‘PEOPLE WILL DIE’ IF WE DON’T TACKLE IMMIGRATION, WARNS JENRICK

Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick has said he is ‘sickened’ by Labour’s decision to scrap the Rwanda policy, saying the decision is ‘putting the public in danger’.
Mr Jenrick also said he believed English identity was ‘in peril’ and the country risked handing guardianship of it to the far right.
Speaking on GB News, Robert Jenrick said:
“There are dozens of terror suspects who are breaking into our country on small boats coming into here illegally. These are people who are linked to serious terror organisations like al-Qaeda and Islamic State and we need to tackle this.
“I fought relentlessly within government to address this, and that is one of the reasons why I believe we now need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, because we will not be able to remove these people from our country, people who are posing a serious risk to the public, unless we do so.
“There are dozens of dangerous terror suspects in our country who we need to removed. There are over a thousand illegal migrants who are on our registers for other serious criminality, and we need to get these people out of our country.
“I argued, when I was in government, relentlessly, that we needed to take the most robust action. That was the reason why I argued for a strengthened version of the Rwanda policy whereby people who come here illegally would be removed within days, not weeks or months or years.
“We should end the merry go round of legal claims which is preventing us from removing those people. It’s ultimately the reason why I decided to resign from the cabinet at the turn of the year, because I wasn’t able to persuade the then Prime Minister to take the action that was necessary. And I left government so I could change the law to stop this, so we could disapply the European Convention on Human Rights, and we can get these dangerous people out of the country and keep the public safe.
“Now we have a Prime Minister in Keir Starmer whose first act was, rather than strengthening Rwanda like I wanted, was to scrap it. And I’m frankly sickened by that, because that is putting the public in danger, and we’ve got to hold him to account for the decisions that he’s making.
“One of the reasons why I’ve taken the decision to set out this information today, because I think the public and those in politics need to know how serious this situation is.
“If we remain within the European Convention on Human Rights, we will not be able to tackle this issue. There will be terror suspects on our streets for years and decades to come, and people will be put in great danger. People will die as a result of that, as they have already with terror attacks, for example, in Reading and Hartlepool and London Bridge: we’ve got to end that.
“But within the Conservative Party, I actually see that things are changing. There is now a consensus that the ECHR is failing us, and some are saying that we need to reform it. In fact, everyone agrees that at the least it needs to be reformed. What I’m saying is that’s not possible. I have studied this, I have a plan, and it’s clear to me that there is no way to reform this. That would be a project of decades. There’s no way in which we could do that. It would be as doomed to failure as David Cameron’s well intentioned attempt to renegotiate our membership of the EU years ago.
“We need to get on and leave, and I would take us out. The good news is that if you look at the members of parliament who are supporting my campaign, they’re coming from all parts, all traditions, within the Conservative Party, and that suggests that we’re winning this argument.
“This isn’t about aping Reform, far from it. I want the Conservative Party to be the serious party of British politics, which is bringing forward the serious answers to the big challenges that we face, like on illegal and legal migration.
”And people can look at my records; they know that I fought relentlessly to reform our legal migration system and personally secured the biggest changes in years that will reduce the number of people coming into our country by 300,000 a year.
“And they knew that I fought to strengthen the Rwanda Bill alongside 60 colleagues that would have stopped the boats. And they also can see that I stood up on principle. I was the only one, frankly, who chose to resign on a matter of principle of honour in the last parliament of all those who served in cabinet. That shows that I stand for my principles, and I want to make this Conservative Party better. I want to, if we’re lucky enough to reenter government in the future, address these issues once and for all.”
Discussing his sacking by Boris Johnson in 2021, Mr Jenrick said:
“Well, you have to ask Boris. He himself has acknowledged that it was a mistake to row back on the planning reforms that we were developing at the time. They would have helped hundreds of thousands of young people onto the housing ladder, created thousands of jobs and a lot of economic growth that was needed in this country.
“And that’s one of the other things I want to do. I want to get people back onto the housing ladder. I think that is a fundamentally Conservative thing, and it’s important that we do that. Of course, we need to do this in our big cities, rather than carpeting over the countryside and the Greenbelt, but we’ve got to address that. I was right to address it at the time, and it will be part of a future Conservative government’s agenda when we next come to power.
“When I was housing secretary, I brought the number of new homes being built in this country up to the highest level since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. In fact, the highest level since 1987 it fell back significantly when I left office. So my record on housing is the best of any housing secretary in recent decades, and I want us to get back to those levels again, because I think it is so important that we give young people a stake in society. That is a fundamentally conservative principle.
“My record as housing secretary is there for everyone to see. I fought to get the number of homes being built in this country right up there to the highest levels they’ve been in my lifetime. And I want to see that happen again in the future.
“People can see that when I’ve been in government, I’ve always taken difficult decisions. I’ve always fought for solutions to the big challenges facing our country, whether it’s to reform the planning system, to get the country building again, whether it’s slashing red tape for small businesses when I was community secretary, or whether as immigration minister, getting down legal migration for the first time, tackling the boats, signing deals like the one with Albania that led to an almost 40% reduction in the numbers coming across. Those numbers started to rise again as soon as I resigned.
“And then obviously fighting for us to have a sustainable solution to the small boats crisis, with a stronger Rwanda policy that would have stopped those boats and would have put this country in a much better place to tackle all of the harms that are coming as a result of illegal migration.
“I didn’t find it hard to describe English at all. I was surprised that one of your rival channels even asked me the question. No one would ask a Welshman or a Scotsman or a Frenchman to define what is Welsh or Scottish or French identity.
“My point was that national identity comes from our history, our language, our food, our landscapes, our literature. And I think we can all point to things that we love about this country.
“What I was trying to say in the article was that far too often do English politicians talk about English identity. It’s perfectly normal for a prominent Scottish or Welsh politician to celebrate Scottish or Welsh identity, but in England, somehow it’s anathema, and that’s got to change.
“I think English identity is in peril right now, and that’s partly because our kids are not being taught in our schools. It’s that institutions like our museums and the guardians of our culture are too quick to denigrate it. And it’s also because mass migration, particularly focused on England and English cities, is making it too difficult to integrate people into our identity. And I want to change that.
“I want to start a national conversation about how we celebrate and we protect English identity and we hand it on to our own children and grandchildren.
“I think that there’s a real problem in this country that a lot of people, whether it’s in politics, in the media, in our cultural institutions, do not want to talk about English identity in particular. In fact, they frown at that sometimes, and they think that the flag of St George is associated with the far right.
“Well, I want to reclaim those things. I want it to be perfectly normal for an English politician to be talking about our own national identity. I think that’s really important or else, the real danger in our politics is that we leave those things to the far right, and that’s wrong. It should be a mainstream view that we can talk about our own identity, which is so important to us as a country, we should be handing on to the next generation.”