A former Tory immigration minister was roasted by Susanna Reid after he unveiled proposals to slash the number of people coming to the UK.
Robert Jenrick says he wants to cut net migration to “the tens of thousands” - a Conservative pledge first made by David Cameron before he became prime minister.
However, despite 14 years of Tory government, official figures revealed that net migration in the year to June 2023 was 672,000.
On ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Reid told him: “That record level of legal migration - some people might think it’s a good thing because immigrants bring enormous value to the economy. But you are arguing that it’s too high.
“That happened on your watch, on the Conservative government’s watch. This is 14 years that the Conservatives have been in government and we’ve got record levels of legal migration.”
Jenrick, who resigned last year in protest at Rishi Sunak’s plan to cut illegal migration, replied: “I’m not just complaining about it, I’m actually putting forward a fully worked through plan which could actually fix this problem and get us back to the tens of thousands.”
The senior Tory today published a 30-point plan aimed at cutting immigration, including breaking up the Home Office and creating a new department focused on controlling the UK’s borders.
He said: “I do think the government has made some serious errors after we left the European Union because we took back the levers of migration, we ended free movement, and that meant that politicians had much more control than they had ever had in the past.
“But they did make some serious mistakes, and that to me was a betrayal of Brexit. What we’ve got to do now is fix it, and we still have time within this parliament to make the changes I’m proposing, that would ensure we get back down to the tens of thousands.”