Last weekend’s Sunday Times lead with a story on Britain granting asylum to a security chief of Hamas, proscribed as a terrorist organisation. On one hand, the story should have been unbelievable, and yet thanks to our ludicrously dysfunctional asylum system, it was entirely believable.

Asylum and immigration remains an ongoing disaster showing the British state at is worst, aided and abetted by a Labour government that shows no interest in stemming mass immigration.

At Conservative conference, it’ll be one of the major issues discussed. Get it right, and we have a chance at the next election. Get it wrong, and we don’t, especially given our record.

The good news is that we are in a better position than we were, especially on asylum. We will pull out of the ECHR, aim to remove 150,000 a year, pledge to deport all new illegal arrivals with a week and shut the wretched immigration courts with their activist class of judges.

But that still leaves lots of important work to be done. Here are some thoughts from me.

First, the purpose of immigration policy is not to ‘position’ ourselves a little bit here, or a little bit there; a little bit to the left of Reform, or right of Reform and left of Restore, yakety-yak, etc, etc. It’s to have a immigration policy build around conservative ethical and political principles. These are:

• Borders are inviolate – no one gets in illegally
• Whilst there are great people everywhere, some cultures are more compatible, some less. We should prioritise those who come from high trust/low, crime cultures and deprioritise those who come from misogynistic cultures wherever they are found: anything else puts women and children at risk.
• Our migration system needs to be credible, controlled and limited. Right now, it’s not. British citizenship too must be much more tightly controlled
• Migrants must clearly contribute – and many do – but work visas should be time limited unless in exceptional circumstances
• Law and order matter. We must recognise and deal with the growth of ethnically based organised crime and do much more to deport foreign-born criminals

The overwhelmingly majority of the electorate – from all parties – want a tough asylum and migration policy. Increasingly numbers of Britons feel migration has been bad for our country. For social cohesion, that’s not a place we want to be. Modest migration strengthens our society. It is a social good. Mass migration is arguably weakening it. We need to defend a multi-ethnic state, if not a multi-cultural one, and whilst we should ensure that we respect the contributions of everyone wherever those they are from, we need to end large-scale immigration as a priority and put in place a credible system for limited migration, accepting that deportations and returns are elements of this.

Finally, although Britons want a tough policy, they want it articulated thoughtfully and intelligently: a clear and strong message, moderately delivered, based on clear and just principles that defend a tolerant society.

To cut to the chase, if borders are inviolate, why will we allow who came here illegally to stay? I know we have promised to deport new arrivals, who break our laws by coming illegally, but what about those illegals who arrived two years ago, or those arriving now? Why should they be allowed to stay?

Just like more recent arrivals, they pay organised crime to smuggle them here and some will continue to work for crime gangs, effectively being indentured to them. Some will be an active danger to women and children, as we are now seeing. Some are a security threat. A man arrested in May last year in connection with a planned attack on the Israeli embassy was a small-boat arrival, living in taxpayer funded accommodation. I can see the case for allowing small numbers, say Iranian females, leave to remain, but as we know women make up a very small number of illegal arrivals.

A controlled, credible and limited system

At the moment, migration is still out of control. We’ve had 83,000 illegals since Labour came to power, and legal migration is still running in the hundreds of thousands. It’s partially hidden by the large numbers of people leaving. When you have an organisation as discredited as the UN criticising the Home Office over serious flaws in our asylum and decision-making process, you know you have a problem. Only half of asylum decisions met the UK Government’s standards; painfully awful, and even if a few fail, their chances of being expelled are v very low – the average asylum seeker effectively has a 95 percent chance of avoiding deportation. When dozens of men claim asylum on ground of homosexuality, all claiming the same UK partner, or that hundreds of Iraqi Kurds all claimed to be in danger because of their relationship with the same daughter of a powerful figure in that country, let’s not pretend the system isn’t being abused.

A recent whistle-blower recently said that maybe one in a hundred asylum seekers was genuine. This itself raise a difficult question. Kemi has said that we will remove those with no right to be here, but what happens if the right to be here has been gained by cheating or gaming the system, or via a system which has simply given up doing its job and is provably letting in the wrong people? Do we just accept this? Do we look at all these claims again? Does the Home Office even keep the information?

I do not understand why we do not cap numbers. On asylum, why don’t we agree to take a small number of asylum seekers, say 1,000 a year, certainly no more than 5,000. They come only via the UNHCR. Do I like the UN? Not particularly, but someone registered with them as a refugee is more likely to be genuine. Everyone else we should reject unless their application is directly supported by the Home Secretary.

Why can’t we cap legal migration too? Even 25 years ago, the idea that we would simply take in millions of people who come here on student, spousal or occasionally a work visa, would have been unthinkable. Arguably, we’ve offered citizenship as a carrot for workers. The result is a city of new citizens – 200,000 plus – every year, with next to no requirements: for example, B1 level English which is enough to write an email but not to read a book. We do police checks on potential citizens here, but appear not to do so regularly in their home countries. Why not?

