Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.
Kemi Badenoch recently insisted that “ministers didn’t notice” the unprecedented migration levels they oversaw under the previous Tory administration.
Similarly, she told Sky News last year that the Conservatives merely “took their eye off the ball” on the issue.
But the huge immigration figures Britain clocked up under the 14 years of Tory governance, particularly under Boris Johnson, were a decision.
Fresh visa routes were rolled out and existing rules eased. Now Badenoch wants us to believe she and her colleagues simply did not realise what they were supporting.
One of the biggest problems with her continued attempt to pitch herself as a bold disruptor on the Right is her own record. In 2018, she enthusiastically backed the plans to remove the annual cap on skilled work visas. She was by no means dragged into defending the proposals.
Indeed, when Sajid Javid presented the Government’s post-Brexit immigration White Paper, she thanked him for proposing to remove annual limits on work visas and for changes benefiting international students. “I lobbied for both,” she proudly told the Commons.
She may hope to brush this record off as a reluctant decision, taken in different circumstances. But this is unlikely to wash with voters who feel the Tories betrayed their post-Brexit promises. These were not insignificant tinkerings with the system. Javid’s White Paper proposed removing the cap on skilled workers, lowering the skills threshold and abolishing the requirement for employers to test whether a resident worker could fill a vacancy. The new system subsequently introduced in 2021 made it considerably easier for employers to recruit from outside the European Union.
Moreover, these changes were unveiled two years after the bombshell vote for Brexit, which channelled the decades-long frustrations of millions of voters over mass immigration and sovereignty. But rather than seizing this historic opportunity to reduce immigration, Tory ministers erected a system with no overall numerical ceiling on so-called “skilled-worker” visas.
It has become increasingly clear just how inadequate this entire “skilled” visa system is. Reform Party Chairman Zia Yusuf recently exposed how one takeaway shop in Derby was assigned 76 Certificates of Sponsorship in 2023. It is obvious that these lax systems are allowing businesses to import cheaper overseas labour. It is also concerning that the system previously allowed care workers and students from across the world to bring vast numbers of dependents with them, until rule changes in May 2024.
In general, the consequences for British workers have been dire. According to new Centre for Social Justice research, the number of payrolled employments increased by approximately 3.7 million between 2014 and the end of 2025. However, just 734,000 of that uptick was among British nationals, compared with some 408,000 among EU nationals and 2.5 million among non-EU migrants.
Office for Budget Responsibility figures analysed by the Adam Smith Institute, showed that low-wage immigrants cost the UK nearly £465,000 each by the age of 81. Back in 2016, Migration Watch UK already calculated that the net financial burden of migration to the UK is £4 billion to £17 billion annually. If recent “Boris wave” immigrants are granted Indefinite Leave to Remain, costs to the taxpayer could rise by billions.
The now infamous data graph published by The Economist in 2021, showed that non-Western immigrants to Denmark, a somewhat similar society to the UK, were a net fiscal negative. Immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa were found to be fiscally negative even while at prime working age.
Perhaps these rather awkward points are why Badenoch often chooses to focus on illegal immigration. This is indeed an urgent issue, and Nigel Farage is right to request a “national emergency” be declared. Still, it is a separate one to legal immigration, which is responsible for the vast majority of new arrivals into Britain.
Badenoch now promises a numerical cap on legal migration and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
But will voters actually believe her? The Tory track record on immigration, and what they often parrot prior to elections, are two very different things. How restrictive would her cap be, and which visa routes would it cover? Would a future Tory administration buckle when various sectors, and universities, demand exceptions, as they invariably would?
Badenoch has also garnered extensive plaudits in the right-leaning press for warning about the failure of multiculturalism and suggesting new integration methods are needed. Her outspoken criticism of rising antisemitism, including at the hands of Islamists, is to be welcomed. But to the average Joe these seem like tired, obvious platitudes that even David Cameron and Angela Merkel peddled back in the 2010s. These remarks may irk uber-progressives, but there is nothing groundbreaking about such observations. Many well-meaning people wise enough to point them out in the past few decades, like Farage, were smeared as racist and bigoted for far too long, including by the Tory establishment.
British voters do not want endless podcast spiels about wokery. They are desperate for concrete solutions to the problems that mass immigration has created.
Paying lip service to public anxieties is what the Tories have already done for decades, while overseeing unprecedented levels of migration – to the detriment of our economy and culture. Badenoch is yet to fully explain how or why she is supposed to have changed her mind.
By play-acting as if high immigration was an accident her party wandered into, Badenoch is guilty of admitting either her party’s deceit or incompetence. Neither of these implications is attractive to our exhausted electorate.