Editorial: The Tories allowed a massive influx of immigration but Labour is set to be even worse over border controls

​A simple way to summarise the immigration disaster in the United Kingdom is as follows.​

The Conservatives presided over a loss of control of our borders, and the mammoth net increase in the number of migrants coming into the UK – increasing the overall population by more than a 10th – is one that happened over the last 20 years, most of it under Tory rule.

In fact the worst period was the most recent of those two decades, when various Conservative prime ministers were in office.

They did not do something that a fiscally prudent and socially conservative government should have done, which is reform welfare in a way that brought a much higher percentage of the existing population into work, thus reducing our reliance on foreign labour to take up jobs that healthy UK citizens refused to do. It was the Tories who should have made the cultural arguments against a massive influx of people from very different, sometimes even hostile, groups of people. Instead, it was a badge of progressive pride to many Conservative ministers to say how pro immigration they were, as if to disprove any sense of racism.

However, while the Tories are deeply culpable for this disaster, Labour is somehow managing to be worse than them. First it was the previous Labour government that set in motion mass immigration. Now this government is not taking the radical action that is required.

We report today that the number of migrants arriving in the UK after crossing the English Channel has set a new record for the first four months of the year, with 8,064 arrivals so far in 2025. Set against overall migrant numbers it is small, but it means yet more hotels etc will have to be requisitioned.

Labour mocked the Rwanda processing scheme but never addressed the fact that its main recommendation was that it was a deterrent. Now there is barely any such.