social Care Visa,
the Home Office and the Department
for Health estimated
that the number of visas that would
be issued was in the low thousands.
It turned out, with dependants,
to be in the hundreds of thousands.
But there are also conscious
decisions that were made,
like bringing back the graduate
route for university students
to stay on post-study.
Those were very bad decisions
that essentially
stuck two fingers up
to the British public.
Decisions that were taken to create
a post-Brexit immigration system
that was more liberal
than the one that we had
when we were members
of the European Union.
I think the criticism
of the points-based system
is a fair one, and I don't think
it was really thought through
and the numbers were going up
all the time.
Certainly think that there should
have been more work done by us
as policy-writers
in trying to work out
how we could actually
get the numbers down.
It has become clear that the people
who ran the Leave campaign,
who were given an opportunity to run
government and do something
about migration, actually realised,
"Look, this is a much more
complicated
"problem than we thought."
Boris Johnson was the master
of all he surveyed,
with a huge mandate from voters.
Today he is on his way out.
And I want you to know how sad
I am to be giving up
the best job in the world.
Liz Truss will be
Britain's next Prime Minister
after she was declared the winner of
the Conservative Party leadership contest.
Thank you.
Liz Truss resigning
as leader of the Conservative Party
and therefore as Prime Minister.
Rishi Sunak is therefore elected
as leader of the Conservative Party.
CHEERING
I entered the Home Office
in a period of complete crisis.
It was a burning building.
There were hundreds of thousands
of people coming into the country
perfectly legally,
and it was very apparent to me
that we needed to do something
entirely different.
Upon my appointment as Home
Secretary, Rishi Sunak promised me
that he understood the,
again, crisis
of unprecedented levels of visas
being issued to workers,
to low-wage workers,
low-skilled workers,
students and their dependents
coming into the country.
We had a record
small boats crisis
billions of pounds
being wasted on hotels.
The entire system was in chaos.
Suella Braverman and I were
completely aligned.
We were of one mind on this.
So it came as no surprise to me
that at the beginning of 2023,
Rishi Sunak made stopping the boats
one of his five key pledges,
promises to the nation.
We will pass new laws
to stop small boats,
making sure that if you come
to this country illegally,
you are detained
and swiftly removed.
I was encouraged by the commitment
Rishi Sunak was demonstrating
to this issue.
His famous phrase was that he was
he would do whatever it takes
to stop the boats.
I believed him then.
RISHI SUNAK: We've introduced
unprecedented legislation
to make clear that if
you come here illegally,
you will be detained
and removed in weeks.
I said I would stop the boats
and I meant it.
It was as if there was a sign
on the white cliffs of Dover -
"Everyone Welcome."
I went out repeatedly,
I told everybody
there would be a massive number
of people that came.
The last Labour government
deported illegal immigrants
in their tens of thousands.
It was respectable.
Now if you deport one,
you’re a monster.
This is how the centre of gravity
of all these arguments has shifted.
And Rishi was trying
to wrestle it back.
But it was more about rhetoric
than it was about reality.
It was more about telling
the British public
what they wanted to hear.
This is intentional policy, because
it makes a small problem look big.
It's good for your image as tough,
and you're really targeting
the people who have strong views
who might go and vote for UKIP.
We knew that immigration
was a really big issue,
and, you know, that that had been
obvious for a very, very long time,
which is one of the reasons why, you know,
Stop the Boats is one of those key pledges
that the Prime Minister
had put forward.
So we didn't need to be pushed
into this position.
We were taking it seriously.
So if you could take those asylum
seekers out of the hotel up the road
and put them on a plane to Rwanda,
you would. Exactly.
We need to take ownership of the
fact that these are people
in our country, and we need
to process their claims
as quickly as possible.
We had issued 1.1 million
work and study visas.
We'd never done that before.
So this was, erm, you know, totally
at odds with our manifesto pledge
and an undermining of the
Brexit referendum vote in 2016.
I made all these points
to Rishi Sunak.
He promised me that, erm,
he would support me in the measures
that would be needed.
It became quickly apparent
that those were false promises.
Back in 2019, the government
promised to cut net migration.
At the time, it was 226,000.
It’s gone up.
The forecasts say it will
continue to climb
to between 650,000
and nearly a million.
Will it go down next year?
What I can tell you is I want
to bring
the numbers of legal
net migration down.
He put forward the argument that
mass migration was a good thing,
because undercutting
British workers' wages was helping
to bring down inflation.
I was shocked
and I completely disagreed
with that approach.
The broader objection that I would
get from the Prime Minister
and from the Chancellor of the
Exchequer and other ministers
was that if we were going
to cut immigration,
erm, then we would be actually
cutting revenue.
There has been a fundamental
dishonesty about immigration policy,
which is many of the economic
departments in government
want more immigrants because
they recognise that immigration
is necessary for the workforce, that
it's good for growth, and so on.
Whilst the Home Office's line tends
to be "we want to stop immigration".
And governments have been perfectly content
to let those two narratives
just sit side by side
without explaining any of the
trade-offs to the public.
One conversation I had went
along the lines of,
"Well, Suella, if you want to halve
net migration to 300,000,
"you realise that's going
to cost us £3 billion pounds?
"That's the same as a tax cut
to income tax."
"Prime Minister," I would say,
"Let me, let me just do what's
necessary to lower immigration.
"It's so easy. We don't need to pass
an Act of Parliament.
"We don't need to worry
about the House of Lords.
"We don't need to worry about the
European Court of Human Rights."
But as long as the Prime Minister
refused to support me,
my hands were tied.
The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
has sacked his Home Secretary,
Suella Braverman.
It's a really extraordinary end
to her tumultuous tenure
as Home Secretary under Rishi Sunak.
I felt that many others
simply wanted to create
a symbolic policy.
I remember a particular Cabinet
meeting in late November,
and I looked around the room
and felt that I was
the only person there
who was genuinely pressing
for a policy which would work.
