𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Something has changed in the Channel this summer, and none of it for the better. The mega dinghy has arrived – boats built in China for the sole purpose of packing in more illegal immigrants than ever before. The crossing is more dangerous than ever, more people are making it, and the consequences are felt dearly here.

Andy Burnham is no different to Keir Starmer, unwilling to make the changes this country needs to tackle illegal immigration. More illegal immigrants crossed the Channel under Starmer than under any prime minister, his successor has watched that failure and learnt nothing from it. Unless Burnham acts, and acts decisively, he will fail on illegal immigration exactly as the man he replaced did.

Crimes committed by illegal immigrants are reported seemingly daily, and of a horrific nature. Two Afghans raped a young woman in Barking who had gone out on a date. Another 19-year-old girl was raped in Bournemouth by a refugee as she was trying to get home from a night with her friends. Labour’s answer has been to publish posters telling illegal immigrants to be nice, informing them that women here are equal and that the age of consent is 16. It is a complete admission of the danger posed by the people being let in, who should not be here in the first place.

People are arriving from cultures with no respect for women and girls, where women are treated as property, and that outlook is incompatible with our society. We have been sounding this alarm, and open-border activists, including those who run the Government, refuse to listen. Too many of those communities have failed to integrate, and microcosms of British society now run on standards imported from somewhere else, at the expense of the women who live under them.

Violence against women and girls is a national epidemic. Precisely because the scale is so grave, we cannot indulge political taboos. Pretending it is not happening silences survivors, re-victimises them and leaves other women less safe.

For too long, fears about undocumented young men arriving illegally have been dismissed by the Left as prejudice, yet the Government’s own posters show ministers know the risk is real. That is why those we let in must respect our law and customs, embrace them rather than evade them, and integrate. Our Cultural and Integration Commission starts from the principle that Britain can be multi-racial without being multicultural, and that shared values are a condition of living here.

Immigration cannot mean opening the door and hoping for the best; it must mean insisting that those we admit accept British law and the equality of British women, without exception. Men who abuse women should not be granted the right to settle here, and those who abuse after settling here should lose it.

All of this begins in the Channel, which is why cancelling the Rwanda scheme days before it was due to start was so catastrophic. More than 80,000 illegal immigrants have crossed since the election. Labour have now conceded that Rwanda was necessary, taking two years to accept what the National Crime Agency concluded long ago, that third-country removals work.

Labour voted hundreds of times against the last Conservative Government’s measures on illegal immigration, and against Rwanda above all, then scrapped it within days of taking office. Rwanda only works as a deterrent if it is real, and it will only be real once we are out of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is why leaving sits at the heart of our BORDERS plan.

Through that plan we will leave the ECHR and the European Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, which tears down the lawfare blocking removals, and ban asylum and protection claims from illegal entrants, ending the cycle of appeals that frustrates removals. The next Conservative Government will remove every illegal arrival within a week, to their country of origin or to a safe third country such as Rwanda, with no asylum claim and no court process to hide behind, deport all foreign national offenders, and raise removals to 150,000 a year. Only the Conservatives have the plan to restore control of our borders and the backbone to use it.

How Andy Burnham responds to a summer like this is the real test of him. He is the man who said immigrants should claim benefits immediately on arrival, and argued for more immigration legal aid, which would make removals harder still. Will he double down on his open-borders beliefs and pander to left-wing Labour MPs, or will he stand up for strong borders?