'It's a total farce': Conservative leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick hits out after Labour abandons Rwanda plans
6 September 2024, 09:40 | Updated: 6 September 2024, 09:42
Watch Again: Nick Ferrari is joined by Tory MP Robert Jenrick | 06/09/24
Conservative MP Robert Jenrick has labelled Labour's stance on immigration "a total farce” after Germany proposed adopting abandoned Rwanda plans.
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Describing how the current government has "surrendered to the people smuggling gangs", the Tory leadership hopeful told Nick Ferrari at Breakfast, pulling no punches when it came to Labour's immigration plans.
“They’re either being dishonest or hopelessly naive,” Mr Jenrick said of Labour's decision to abandon the Tories' Rwanda policy.
“It’s a farce, it’s a total farce,” he added of Labour dropping proposed plans, as Germany seeks to adopt similar measures.
On Thursday, Germany's migration commissioner, Joachim Stamp, said the German Rwanda scheme would focus on migrants coming across the EU's eastern border.
“In order to make that police work, I’ve come to the view we need to leave the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR),” Mr Jenrick insisted, putting immigration at the front of his leadership bid.
"I don’t come at this from an ideological perspective, I come at it from a practical one."
Nick Ferrari asks Robert Jenrick if he was 'radicalised' during his time in the Home Office
His comments come on the day Labour prepared to forge a new path as part of a people smuggling summit chaired by Yvette Cooper.
"We’ve got intelligence services, prosecutorial authorities, NCA and senior cabinet ministers looking at the intelligence looking at how we can step up to stop the tragedies like the one we sadly saw this week where lives were lost," Dame Angela Eagle, Minister for Border Security and Asylum told LBC on Friday.
Mr Jenrick said current plans "aren't enough", adding: "you have to have a deterrent”.
He added there was a need to let illegal immigrants know “they’ll never find a life here in the United Kingdom”.
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Speaking with Nick, the Tory leadership hopeful said historic leaders and former PMs alike would "be aghast" at the state of today's liberal immigration system as a result of the ECHR.
“Winston Churchill, who created that, will be aghast at what it’s become today, because we have foreign nation offenders like murderers and rapists and paedophiles we can’t remove because of that human rights architecture," he said.
"We’ve got terror suspects on our streets, who we can’t survey properly or remove because of it.
"Not able to properly secure our border, in an age where there are millions of people looking to come to developed economies like ours.”
It comes as Labour ministers considered plans to send criminals to serve their sentences in Estonian prisons in an effort to combat the overcrowding crisis in British jails on Friday.
Sending offenders to the Baltic state is under consideration as one of many options to address the capacity problem faced by British prisons- where just over 1,000 spaces are thought to be left in England and Wales.
