Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has come under fire after dismissing key questions about her immigration plans as ‘irrelevant’ as she is warned she could collapse the Good Friday Agreement
Kemi Badenoch’s flagship immigration plan has been savaged – after she said important details about her proposals were “irrelevant”.
The floundering Tory leader is under pressure to convince her membership she has what it takes to win hard-right votes back from Nigel Farage. On Sunday she announced she would remove 150,000 people a year from the UK, but struggled to say where they would be sent.
And she was warned that her “utterly irresponsible” plan to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) could put the Good Friday Agreement at risk. The Conservative leader said Tories would have to agree to leaving the ECHR in order to be allowed to stand as a candidate – risking an exodus to the more moderate Lib Dems.
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Where will people be sent?
Pressed about her proposal to deport 150,000 people a year, Mrs Badenoch refused to say where they would be sent. She told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg: “People need to go back to their countries. They can go to safe third countries if that’s the best thing for them.”
Asked where they would go, she said: “Not here, not here. They don’t belong here, they are committing crimes, they are hurting people.” She added: “I’m tired of us asking all of these irrelevant questions about where should they go. They will go back to where they should do or another country, but they should not be here.”
The Tory Rwanda plan, which cost taxpayers over £700million and resulted in just four volunteers agreeing to go, was torn up when Labour came to power.
Dire warning over ECHR plot
Mrs Badenoch faces outrage after saying she would fully repeal the Human Rights Act and exit the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings (ECAT).
And domestic modern slavery laws will be amended so modern slavery claims no longer prevent removal. The Tories have also pledged to set up a new Removals Force – similar to Donald Trump’s draconinan US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE).
Northern Ireland Secretrary Hilary Benn warned leaving the ECHR – which Winston Churchill was a key advocate for – could have dire consequences. He stated: “When the Northern Ireland Bill to implement the Good Friday Agreement was debated in the House of Commons on July 20 1998, the then Conservative opposition gave it its full support. The GFA has resulted in over 27 years of peace after the trauma of the Troubles.
“And yet the Conservative Party has now joined Reform in advocating a policy that could undermine the Good Friday Agreement – namely by proposing to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights.
“Until recently, it was completely unthinkable that a party aspiring to govern the United Kingdom would countenance putting that agreement at risk, given that ECHR membership is one of the GFA’s founding pillars. Or that they would seek to put the UK in the same group as Belarus and Russia as the only three countries in Europe which would not be signatories to the convention. Utterly irresponsible.”
The Irish Deputy Prime Minister Simon Harris last month warned: “The ECHR’s guarantees cannot be negotiated away, despite what some politicians might claim.” And last year Ms Badenoch warned Tory Party members that leaving the ECHR would not address “the root of the problem”, saying it would lead to “legal wrangling”.
Mrs Badenoch earler told GB News: “If you do not agree with leaving the ECHR, then you should not and cannot stand as a Conservative candidate.” Asked whether she will “kick people out” if they rebel on this issue, she said: “They can be in the party, but they cannot stand as MPs.”
‘Copying Reform policies’
A Labour spokesperson said: “Kemi Badenoch has been Conservative Leader for 338 days now and the British people are still waiting for an apology for the mistakes her party made. Her Conservative Party has learned absolutely nothing from 14 years of failure.
“Badenoch can’t answer the most basic questions about the policies she’s supposedly spent months thinking about. It’s the same old Tory Party making the same old mistakes – and the public shouldn’t and won’t forgive them.
“While the Tories and Reform scrap over who’s copying whose policies, Labour firmly chooses the path of national renewal, by driving forwards growth, securing our borders and making working people better off.”
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