Sunak’s weakness on immigration has driven me to leave this party

Recently, Sarah Dines MP, a barrister and former Home Office minister, argued in that the meaning of the European Convention on Human Rights has been corrupted in order to humiliate the UK in pursuit of the agenda of its Strasbourg Court.

Readers will know from my previous articles that her views on this subject are very much in line with my own.

She joins the growing list of former ministers, including home secretary Suella Braverman and immigration minister Robert Jenrick, who have explained that the Government’s Rwanda Bill is just not effective enough to stop the removal of illegal migrants being bogged down in a morass of human rights based claims in our courts and in Strasbourg.

Yet the Government has obdurately persisted in resisting amendments that might make the Bill more effective, because it puts its desire to kowtow to the judges in Strasbourg above its duty to deliver results for the British people who elected it, wrongly equating the highly fallible utterances of the politicised Strasbourg court with “international law”.

As a life-long active Conservative, I am appalled by the weakness of this Government, by its outright betrayal of the promises made to the British people in the 2019 general election, and by the fact that it has largely ceased to be conservative in anything but name. That is why I have now resigned from the Conservative Party and will campaign against it at the next election. Its wilful refusal to do what is necessary to stop the arrival of illegal migrants is overshadowed by its reckless policies on legal migration. Brexit gave us back the legal power to control our borders, but this Government has deliberately chosen not to do so despite its Brexit freedom.

The Government’s record on reforming the vast raft of rules and regulations which we inherited from our time in the EU has been woeful. We have (at least in Great Britain although not in Northern Ireland) had the benefit of escaping the imposition on us of 200,000 pages of new laws introduced in the EU since Brexit. But there has been no systematic programme of taking advantage of our Brexit freedom by going through our inherited EU laws and revising and improving them to make our economy more competitive.

But one of the few areas where we have managed to diverge from EU rules is to abolish VAT refunds for foreign shoppers who come here to buy goods and take them home with them. This tax-free shopping concession is still there under EU rules in Paris and Milan, so luxury shoppers from the Far East or America are increasingly going there instead of coming to London. So a “well done” to this “Conservative” government for using your Brexit freedom to actively damage our international competitiveness.

Since the Conservative Party will not deliver on its promises, it is time that it is superseded by one which will. It’s not easy for a new party such as Reform to replace one of the two main parties under our first past the post electoral system, but the Conservative brand is now so badly tarnished that this is probably a more achievable task than getting millions of disillusioned electors to vote Conservative again.

Robert Jenrick