Editorial: ​Farage’s chance to take lead on immigration

​The former home secretary Suella Braverman recounted a telling point about her time in government.

Writing in the media yesterday, Ms Braverman talked about 2023, when net migration into the UK hit almost a million people. "I was home secretary ... fighting an often lonely battle within cabinet to apply the brakes,” she said. “That battle was largely lost.”

Ms Braverman points out that the reduced figure of 700,000 people was still a crisis, as it assuredly is. To have approaching two million people enter the UK, an already densely populated country, in two years is nothing less than a crisis.

Yet she implies that she was almost alone in resisting this. The claim is self-serving but it is also plausible. There are other credible accounts of cabinet ministers in the Tory government repeatedly asking for tens of thousands of people to be allowed into the country for one reason or another, often due to labour shortages in a particular sector at a critical time. On one level it is easy to see how it was largely approved, yet a Conservative Party government above all should have seen the huge cultural and infrastructural pressures from such an influx. And it was the Tories who should have reformed welfare such that the existing UK population could not turn up its noses at unpopular jobs.

Those problems are so acute now that there is disastrous further pressure on housing, disastrous further pressure on health, disastrous pressure on schools, as well as conflict in communities. Labour, which was so naive about this – like Stormont MLAs, it only ever hailed diversity and silenced concerns as ‘racist’ – was not going to get tough at borders.

Amid the chaos, this is Nigel Farage’s chance to show leadership and outline uncompromising positions on immigration so that our leaders don’t just stem the influx but find ways to remove as many illegal entrants as feasible.