And I left that meeting,
I walked out into Downing Street,
and at that point I knew
that I'd have to resign.
Particularly under
the Sunak government,
you had this steady drumbeat
on the right of unhappiness
with levels of legal migration,
whilst at the same time 700,000-plus
people were getting visas
to come here under the government's
own policy.
So this, in a sense, encapsulates
what I mean by dishonesty,
is sounding unhappy about the direct
consequence of policies
you yourself have put in place.
The great strategic error
of the Conservative Party
over the last 14 years has not
been to address the issue
of immigration, but actually
to tell people consistently
that it can solve it.
And at every turn, it has
doubled down in telling people,
"We can solve this problem."
That has then resulted in the
Conservative Party saying
even more desperate things like
"Why don’t we create a deterrent,
like putting people into Rwanda?"
They've become obsessed by the
issue, it's costing a fortune.
Nobody really seriously believes
that it's actually going to make
a huge difference in terms
of cutting migration,
and yet they're on the
hook for that.
I certainly think, you know,
we did not do enough over the time
in government to bring in a proper
controlled system of immigration
that benefited Britain
and that people had faith in.
A new Prime Minister and
a new beginning, says Labour,
as Keir Starmer sweeps
to a landslide election victory.
Reform's first MP and
first victory tonight.
We’re going to hear
Lee Anderson now.
I want my country back and Ashfield
can play their part in that.
Thank you.
So they will be able to make a moral
case that they are making an imprint
in British politics.
I believe
that the population explosion is
having the biggest impact
on the quality of life of ordinary
folk than any other issue.
Even the net figure is
a migrant a minute.
And I think for anyone that believes
that somehow this issue
will gently go away, I don’t think
the debate’s even started.
SHOUTING, SIRENS WAIL
More than 100 people
were arrested in London, Hartlepool
and Manchester overnight.
JAMES CLEVERLY: There is no excuse
for the violence,
none whatsoever.
And the people that have
engaged in that should be dealt with
and dealt with firmly.
But also to basically write off
everyone involved
as being a kind of, you know,
far-right,
because the vast majority
of people were not,
writing them off in that way means
the government is now less likely
to listen to the genuine concerns
that are interwoven
in some illegitimate concerns.
DIANE ABBOTT: I don't buy
the argument that people
were attacking mosques,
trying to burn down hotels
with asylum seekers in
and beating up people
of colour on the street,
I don't buy the argument that that
was down to legitimate grievances.
My own constituency in Hackney,
some of them have similar
legitimate grievances.
They're not beating up black people.
I have always accepted that concerns
about immigration are legitimate.
It is as point of fact
the policy of this government
to reduce both net migration and
our economic dependency upon it.
It is my personal mission to smash
the people-smuggling gangs.
No more gimmicks.
No more gesture politics.
No more irresponsible,
undeliverable promises.
It's become a sort of crude argument
where some people say,
"Well, you know, you've
got an open door on immigration."
And other people say, you know,
"You're anti - immigrant."
It's a hopeless argument that you'll
never resolve in that way.
You resolve it
by a system of control.
One of the people I worked with,
erm, she said to me once,
"How can they hate us so much
when they don't even know us?"
And my answer was,
" Because they don't know us,
"maybe we need to do more
to come forward and speak,
"tell our own stories, engage
with people, engage with the debates
"in order to change things."
Just you watch, this issue is going
to get bigger and bigger.
What are the impacts of recent
changes to UK citizenship?
Explore the Open University's
stories of two fictional families
by scanning the QR code on screen now,
or visiting bbc dot com uk slash
immigration and following links
to the Open University.
OCR and Synch by Andante
OCR and Synch by Andante
If I could link in the minds of
the British people immigration
with membership of the European
Union, then everything would change.
We haven't got enough
houses now, as it is.
So where are you going to put them?
Just remember how many immigrants,
like my family, like a lot
of the people in this audiences
family, have built this nation.
The problem has been that
immigrants, asylum seekers
have all been confused in
the popular mind.
Anti - immigration groups
were behind disturbances in several
English towns and cities last night.
One of the protesters told me
the country was full
and foreigners were the problem.
The idea that we had some sort of
open door immigration policy
is just absolute nonsense.
We wanted to see strict limits
at a scale that was not
going to disturb the nature
of our very historic
and peaceful country.
What I saw was the tabloid press
becoming unhinged about this issue.
British jobs for British workers.
Net immigration in the tens
of thousands.
My promise to you - to stop
the boats.
There is a pervasive view that
more immigration
is better for the country.
It was too high.
It wasn't being controlled,
it needed to be controlled.
The fact is, we're not
in control of it,
and to say otherwise is misleading
the public.
I'm Craig Oliver. I was director
of politics and communications
at Number 10 Downing Street.
There was a huge amount of polling
about what was going on
in the country, and "what issues
did people consider
"to be the most important?"
And every week, bar one, immigration
was at the top of that list.
It was a huge issue.
David Cameron felt that it was
his duty as Prime Minister
to address that issue, which is
where his pledge to get
net migration down to the tens
of thousands came from.
One of the aims of my government was
that we should have an economy
that can function and grow and
become more productive
without mass migration every year.
In 2010, 2011, 2012, we were getting
net migration down.
We were making progress.
The Conservatives have adopted
this slogan,
and were clearly not going to meet it.
They felt very vulnerable,
politically, because of it.
And the response was to become,
in some cases, more rationally
restrictive, in other cases
completely irrational and damaging.
But we saw, you know, an element
of panic.
Theresa May and David Cameron
wanted to bring together
all the different departments
to come up with policies
that would be as hostile as possible
for immigrants who they didn’t want
to be in the country.
From where I was sitting, it felt
like a lot to do with appealing
to the right of a political party.
The idea of having a sort of
internal border, where you check
whether people who are using public
services are actually in the country
legitimately, that is a very
sensible policy
and that wasn't in any way
a reaction to anything else
that was going on.
