Suella Braverman, Home Secretary, will reiterate the UK government’s commitment to reducing net migration on Monday as inflows are set to hit a record high this year.
Braverman will say in her keynote address to the National Conservatism conference in London on Monday that she campaigned for Brexit because she wanted Britain to control migration.
This is the second conference in a week involving conservative right-wing figures keen to get back on the political agenda after a poor performance in local elections earlier this month.
In its manifesto for the 2019 general election, the Conservative party promised that overall numbers would decline, but official data due this month from the Office for National Statistics should instead show that net migration has reached record levels.
“We need to reduce the overall number of immigration,” the Home Secretary will tell the conference, which will also be attended by Leveling Secretary Michael Gove, former Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lord Frost, the former Brexit negotiator.
Frost confirmed on Sunday that he had launched a bid to become a Tory MP in the next general election.
“Brexit allows us to build a highly-skilled, high-wage economy that is less dependent on low-skilled foreign labour. That was our 2019 manifesto promise and what we must keep,” Braverman will say, adding that it was not “racist” to want to control Britain’s borders.
Public concern over the scale of migration to the UK was a key driver of the ‘Leave’ campaign in the Brexit referendum. Annual net migration has fallen from 306,000 at the time of the vote in 2016 to 88,000 for the year to June 2020, just before Britain officially leaves the EU.
Since then, however, the figure rose to 503,000 for June 2021-2022 and is expected to reach a record high this year, mainly due to an increase in post-pandemic international studies, the influx of Hong Kong residents and Ukrainian and Afghan refugees.
On Sunday, The Guardian reported that nine organisations, including the Society of Asian Lawyers and the Association of Muslim Lawyers, had written to the Bar Standards Board urging it to investigate comments previously made by Braverman.
Braverman is a qualified attorney and still subject to certain rules governing professional conduct.
The three-day conference on National Conservatism is organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a group run by American and Israeli right-wingers. It follows the launch event of the Conservative Democratic Organization in Bournemouth on Saturday, a group formed after Boris Johnson was ousted from Downing Street.
Sunak faced a flurry of criticism at the CDO conference, including from former Home Secretary Priti Patel who blamed the Conservatives’ poor local election result on his leadership.
Patel told disgruntled Tory activists: ‘If the center of the party spent more time with us, listening, engaging, then I think it’s fair to say we wouldn’t even have seen more than 1,000 of our friends and colleagues lose their seats.”
The CDO has repeatedly denied the accusation that it is a ‘Bring Back Boris’ front group, although conference organizer Claire Bullivant’s suggestion on stage that it would benefit the party s he returned to the bar was greeted with cheers.
Johnson himself did not appear in person, instead sending a video message that lasted less than a minute, in which he got the name of the organization wrong.
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