Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said more needs to be done to reduce legal migration and said there was “no good reason” why Britain could not train up a home-grown workforce of lorry drivers and fruit pickers and reduce the country’s overall need for immigrant workers.
Giving a keynote speech at the National Conservatism conference in London on Monday, Braverman said, “While illegal migration is rightly our priority given the acute challenges that we face in the Channel, we must not lose sight of the importance of controlling legal migration as well.”
The Conservative Party manifesto at the 2019 general election promised to control immigration and said “overall numbers will come down.”
Braverman said: “It’s not xenophobic to say that mass and rapid migration is unsustainable in terms of housing supply, public services, or community relations. Nor is it bigoted to say that we have too many asylum seekers in this country for whom we have insufficient accommodation.”
She told her audience, “That absorbing more and more people means building more and more homes is another one of those unfashionable facts that the open-borders brigade would say means we’re starting a culture war.”
She added: “There’s no good reason why we can’t train enough HGV drivers, butchers, or fruit pickers. Brexit enables us to build a high-skilled, high-wage economy less dependent on low-skilled foreign labour. That was our 2019 manifesto pledge. We must deliver.”
“It’s not racist for anyone, ethnic minority or otherwise, to want to control our borders. I reject the left’s argument that it’s hypocritical for someone from an ethnic minority, like mine, to know these facts or to speak these truths,” said Braverman, whose own parents met after emigrating to Britain from Mauritius and Kenya in the 1960s.
‘Immigration Without Integration’
Braverman said, “You cannot have immigration without integration.”She said: “People who come here should embrace and respect this country. They must not commit crimes. They may practise any faith or none, and they need to respect everyone else’s right to do the same. They need to learn English and understand British social norms and mores, which is not to say that they cannot enrich and add to our culture. Above all, they cannot simply turn up and say, ‘I live here now, you have to look after me.'”
“The unexamined drive towards multiculturalism as an end in itself, combined with identity politics, is a recipe for communal disaster,” she warned.
Braverman, whose speech was briefly interrupted by a protester from Extinction Rebellion, said: “I voted and campaigned for Brexit because I wanted Britain to control migration. So that we all have a say on what works for our country. High-skilled workers support economic growth. Fact.”
“But we need to get overall immigration numbers down. And we mustn’t forget how to do things for ourselves,” Braverman added.
Braverman described identity politics as the “infinite division of society” and said: “Measuring diversity only on the basis of skin colour, sex, and sexuality is mind-bogglingly myopic. Identity politics is the politics of grievance and division.”
She was applauded when she said it was an “unfashionable fact” that “100 percent of women do not have a penis.”
She then criticised the leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, who said last year, “A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view, that is actually the law.”
Jokes About Starmer Becoming First Female PM
“In that way, we distinguish ourselves from the leader of the left, Sir Keir Starmer. He opposes today the things he stood for yesterday, that he’ll change his mind on tomorrow, and he’ll campaign on next year as a man of great principle. Although given his definition of a woman, we can’t rule him out from running to be Labour’s first female prime minister,” she joked.Braverman also addressed the issue of “white privilege” and collective guilt about slavery and imperialism.
She said: “The left can only sell its vision for the future by making people feel terrible about our past. White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt. Nobody should be blamed for things that happened before they were born.
“The defining feature of this country’s relationship with slavery is not that we practised it, but that we led the way in abolishing it. We should be proud of who we are,” she added.
Braverman claimed conservatives are “sceptical of self-appointed gurus, experts, and elites” and “prize experience, judgment, and wisdom.”
She said she would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory, than by all the academics at Harvard University.
“Common sense and a shared understanding of who we are and what really matters in life have vastly more to recommend themselves than does anything that emanates from an ivory tower,” said Braverman.
Braverman said she supported social mobility but not Marxist-style total equality.
She said: “One thing we do not wish to conserve is someone’s life circumstances. One cannot legislate away differences in work ethic, nor natural endowments. Instead, conservatives seek to level the playing field so more people have an opportunity to improve their lot.”
The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “She continues to represent the UK government views on all issues relating to the Home Office, as you would expect. We want to see employers make long-term investments in the UK domestic workforce instead of relying on overseas labour as part of building a high-wage and high-skilled economy and we are supporting those industries in doing that.”
Earlier, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, told ITV’s “Good Morning Britain:” “Nobody sensible is saying there should be uncontrolled migration. I certainly am not. It should be controlled. Of course we should have control of our borders.”
“But some politicians play on people’s fears, other politicians address people’s fears,” Khan added.
