While immigration goes hand in hand with an open society and the United Kingdom is a country that has historically thrived on immigration, this country finds itself caught up in a crisis.
The influx of legal migration and illegal immigration into our country now very clearly qualifies as an emergency.
It is a crisis of our own making but one for which successive governments must accept responsibility and address.
In 1997, net migration was just 47,000. The Office for National Statistics figures showed net migration to the United Kingdom of 745,000 in the calendar year 2022.
Sarah Dines has slammed the European Court of Human Rights
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In the year ending June 2023, 322,000 migrants were non-EU workers and their family members, and 378,000 were non-EU international students and their family members.
Polling has clearly shown that the public want immigration to be reduced.
The 2016 independent review by Dame Louise Casey into opportunity and integration found that some areas of the UK were “changing out of all recognition”.
The Policy Exchange think-tank noted in 2017 that: “Too many people coming too quickly into a society makes it difficult to retain a sense of cohesion and stability”.
Demos, Britain's leading cross-party think tank, found in 2018 that around three-quarters of the British public believed that immigration had increased divisions.
The Conservative Party was elected in 2019 on a manifesto commitment to reduce the overall level of legal immigration.
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Dines claims that the Tories' inability to combat the issue of small boats has led to public disillusionment with politicians
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Not only has this government all too obviously not honoured that commitment, we have also not been able to adequately address the unprecedentedly high levels of illegal immigration, not least of which by way of the small boats. This has undoubtedly led to public disillusionment with politicians.
We can now identify one of the key reasons for this crisis.
I know from my own time as a junior minister in the Home Office how difficult it was to effect change in government policies given the dead hand of the European Convention on Human Rights – and more specifically how the Convention has come to be interpreted by the deeply questionable European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the often legally-unqualified activists who have been appointed to its bench as judges.
All roads with regard to legal and illegal migration lead back to this Strasbourg Court. The United Kingdom has become a laboratory for Strasbourg’s political activists.
The cost to the taxpayer of hundreds of thousands of Strasbourg-sanctioned “legal” migrants in recent years runs to billions of pounds.
Every claim for refugee status or entry into the United Kingdom resulting from Strasbourg’s ever expanding interpretation of Convention “rights”, and rubber-stamped or fast-tracked by an increasingly “woke” civil service has a cost implication.
We all know of the £8million a day for housing illegal “small boats” migrants, revised recently to £15million it is said, something which is set to cost £6billion over the next two years.
This is the tip of the fiscal iceberg created in large part by Strasbourg and borne by taxpayers already acutely aware of the associated pressures on the National Health Service, public housing, rental market and schools.
The number of asylum seekers in hotels increased by 25-fold between late 2019 and early 2022. 93,300 people claimed asylum in the UK in 2023.
The cost of housing 120,000 asylum seekers, whose presence and open-ended rights are also facilitated by Strasbourg’s ruling, is on course to reach up to £11 billion a year.
The cost to the taxpayer of hundreds of thousands of Strasbourg-sanctioned “legal” migrants in recent years runs to hundreds of billions of pounds.
The crisis is self-evident. The solution is equally clear. The United Kingdom must leave the jurisdiction of Strasbourg.