Truss Must Stop The Boats Or Go Down As A Failed PM

Political Commentator Patrick O'Flynn writes for Heaver News.

Three big things happened in Britain during Liz Truss’s first week as Prime Minister and you will certainly know all about two of them.

First, she set out a plan to put the lid on soaring energy bills by subsidising them out of the public purse to the tune of an astonishing £150bn over the next two years.

Secondly, the Queen died and nearly all of us were engulfed in sadness and grief. Naturally since the news broke our media has been almost entirely fixated upon the passing of Her Majesty after her 70 years on the throne. Other matters have barely been reported, such as the exciting advance of Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv region.

But there’s been a third big event in Britain too that will surely weigh very heavily at the next General Election and yet has not featured on any TV News bulletin that I have seen: the record set in 2021 for the number of migrants to arrive illegally in Britain via cross-Channel dinghies has been broken, with three and a half months of 2022 still to run.

The 28,526 such arrivals in 2021 was itself a massive rise on the 8,404 recorded in 2019. Yet the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that more than 600 people had crossed in 19 boats on Monday, taking the running total for the year to 28,592. Another 538 arrived yesterday (TUE). Given that September and October are usually the peak months for crossings, it looks like we are headed for a final annual total of at least 40,000.

Because she is not being pressed about this by the political correspondents of the main broadcasters, or by opposition party spokesmen, Ms Truss may be tempted to regard it as a minor irritation. She would be foolish to do so.

In fact there is no greater threat to her prospects of winning the next election than Conservative failures on immigration in general and the shambles in the Channel in particular. The farcical situation is simply killing the belief of Tory-leaning voters in the party.

A poll for Migration Watch UK in July found that 73 per cent of Conservative voters want lower immigration. Tellingly that figure was a massive 86 per cent among those who voted Tory in 2019 but said they no longer supported the party.

The YouGov tracker of key political issues also finds a huge difference between the ranking accorded to immigration by 2019 Tory voters and 2016 Leave voters on the one hand, compared to Remainers and non-Tories on the other. Among the former groups immigration and asylum is continually rated the second top issue (behind the economy). Yet among non-Tories and Remainers, it is down among the also-rans.

In her leadership campaign, Truss promised action to deal with the dinghies. “Words are not enough. I will take firm and urgent action to protect our borders and stop the traffickers once and for all. That’s why I will expand our Border Force and build on the Rwanda policy. I will also make sure that the ECHR works for Britain,” she said.

As yet there is presently no sign of such action. In fact the only thing that has happened in this area, policy-wise, is the dropping of plans for a British Bill of Rights.

Does Liz Truss realise what thin ice she is skating on? Legions of voters let down by previous Tory leaders who promised to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands annually yet never got close, or who expected Boris Johnson to fulfil his early promise to “send back” the Channel migrants are by now pretty cynical about the Conservatives on these matters.

They are unlikely to go out and vote for Keir Starmer or Ed Davey’s parties, but the prospect of them sitting on their hands come election day grows ever-stronger.

Priti Patel’s career in high-end politics has already been truncated by her failure to turn words into deeds. None of her schemes – from paying money to France, to appointing a “Clandestine Channel Threat Commander”, to announcing a policy of pushbacks at sea and then the Rwanda policy – amounted to a row of beans.

When she told us in her Conservative conference speech last year that “we are smashing the economic model of the people-smugglers so they can no longer profit from human misery”, most of us just snorted with derision: She wasn’t and didn’t.

You said it, Liz Truss: words are not enough. Numbers are however very telling and 30,000 will be hit very soon and then 40,000 – perhaps even 50,000 by year’s end. Preside over something similar – or even worse - in 2023 and you will go down as a fag-end premier who didn’t even chalk up two years in office.