Rishi Sunak has slashed small boat arrivals & voters worried about illegal migration should back him to sort it
Tide turning
IT is fair enough for Rishi Sunak to begin 2024 by claiming some measure of success on illegal migration.
A vast backlog of 92,000 asylum cases has been wiped out, roughly half the overall total.
Small boat arrivals have been slashed by a third on 2022, chiefly thanks to deals the PM has struck.
But has he “stopped the boats”? No.
That will take a deterrent like the Rwanda scheme.
And Mr Sunak is up against obstructive judges, Tory “wets”, a left-wing opposition and a human rights industry determined to thwart it.
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Immigration officials, too, seem routinely to side with failed asylum-seekers.
Of the few who are deported, scores soon return illegally, file new applications and are mysteriously approved.
No wonder they come back.
The PM seems forever rowing against the tide.
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But voters worried about illegal migration should back him to sort it.
A Labour Government would simply have zero interest in doing so.
Night Mayor
HOW heartbreaking and how ironic that as London Mayor Sadiq Khan advertised himself in the New Year’s Eve skies over Westminster, a teenager was knifed to death trying to watch it.
Harry Pitman, another child to add to 2023’s appalling toll on Khan’s watch in the crime-ravaged, gang-plagued capital.
What was the Mayor’s message to the nation watching the fireworks on TV?
His usual vacuous virtue-signalling about diversity, gay rights and the NHS . . . despite it being in disarray due to Covid and strikes run by militant lefties Khan wholeheartedly supports.
Nothing, naturally, about knife crime, which elsewhere he managed to blame not on gang wars, drugs, feeble policing and his own ineptitude but on smartphones, which he said tech firms should make less attractive to robbers.
A masterclass in buck-passing.
And typical of a tribal Labour man unfit to lead anything, let alone what is still the world’s greatest city in spite of him.
Sick walkout
TOMORROW the junior doctors’ union will inflict further suffering on the sick — and damage to the NHS it claims to revere.
The BMA, crammed with idiotic young Arthur Scargill wannabes, should be ashamed of itself.
Almost any career starts with low pay.
Medics begin on nearly £30,000, but that rises rapidly.
They also get huge pension bungs from the NHS and have a clear pathway to a six-figure salary.
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Yet the union wants pay compensation for every economic downturn since most of them were kids . . . from the 2008 financial crisis to austerity, then Covid and war.
This doctors’ strike, the longest in NHS history, will be indefensible.