Theresa May - "We're
going to give illegal migrants
"a really hostile reception."
It's an interview in the
Daily Telegraph.
The Immigration
Minister, Damian Green,
said he was working closely with
other government departments
to create a hostile environment
for migrants
to live in the UK illegally.
It's a get-tough policy.
Finding suspected illegal
immigrants and removing them.
So, we've got a warrant to be
on the premises, OK?
The words that were attached to it,
of hostile environment, were
were a bad idea.
But the fundamental thinking
behind it was that when people
who are here illegally want to live
in social housing, or want to use
the health service,
or other public services,
you identify whether or not they
have a right to be here.
This turned ordinary people, landlords,
into immigration officers.
This, you know, turned employers
into immigration officers.
The impact on migrants of those
policies was huge.
People stopped actually renting
to migrants, even those
who have status, who have visas.
Because they are not immigration
officers, they can't tell.
They did not want to take the risk.
It basically brought an awful
lot of people
into the arm of enforcement.
I remember arriving at Finsbury Park
station one evening,
and suddenly the place is full of
immigration officers
stopping people randomly.
Who were they stopping?
Asian people, African people,
Caribbean people.
It was always obvious that
the hostile environment
was never going to just affect
a very small group of people.
People of colour, they were
treated as foreigners, and often
that assumption that they were
migrants or foreigners
was initially based on skin colour.
The phrase "hostile environment"
was used inside the Home Office,
specifically about illegal immigrants
who had no right to be here,
and it was one of those
phrases where political
opponents managed to distort it
in a fairly successful way.
How do you spot an
illegal immigrant?
In London, it's probably nigh on
impossible.
The Government says this pilot
poster campaign
will target illegal immigrants.
This is just the latest in a
series of immigration initiatives.
I think it's a fantastic idea.
We need to clean up the mess,
because it's creating a lot of
problems here.
And, also, the people who are
legally entitled to work
are being deprived of jobs.
When I saw that van
Actually, I saw it on the street.
I mean, my heart sank.
We felt so low, so depressed.
It took us by surprise how low the
Government could actually go.
And because all of us migrants,
we lived here for many, many years,
we should feel British.
We felt this is targeting us.
This area, I've always said about
immigration is what is required,
is calm and moderate and
sensible language,
and tough, robust action.
And all too often in British
politics, you've had tough language
and weak action.
Got it the wrong way round.
There was always a tension between
David Cameron and Theresa May,
and there was a particular issue
with her department
and her special advisers, who often
would do things that I think
that David Cameron should have been
a lot clearer about saying,
"Look, you shouldn't be doing
this kind of thing."
And sometimes things would burst
into the open, that we discovered
had happened, that we would not
have sanctioned.
I don't think I was aware of the
Go Home vans at the time.
We ended up looking as if somehow
that this was playing to
the gallery, rather than actually
having a serious solution
to a problem.
There were some returns achieved
as a result of that.
But I think politicians
I think politicians should be
willing to step up to the plate
and say when they think something
actually hasn't been as good
an idea, and I think they were
too blunt an instrument.
When I first met Nigel Farage,
he was a telephone call
into my own home when
I was watching Spooks on TV.
And I remember thinking that it was
just a joke from my brother,
making up that this person
was calling me,
and it turned out that it was Nigel.
When we met, he was affable.
But there was always this sense
that it was never his true self
that was talking to you.
I think always Nigel's main point
was that he wanted to leave
the European Union, and the
immigration wasn't a big issue
for him in so many ways.
Nigel picked up on the very clear
message coming from those people
that immigration was becoming
a big issue in the UK.
Immigration enabled Nigel, then,
to start talking about
other issues that impacted, say,
poorer sectors of society.
And that was the great opening gap.
Without that, UKIP wouldn't
have grown.
UKIP emerged as a
separate political force,
and were taking a position
on immigration, with which,
of course, we agreed.
With Migration Watch being rational
and logical about what the impact
of this massive increase in
population would mean for schools,
roads, access to GPs, and everything
else, I think to some extent
it did help to make wholesale debate
amongst the British public
respectable.
Nigel relied on them a lot himself.
He had more private meetings
with them than was allowed
by people like myself.
With the help of people like
Andrew Green, Nigel was then able
to start, develop an argument that
talked about EU migration
and the numbers coming across.
That allowed pressure onto
the Conservative Party.
FARAGE: Why are so many foreign
people entitled to benefits at all?
And, of course, the reason is, we're
all members of this European Union.
And now we've given them total
freedom to use our benefits system,
our health system, our schools.
Migration Watch were a very
important group.
They were producing numbers,
none of them were ever wrong.
Their predictions were also
incredibly good.
That legitimised everything
I stood up and said.
It was important to have them there.
So, Migration Watch, yeah,
a big part in all of this.
Nigel Farage, he's a very, very
skilled campaigner,
and he very effectively used
immigration as an issue
and put it front and centre
in terms of his aim of getting us
out of the European Union.
Down every street in Eastleigh,
the chase for votes continued.
The postal vote is very
Squeezing every last chance to
get their message across.
UKIP think they could
do well, possibly come first,
maybe beat the Tories to second.
They've put immigration
front and centre.
Thanks very much for stopping there.
There needs to be a moratorium on
immigration for a period of time
to allow this country to absorb
what is here already.
The Conservatives are
deploying their big guns
to try to stop that happening.
There's no doubt the Conservative
Party and David Cameron
had underestimated UKIP.
It was clear that they were
a presence and a force
and a problem for the
Conservative Party.
That only grew over time.
There was a massive pressure on
David Cameron in and around Europe.
Public disillusionment with the EU
is at an all-time high.
That is why I am in favour of having
a referendum.
Oh, there was elation that
we'd applied pressure now
on the Conservative Party,
that they had actually gone so far
as to say that they needed to
have a referendum.
