MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Can Suella succeed where other Ministers have woefully failed?

Aren’t you very weary of Government promises to solve the problem of illicit migration into this country? The Mail on Sunday certainly is, and we are sorry to have to return to the topic. But we feel we must.

For more than ten years the Conservatives‘ immigration policy has been as convincing as one of those recorded messages that trills, ‘Your call is important to us. One of our representatives will deal with you shortly. You are now number 92 in the queue’. You can almost hear Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing as the speeches, policy announcements and articles by Ministers pour out of Whitehall, pledging each time that something significant is really going to happen.

Since David Cameron‘s premiership, we have been kept hanging on with promises of crackdowns, ‘hostile environments’, vans patrolling the streets with warnings of arrest, tougher sentences for law-breakers, schemes for housing migrants offshore, bids to win the co-operation of France, and the mirage of a British walk-out from the ‘Human Rights’ Charter which migrants endlessly exploit to avoid deportation.

By our count, there have been five Prime Ministers and six Home Secretaries since this began, and who knows how many more there will be, each emitting so much hot air on this issue that it could be repurposed as heat pumps to help save the planet from eco-doom.

A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, from a Border Force vessel after being rescued during a small boat incident in the Channel on Friday

The Mail on Sunday and our sister paper, the Daily Mail, have striven to cover this huge issue, unwelcome to our pro-migration elite, with care and thought. And without doubt it most certainly is a very intractable problem.

The Daily Mail’s recent exposure of the appalling behaviour of some immigration lawyers, a fine old-fashioned (and widely praised) scoop based on diligent reporting, has demonstrated beyond doubt that the system is utterly broken.

And we have always hoped that the promises made by Conservatives would be fulfilled.

Indeed, to her credit, Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s strong words in her interview with The Mail on Sunday today are impressive. Heaven knows, we are willing to go into battle with the Tory Ministers, side by side, if the trumpet ever actually sounds for the charge. But too often it has been a large cloud of bluster and a crisis that does not go away.

If one tenth of the determination the Government has employed on Net Zero had been applied to illegal immigration, we would surely have got somewhere by now.

Make no mistake, we would get nothing better from Sir Keir Starmer’s neo-Blairite Labour Party. The Blair-Brown government had a ‘driving purpose’ to change the make-up of Britain by encouraging large-scale arrivals from abroad. Also, as we learned from leaks and from Gordon Brown’s disgraceful remarks on the subject when he thought the microphones were off while discussing the views of Labour-supporting pensioner Gillian Duffy, any legitimate concern over the scale of migration is considered ‘bigotry’.

Voters have a clear choice between the two main parties. A fundamental principle of our democracy is that there is disagreement, so we are not governed loftily by a perpetual elite who care little for what we think.

The Tories speak for a very important part of Britain – one that has not been treated with much consideration lately.

It is true that the recent problems of Brexit, Covid and the change in Prime Ministers have distracted them from their purpose. But no longer.

An answer to the border crisis is their most pressing task. Nobody else will tackle it. Suella Braverman and her colleagues would win the gratitude of millions, and our unstinting support, if they follow up talking with cold, hard resolution to end a problem that has been allowed to fester for far too long.