Kemi Badenoch has criticised the government’s White Paper on immigration, saying “it’s not good enough”. The Conservative Party leader’s comments come as Sir Keir Starmer sets out plans to significantly reduce net migration and head off the electoral threat posed by Reform UK. Report by Gluszczykm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We need to tackle the high number of people coming into this country.
00:04Immigration is too high.
00:05So we want to support all the sensible and good measures that will help bring it down.
00:09But we have a bill in Parliament right now where none of those measures are going in.
00:13We've been putting things in.
00:15He has been voting against them.
00:16Take indefinite leave to remain.
00:18We wanted it to be 15 years.
00:19It's too quick, the rate at which people get British citizenship.
00:23We need to do something about that.
00:24He's watered that down to 10 years and again kicked it into the long grass.
00:28But of course we want to see sensible measures on migration.
00:31It is far too high.
00:32My party has acknowledged that.
00:33But what I have done now that we are under new leadership
00:35is get everyone in my party to sign up to the new, much tougher proposals.
00:39I think Labour are taking us for fools, quite frankly.
00:42I think they are taking us for fools.
00:43This is nowhere near the scale of the change that we need to see.
00:47There's only one party that is serious about solving this issue.
00:50We're not like reform announcing more ministers.
00:52That's not what's going to solve the problem.
00:54What will solve the problem is systemic change.
00:56Things like disapplying the Human Rights Act.
00:59We had a deportations bill last week that had that as well as several tougher measures.
01:04Labour has had an announcement this morning that's about watering down good proposals.
01:09It's not good enough.
01:10They are taking us for fools.
01:11We need to make sure that we have enough people in our country working
01:15before we start looking to other countries.
01:17And this is one of the things that has helped drive up the costs and the scale of migration.
01:23Because it isn't just the workers who are coming in, it's also the dependents that they bring in.
01:28That's when it stops being a net benefit and becomes a net cost.
01:31The small boats crisis is getting worse.
01:33It is a lot worse than it was this time last year.
01:35Labour are doing nothing on it.
01:37They need to do things now.
01:39And there are opportunities and proposals now that they can take forwards,
01:42not just announce a white paper looking to the future.
01:45Thank you all for trying to get out.