And that was a clear recognition
that UKIP had come of age.
To say, " Look, it was all because of
pressure from UKIP,"
that's complete nonsense.
I first started writing and thinking
about the need for a sort of reset
in Britain's relations with Europe
in January 2012,
when UKIP were barely polling.
They were, like, 4% or 5%.
So, of course they grew, and of
course I thought they were going to
grow as we went into a European
election in 2014.
But the motivation for trying to
sort out Britain's relationship
with Europe was not so much
about UKIP.
It was more about that I thought
the relationship wasn't working.
There was no way that Cameron would
ever have offered a referendum
had it not been for the rise
in UKIP.
All the press say, "Well, that's
it, the UKIP fox has been shot."
No, all he done was legitimise us.
Nonsense.
I mean, it really is nonsense.
If you read the speech, it actually
barely mentions immigration at all.
In fact, I don't think it does
at all.
It probably should have done,
but it didn't.
The UK Independence
Party may have come second,
but those smiles tell you they think
they've made the big time.
For the Conservatives, they were,
I think, shocked that UKIP,
who had been trying to build up
hostility to immigration,
effectively broke through in
that by-election,
and that really sent alarm bells
ringing in the Tory Party.
From that point onwards,
there was a huge energy.
And you saw, then, us winning
seats in local elections
up and down the country.
The political party once
dismissed by the Conservatives
as loonies and clowns has tonight
sent a shock wave through
the Westminster establishment.
We need to show respect for people
who've taken the choice to support
this party, and we're going to work
really hard to win them back.
What then happens,
which I hadn't foreseen,
was, of course, you get
the euro zone crisis.
Unemployment across the eurozone
remains stubbornly high.
In Madrid tonight, protesters
clashed with the police
after the announcement that
unemployment had reached
another record level.
LOUD BANG
For those under 25,
the jobless rate has reached
a staggering 57%.
You get this huge influx of people
coming in to take in the jobs
that my government
was successfully creating.
The euro zone crisis
was a real setback,
and that wasn't something
I had predicted.
By the time we got to 2013-2014,
people had realised we didn't
have any control over numbers
coming into Britain whatsoever.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: Our first question
from Danny Rose, please.
Is it time we defied Europe
and closed our borders
and say we're full?
The main concern in immigration
is that people come over here
and they work for three months.
Once they finish a three-month
contract, they're then out there
and they claim benefits from that.
I was the director of strategy
in Downing Street.
Every weekend we asked one
completely open, unprompted question
in an opinion poll of 2,000
people all over the country.
And the question was -
if you could raise just one issue
with the Prime Minister David
Cameron, what would it be?
And every weekend,
with one exception,
that word cloud was dominated
by the word "immigration".
This is a leaflet that
Nigel Farage's party distributed
in the recent Eastleigh by-election,
you may remember it.
It says here that 29 million
Romanians and Bulgarians
may come to this country.
There aren't even 29 million
Romanians and Bulgarians
Bulgarians living in Romania and Bulgaria.
It is simply not true.
Nigel Farage
grinning because his dream
of topping a national vote
came true.
It is an earthquake
in British politics.
It is a remarkable result
and it does have, I think,
profound consequences for the
leaders of the other parties.
The Conservatives have defied
all the pundits
and won a majority of MPs
in Parliament.
Decisive, clear cut, emphatic.
This was a sensational victory
for David Cameron.
UKIP took 13%,
but their leader failed
to win a seat.
I will now form a majority
Conservative government.
And, yes, we will deliver
that in-out referendum
on our future in Europe.
If he had not said that there
was going to be a referendum,
Nigel Farage would have
continued his march.
Hundreds of refugees
poured onto the platforms.
They race towards a train.
Children were hauled up
into the carriage,
others climbed on the backs
of those hoping to squeeze in.
Immigration came onto the
public agenda very strongly,
and I think a lot of that
was the Syrian civil war.
I think people feared that a lot
of that migration ultimately
was going to end up
in the United Kingdom.
Groups of migrants
are breaking through
Calais defences using watchmen,
wire cutters and force of numbers.
More than 100 extra police have been
brought in to help keep control,
but the lure of the UK is stronger.
A lot of the concern about
immigration in the country
was about people from
outside the European Union.
But that problem got conflated
with people from Eastern Europe.
And so it was a debate
that was not just toxic,
but it was also very confusing.
I provided all of the
private polling
and was one of the strategy
advisers to that campaign.
Most people in Britain thought
that the scale of people
coming to the UK from the EU
and the fact that we couldn't limit
or control that was a problem.
If that was the primary issue
in their mind when they voted,
we would lose.
It’s getting too much, you know,
there’s too many people coming in.
You know, they've opened the doors,
haven't they, practically?
Because there's no work for us.
So how can we survive?
There's too much people come in.
Britain's relationship with Europe
is going to need to change.
A renegotiation accompanied
by a referendum will be necessary
to get it back into place.
As David Cameron left
last night confident his reforms
would make a difference, critics
already claimed this deal was weak.
Within hours of this
crucial summit ending,
it seems the referendum campaign
is just starting.
I negotiated that you shouldn't get
full access to the welfare system
for four years.
But it wasn't a slam dunk,
because it wasn't no benefits for
four years,
it was a sort of sliding scale.
So it was complicated
and it was second best.
And so on the subject of immigration
in the referendum campaign,
you know, we knew we were
on ground
weaker than we would have liked.
It fell far, far short for anybody
who was really concerned
about the issue of the
straightforward simplicity of
"take back control".
Hi. Good morning.
Good morning.
This is a choice for a generation,
potentially for a lifetime.
Do we stay in or do we leave
a reformed European Union?
Both sides are now
stepping up their efforts
to persuade you of their arguments.
David Cameron said
he would get net migration
down to the tens of thousands.
That became a massive stick
to beat him with
during the referendum campaign.
The issue is an open door
to 500 million people,
and net migration running at a third
of a million people a year.
And this under a Prime Minister who
promised us he’d reduce migration
to tens of thousands a year.
The genius of Nigel Farage
was to link THE most salient issue
in the minds of the public -
immigration -
with the issue on which he was
trying to wage a referendum -
the European Union.
And I think that linkage
was very, very skilfully done.
When we were talking about Britain's
access to the single market
and how it was good for business
and good for jobs,
when we were talking about that,
we were winning.
And when we were talking about
immigration and the fact that
with free movement of people,
you couldn't effectively control
who was coming into your country,
we were losing.
This whole debate
is about democracy
CHEERING
and our ability to speak up.
And we won't be drowned out,
will we?
No!
I think it definitely made the task
of the Remain campaign harder
that there were two Leave campaigns.
You had the official Vote Leave
campaign run by Dominic Cummings.
That was able to steer away
from some of the more
inflammatory language on
immigration, because they knew
that the other campaign,
Leave. EU run by Nigel Farage,
would go there.
When I first met Cummings -
"Immigration? Oh, no, no, no, we're
not discussing that.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no."
The Leave campaign, the mainstream
designated Leave campaign,
certainly at first at least didn't
talk about reducing immigration,
they talked about controlling
immigration.
From the moment that the ONS figures
on immigration numbers came out
at the end of May 2016,
that changed.
Net migration
to the UK has risen
to its second highest level
on record,
according to the
latest official figures.
Look at the immigration
figures today.
Look at the sheer numbers
that are coming in.
That needs to be got under control.
The real thing that swung the
European Union referendum,
and it was 333,000,
there was the man, David Cameron,
who said we’d get it down
to the tens of thousands
leading the campaign, if you like,
to remain in the European Union,
he was finished from the time
that statistic came out.
Is it not time we took back control
of our immigration policy?
It felt a difficult argument,
because the fundamental point
about free movement is
you didn't have You know,
any number of people from
EU countries could come to Britain.
And they had been coming in
very large numbers.
On a Saturday afternoon,
I was called up by the Sunday Times
and told
that there was going to be
a 5,000-word letter
penned by Michael Gove
and Boris Johnson,
and the headline that they were
going to use was that David Cameron
had been deeply disingenuous
in saying that he wanted
to cut net migration
to the tens of thousands.
Two senior Conservatives,
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove,
have called on David Cameron
to accept the failure of his
pledge to cut immigration.
And I remember we were very deep
into the campaign at this stage
and phoning the Prime Minister.
He was very angry, so much so
that he put the phone down.
And he called me up three
minutes later and he said,
"I'm sorry about that,
but I just can't believe
"that these two people, one
of whom is godparent to my children,
"is claiming that I'm being deeply
disingenuous about this.
"I'm not, I care about this,
it's a huge issue
"and yet every opportunity they're
accusing me of being a liar."
I think one of the final points
for me in terms of my views
on immigration and Nigel
was in relation
to the Breaking Point poster.
We’d won the argument.
We didn’t need to push it any more,
we didn’t need to go down that line.
I remember saying
A conversation with Nigel,
I said, " I don’t think
that was necessary to do that."
And his view was
it was absolutely necessary.
It's an extraordinarily
incendiary poster
to suggest Britain is somehow at
breaking point because of migrants.
Well, what it says,
it says "Breaking Point",
and beneath it, it says
the EU has failed us all.
I put it to you that we are not
part of the Schengen Area,
and therefore these migrants
are not coming to Britain
and it is nothing to do
with EU migration into the UK.
The EU has failed us all.
That poster was coming out
and unfortunately we had Jo Cox die
on the same day.
I think he believed it was just
unfortunate,
but he believed
that we needed to get the issue
of immigration
back out there, and I didn't.
The Breaking Point poster worked.
Why?
Because it got the argument back
onto immigration
in the last few days,
and that was very difficult
after the murder of Jo Cox.
It wasn't true to say that all
the people fleeing Syria
or fleeing war-torn countries
were coming to Britain.
They weren't.
Would you agree with Nigel Farage's
poster this morning launched
saying, "Breaking Point"
and that huge queue?
It's not our campaign.
It's not my approach.
I think the official Leave campaign
was happy that Nigel Farage existed.
They were able to say,
"He's not part of us,
"he's over there, we can't take
responsibility for him"
while being very happy to travel
in the slipstream of his borderline
and sometimes overtly
racist statements
about what was going on
in terms of migration.
The Breaking Point poster, I think,
was the object example of that.
I've been demonised for daring
to talk about these subjects.
I've never, ever, ever wanted
any form of violence,
any form of racist ideology.
The polls opened
at 7am this morning,
and the faces who've dominated
this referendum campaign
were up early, too.
I went to vote at 11 o’clock.
A poll came out showing
that Remain was ten points ahead.
I convinced myself we’d lose.
You had to mentally prepare
yourself to lose.
And then, of course, we saw
Newcastle and Sunderland
and realised that
it might be different.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: The British
people have spoken
and the answer is we're out.
Out! Out! Out!
Out! Out! Out!
I felt desperately disappointed.
I felt I'd thrown everything
I had into that campaign.
I was 100% for the position
I had set out,
and that's why I thought
it was important
to leave office afterwards.
But obviously it was
deeply, deeply disappointing.
If you're born poor,
you will die on average nine years
earlier than others.
If you're black,
you're treated more harshly
by the criminal justice system
than if you're white.
The government I lead will be driven
not by the interests
of the privileged few, but by yours.
The arrival of more than
400 happy Jamaicans.
They've come to seek work in Britain
and are ready and willing
to do any kind of job
that will help the motherland
along the road to prosperity.
We came in 1961.
I was three months old.
So, yeah, we've been
from the early stages
until Mummy and Daddy managed to
purchase a house in Hackney,
and then my two youngest siblings
were born.
I had always wanted
to be a secretary.
That's obviously why my parents
paid for me to take private
typing lessons.
I worked for the NHS
for a long time.
My various other siblings
got into other departments.
It was like NHS, Post Office,
London Transport, you know,
or the police force.
He said, " No," you know,
"we're not happy with you
"not having a British passport.
"There's other people here
"who are looking for the work
and who are British."
And then I realised, "Wow,
what are you saying to me?
"You know, this doesn't sound
right."
The only passport I've got is
a Dominican passport.
But I never thought I was illegal,
cos I'm British.
I got terminated from my job.
I couldn't get benefits.
I didn't have any money.
I just couldn't understand.
The immigration officers
rigorously screen the passengers.
The questions were put kindly,
but the answers
were listened to keenly.
Already, the Home Office's
new instructions
were being strictly carried out.
The Home Office has always been,
um, negative and unyielding
on questions of migration.
I first became aware of this issue
because I do so much
immigration casework.
And it started to be a pattern
that I was dealing with.
The migrants
which came before 1962
came as citizens of the
United Kingdom and colonies.
So, as far as they knew,
they had freedom of movement,
but the hostile environment
brought them up short.
Suddenly the state was telling them
that they weren't really British.
So I first became aware of it
in October 2017.
I went on to interview dozens
of people affected by this,
who were wrongly classified
by the Home Office
as being illegal immigrants,
and that erroneous classification
impacted on their lives
really catastrophically.
The policy was predicated on an idea
that the Home Office would be able
to really clearly distinguish
between who was in the country
legally and who was in
the country illegally.
It became obvious that, actually,
it's much harder to distinguish
between people's immigration status
than it sounds like in the abstract.
Some people were detained and
some people were wrongly deported
to countries that they'd left
as children decades before.
And he got stopped at the airport.
So he's called me and
he's panicking on the phone,
"They're not going to let me
back into the country."
And then two hours later, he came
through the door and he said,
"They've only given
me two months, Mum."
So straight away that just put him
in a state of depression.
And he just became depressed
and I became depressed and
and I did contemplate suicide,
cos I thought, " It's my fault
"why I've got us both
into this situation.
"I put us both in this."
"So if you take away me,
"then perhaps someone
will listen to him."
SHE LAUGHS RUEFULLY
But
Glenda is somebody whose life was
really seriously affected by what happened.
And I think her case, like so many
of the other people we interviewed
in The Guardian, really shows
the extreme cruelty
of the officials
that she came into contact with.
Before publication,
you have to contact the Home Office
and ask for a comment.
And to begin with,
the comments were quite blunt,
so there was no sense of apology
or unease, really,
from the Home Office at all,
just a sense that they were
doing the correct work
in trying to get people
who were in the UK illegally
out of the country.
So, in late 2017,
we started getting these
reports through the media,
The Guardian, of really terrible cases
of people who had been badly treated.
There was a response to them
and ministers were involved.
What we didn't do then,
and what took far too long,
was to understand
that this was a systemic issue.
Thousands of people who
arrived from the Caribbean
with their parents after 1948
must now prove they have
the right paperwork
to remain here in the UK.
They came at the invitation
of the British government.
They were citizens
of British colonies
or newly independent
Commonwealth countries.
Their passports were stamped
"indefinite leave to remain."
But for some who were children
then, that was a false promise.
There's always a moment in a crisis
when you realise that it's a crisis,
and the system,
the organisational system,
moves into a different gear.
For me, in this case,
that was on a Monday morning.
Diaries were cleared, people were
told that we had to focus on this
above everything else.
If only that had happened
three months before.
But it didn't.
How many have been detained
as prisoners
in their own country?
This is a day of national shame
and it has come about because
of a hostile environment policy
that was begun
under her Prime Minister.
I am concerned that the
Home Office is becoming,
has become too concerned
with policy and strategy,
and sometimes lose sight
of the individual.
Both sides of this House need
to accept the need
for a proper debate
about immigration.
It's not just the Windrush
generation, but it's generations
over centuries of immigrants that
have contributed in a positive way
to all aspects
of life in our country.
I got a call from my sister
and she said to me,
"Would you want to speak
to, like, the media about it?"
And I went straight to my room
and I got
The files that I had was that big.
And I was like,
" Right, there you go."
You've been delegitimised
as a British citizen.
It hurts me, because I'm a mother
of four British children, you know?
And so why am I not British?
What did I do wrong?
I didn't do anything wrong.
And it's not my mistake.
You know,
it wasn't so much about me,
it was more about my son.
Giving him his freedom
in his own country.
That's what he needed,
his freedom in his own country.
What we have to remember is
that successive governments
put this in place.
It's not only one government.
And I don't hold I don't hold one
political party responsible,
I hold them all responsible.
So Hostile Environment was one
of the worst policies that ever
came up, because we shouldn't have
been wrapped up in it.
We were British citizens.
It is shameful that this government
has treated this generation
in this way.
It took far too long for the
Home Office to recognise
that these individual cases
were not just injustices
in their own right,
but were part of a wider story
of injustice that affected,
ultimately,
some thousands of people.
I was glad that in the end,
belatedly,
the Home Office was forced
to address the issue.
But, sadly, very many victims
still have not got
their compensation.
JOHNSON: I have just been
to see Her Majesty the Queen,
who has invited me
to form a government,
and I have accepted.
Now, in truth,
nobody in the Home Office thought
that made very much difference,
because no government since 2010
had been able to achieve it.
We were very strongly opposed to
Boris Johnson's decision
to scrap the pledge
to reduce immigration to 100,000.
Did you know
Boris Johnson at all?
I've never met him.
He has no useful policies
on immigration.
Quite the reverse,
it's very dangerous.
So can you guarantee that numbers
will come down?
Yes, I can I can make sure
that numbers will come
Numbers will come down, because
we'll be able to control the system.
So once we had the Boris Johnson
government in place,
it was very clear that the message
about control,
Brexit enabling control
of the border,
the politicians seemed to be very
happy that that was completely
compatible with having
potentially more.
It wasn't about having fewer.
Whether ministers chose to explain
that quite so clearly to the public,
erm, I don't know.
I can barely remember immigration
being debated in Cabinet
during that period.
Many of the greatest proponents
of Brexit
took their foot off the pedal.
Some misread the Brexit
referendum result
and saw the public's demand
merely for control,
and that taking back control
of the levers of immigration
was an end in itself.
The May government had proposed
a more liberal approach
to people coming as skilled workers
to the UK post-Brexit.
But with Johnson, with the
Johnson administration,
that was effectively
put on steroids.
Well, no-one no-one believes
more strongly than me
in the benefits of migration
to our country.
For years, politicians have promised
the public an Australian style
points-based system,
and today I will actually deliver
on those promises.
CHEERING
Boris was always concerned
about skilled labour,
about making sure the City
got the people it wanted, making
sure manufacturing got the people
it needed, and that's where the
points-based system came from.
We would allow numbers in
up to a cap within the categories.
That would enable us to have
immigration that was necessary
for the country’s economy,
but at the same time
strengthen our position to say
absolutely no to everybody else.
"Immigration revolution" is the
big frontpage headline in the Mail.
Boris's border blueprint,
we're told.
I mean, no messing around.
The system that was created
was neither points-based
nor Australian.
It did precisely the opposite
of what politicians had argued
during the referendum.
Policymakers couldn’t have
predicted the numbers of people
who would be coming on the visa
route, or the number of people
that would be coming through
the special schemes such as
Hong Kong or Ukraine.
Net immigration from
the rest of the world,
the light blue line here,
has risen sharply.
Now, whether immigration from this
source will remain high is unclear.
The immigration policy put in place
after Brexit, in my view,
was not the right one.
I don't think treating EU neighbours
in the same way as people
coming from the other side of the
world is good or sensible policy.
If people are coming over to work,
if you're coming from Latvia
or Poland or Spain,
you're more likely to come over
and work and then return home.
If you're coming from Pakistan
or West Africa or wherever,
you're more likely to come,
bring your family
and the pressure on
public services grows.
If you look at the Health
and Social Care Visa,
the Home Office and the Department
for Health estimated
that the number of visas that would
be issued was in the low thousands.
It turned out, with dependants,
to be in the hundreds of thousands.
But there are also conscious
decisions that were made,
like bringing back the graduate
route for university students
to stay on post-study.
Those were very bad decisions
that essentially
stuck two fingers up
to the British public.
Decisions that were taken to create
a post-Brexit immigration system
that was more liberal
than the one that we had
when we were members
of the European Union.
I think the criticism
of the points-based system
is a fair one, and I don't think
it was really thought through
and the numbers were going up
all the time.
Certainly think that there should
have been more work done by us
as policy-writers
in trying to work out
how we could actually
get the numbers down.
It has become clear that the people
who ran the Leave campaign,
who were given an opportunity to run
government and do something
about migration, actually realised,
"Look, this is a much more
complicated
"problem than we thought."
Boris Johnson was the master
of all he surveyed,
with a huge mandate from voters.
Today he is on his way out.
And I want you to know how sad
I am to be giving up
the best job in the world.
Liz Truss will be
Britain's next Prime Minister
after she was declared the winner of
the Conservative Party leadership contest.
Thank you.
Liz Truss resigning
as leader of the Conservative Party
and therefore as Prime Minister.
Rishi Sunak is therefore elected
as leader of the Conservative Party.
CHEERING
I entered the Home Office
in a period of complete crisis.
It was a burning building.
There were hundreds of thousands
of people coming into the country
perfectly legally,
and it was very apparent to me
that we needed to do something
entirely different.
Upon my appointment as Home
Secretary, Rishi Sunak promised me
that he understood the,
again, crisis
of unprecedented levels of visas
being issued to workers,
to low-wage workers,
low-skilled workers,
students and their dependents
coming into the country.
We had a record
small boats crisis
billions of pounds
being wasted on hotels.
The entire system was in chaos.
Suella Braverman and I were
completely aligned.
We were of one mind on this.
So it came as no surprise to me
that at the beginning of 2023,
Rishi Sunak made stopping the boats
one of his five key pledges,
promises to the nation.
We will pass new laws
to stop small boats,
making sure that if you come
to this country illegally,
you are detained
and swiftly removed.
I was encouraged by the commitment
Rishi Sunak was demonstrating
to this issue.
His famous phrase was that he was
he would do whatever it takes
to stop the boats.
I believed him then.
RISHI SUNAK: We've introduced
unprecedented legislation
to make clear that if
you come here illegally,
you will be detained
and removed in weeks.
I said I would stop the boats
and I meant it.
It was as if there was a sign
on the white cliffs of Dover -
"Everyone Welcome."
I went out repeatedly,
I told everybody
there would be a massive number
of people that came.
The last Labour government
deported illegal immigrants
in their tens of thousands.
It was respectable.
Now if you deport one,
you’re a monster.
This is how the centre of gravity
of all these arguments has shifted.
And Rishi was trying
to wrestle it back.
But it was more about rhetoric
than it was about reality.
It was more about telling
the British public
what they wanted to hear.
This is intentional policy, because
it makes a small problem look big.
It's good for your image as tough,
and you're really targeting
the people who have strong views
who might go and vote for UKIP.
We knew that immigration
was a really big issue,
and, you know, that that had been
obvious for a very, very long time,
which is one of the reasons why, you know,
Stop the Boats is one of those key pledges
that the Prime Minister
had put forward.
So we didn't need to be pushed
into this position.
We were taking it seriously.
So if you could take those asylum
seekers out of the hotel up the road
and put them on a plane to Rwanda,
you would. Exactly.
We need to take ownership of the
fact that these are people
in our country, and we need
to process their claims
as quickly as possible.
We had issued 1.1 million
work and study visas.
We'd never done that before.
So this was, erm, you know, totally
at odds with our manifesto pledge
and an undermining of the
Brexit referendum vote in 2016.
I made all these points
to Rishi Sunak.
He promised me that, erm,
he would support me in the measures
that would be needed.
It became quickly apparent
that those were false promises.
Back in 2019, the government
promised to cut net migration.
At the time, it was 226,000.
It’s gone up.
The forecasts say it will
continue to climb
to between 650,000
and nearly a million.
Will it go down next year?
What I can tell you is I want
to bring
the numbers of legal
net migration down.
He put forward the argument that
mass migration was a good thing,
because undercutting
British workers' wages was helping
to bring down inflation.
I was shocked
and I completely disagreed
with that approach.
The broader objection that I would
get from the Prime Minister
and from the Chancellor of the
Exchequer and other ministers
was that if we were going
to cut immigration,
erm, then we would be actually
cutting revenue.
There has been a fundamental
dishonesty about immigration policy,
which is many of the economic
departments in government
want more immigrants because
they recognise that immigration
is necessary for the workforce, that
it's good for growth, and so on.
Whilst the Home Office's line tends
to be "we want to stop immigration".
And governments have been perfectly content
to let those two narratives
just sit side by side
without explaining any of the
trade-offs to the public.
One conversation I had went
along the lines of,
"Well, Suella, if you want to halve
net migration to 300,000,
"you realise that's going
to cost us £3 billion pounds?
"That's the same as a tax cut
to income tax."
"Prime Minister," I would say,
"Let me, let me just do what's
necessary to lower immigration.
"It's so easy. We don't need to pass
an Act of Parliament.
"We don't need to worry
about the House of Lords.
"We don't need to worry about the
European Court of Human Rights."
But as long as the Prime Minister
refused to support me,
my hands were tied.
The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
has sacked his Home Secretary,
Suella Braverman.
It's a really extraordinary end
to her tumultuous tenure
as Home Secretary under Rishi Sunak.
I felt that many others
simply wanted to create
a symbolic policy.
I remember a particular Cabinet
meeting in late November,
and I looked around the room
and felt that I was
the only person there
who was genuinely pressing
for a policy which would work.
And I left that meeting,
I walked out into Downing Street,
and at that point I knew
that I'd have to resign.
Particularly under
the Sunak government,
you had this steady drumbeat
on the right of unhappiness
with levels of legal migration,
whilst at the same time 700,000-plus
people were getting visas
to come here under the government's
own policy.
So this, in a sense, encapsulates
what I mean by dishonesty,
is sounding unhappy about the direct
consequence of policies
you yourself have put in place.
The great strategic error
of the Conservative Party
over the last 14 years has not
been to address the issue
of immigration, but actually
to tell people consistently
that it can solve it.
And at every turn, it has
doubled down in telling people,
"We can solve this problem."
That has then resulted in the
Conservative Party saying
even more desperate things like
"Why don’t we create a deterrent,
like putting people into Rwanda?"
They've become obsessed by the
issue, it's costing a fortune.
Nobody really seriously believes
that it's actually going to make
a huge difference in terms
of cutting migration,
and yet they're on the
hook for that.
I certainly think, you know,
we did not do enough over the time
in government to bring in a proper
controlled system of immigration
that benefited Britain
and that people had faith in.
A new Prime Minister and
a new beginning, says Labour,
as Keir Starmer sweeps
to a landslide election victory.
Reform's first MP and
first victory tonight.
We’re going to hear
Lee Anderson now.
I want my country back and Ashfield
can play their part in that.
Thank you.
So they will be able to make a moral
case that they are making an imprint
in British politics.
I believe
that the population explosion is
having the biggest impact
on the quality of life of ordinary
folk than any other issue.
Even the net figure is
a migrant a minute.
And I think for anyone that believes
that somehow this issue
will gently go away, I don’t think
the debate’s even started.
SHOUTING, SIRENS WAIL
More than 100 people
were arrested in London, Hartlepool
and Manchester overnight.
JAMES CLEVERLY: There is no excuse
for the violence,
none whatsoever.
And the people that have
engaged in that should be dealt with
and dealt with firmly.
But also to basically write off
everyone involved
as being a kind of, you know,
far-right,
because the vast majority
of people were not,
writing them off in that way means
the government is now less likely
to listen to the genuine concerns
that are interwoven
in some illegitimate concerns.
DIANE ABBOTT: I don't buy
the argument that people
were attacking mosques,
trying to burn down hotels
with asylum seekers in
and beating up people
of colour on the street,
I don't buy the argument that that
was down to legitimate grievances.
My own constituency in Hackney,
some of them have similar
legitimate grievances.
They're not beating up black people.
I have always accepted that concerns
about immigration are legitimate.
It is as point of fact
the policy of this government
to reduce both net migration and
our economic dependency upon it.
It is my personal mission to smash
the people-smuggling gangs.
No more gimmicks.
No more gesture politics.
No more irresponsible,
undeliverable promises.
It's become a sort of crude argument
where some people say,
"Well, you know, you've
got an open door on immigration."
And other people say, you know,
"You're anti - immigrant."
It's a hopeless argument that you'll
never resolve in that way.
You resolve it
by a system of control.
One of the people I worked with,
erm, she said to me once,
"How can they hate us so much
when they don't even know us?"
And my answer was,
" Because they don't know us,
"maybe we need to do more
to come forward and speak,
"tell our own stories, engage
with people, engage with the debates
"in order to change things."
Just you watch, this issue is going
to get bigger and bigger.
What are the impacts of recent
changes to UK citizenship?
Explore the Open University's
stories of two fictional families
by scanning the QR code on screen now,
or visiting bbc dot com uk slash
immigration and following links
to the Open University.
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