The scams are legion.

Some students come ostensibly to study for degrees but go absent as soon as they arrive. Why are their visas not revoked? Second, why do hundreds of corner shops, fast food outlets and kebab houses allowed to sponsor workers visas? Again, for how many is this just a money-making scam or a way of importing cheap labour, undercutting workers here?

We need to stop pretending all cultural backgrounds are ‘equal’. If you need to distribute a leaflet to immigrants telling them that rape is a no-no, you know that some of those you are importing are the wrong people.

Ethno-nationalism should not be a part of our identity.

I love that British identity is values-based. I wouldn’t qualify for ‘pure English’ status anyway. My mother was in immigrant, mainly Mittel European German with a bit of Slavic (Polish/Ukrainian) thrown in, and possibly some Jewish blood too. I am married to a particularly fabulous Muslim immigrant to boot, so I don’t think I would not qualify for Rupert Lowe’s version of British identity (and my perfect daughter, who is being brought up in both faiths, certainly would not).

I want a tolerant society that welcomes talent from everywhere. I need it for my own family.

However, there is such a thing as Western civilisation, there is such a thing as British civilisation, and British and English culture. Whilst being respectful of other cultures, I have a very strong affinity for my own culture and civilisation. I despair of those parts of our establishment (media law, politics and academia) who peddle an anti-white racism and which sees Britain as a source of evil and sees ‘whiteness’ as something to be treated or mitigated by the denial of our own culture.

We need to have an honest conversation about the danger to women and children from men from cultures which are far more accepting of, say, child marriage and child sexual exploitation, or those who see women as possessions, or those which see adulthood as the onset of puberty, or those which are interpret female honour as female invisibility in our society.

There are cultural codes which should simply be unacceptable in our society. The Foreign Office already produces country guidance on risk to women. Should we not link our guidance to immigration policy in a ‘joined-up’ government kind of way?

We know that bad men come in all ethnic and religious types, but when an Afghan man is, according to some stats, 20x more likely to commit sexual violence than the norm, it begs the question: what are we doing? When many thousands of children from broken and damaged backgrounds were sexually abused by predominately Pakistani-heritage ‘grooming’ gangs – and justified by at least some on religious grounds – we cannot in clear conscious say that culture is not relevant. It is neither believable nor right. In fact, it is cowardly and dishonest. This vital conversation has been shut down by intolerant ‘progressives’ for too long. We are failing to integrate, in part due to the vast scale of migration.

Part of this is being much more serious about protecting female Muslims. Some of the 1,400 abused girls in Rotherham were believed to be Muslims. Child abuse organisations say that ethnic minorities, including Muslims, under report child abuse, so we know there are Muslim women and girls suffering in silence. We have a duty to them too.

Abuse exists amongst all ethnic and religious groups. but turning a blind eye to evil on the grounds of ‘not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat’, as one former Labour MP said, hurts women and threatens children.

We also need to give far greater consideration to the protection of British Jewry, who are being put in active danger by the utter recklessness of migration policies. That Jews are now questioning their future in our society should shame us.

The ever-eloquent Matthew Syed summed up this new realism in a recent piece in s. The true extremists of our age are those ‘progressive’ liberals wishing to continue with the open borders experiment, not those wishing to end it.

Contribute to society

In 1962 to 1969, when my mum became British, a total of 178,859 citizenships were issued.

By contrast, in 20220-25 alone, some 1.2 million people became British citizens. In the decade before 1.6 million. How many of these were driven by a desire to be British, and how many for financial reasons? I know it’s not a perfect comparison, but when Denmark brought in a highly restrictive approach, including slashed financial benefits, temporary residence mandates, and strict family reunification rules – asylum applications collapsed. The evidence from elsewhere is that asylum is, in part, being driven by financial incentives.

The costs of supporting asylum seekers is astronomical.

The Home Office admitted just last week that the lifetime cost for supporting refugees who were granted asylum under article 8 of the ECHR for last year alone is £4.9 billion, as reported in . Official data shows that households with foreign nationals received a record £11.9 BILLION in universal credit payments in 2025. Up from £9.5bn in 2024 and £7.5bn in 2023. £7.7bn in payments went to jobless foreign nationals. Yet some Labour MPs continue to claim that mass immigration is driven by a moral need to help Britain. One declared that migrants had ‘given up their lives to serve our country’, as if they were engaged in some great act of human sacrifice.

We all know examples of friends and relatives, immigrants born here but doing important, sometimes amazing things. We know that there are many examples of those that contribute. My mother was one of them. She was an auxiliary nurse. She sang in an amateur choir. She supported, with money and time, good causes in north London.

But we also know that low-skilled, low education, mass immigration is unsustainable. A depressing proportion of arrivals from some countries do not work, and those that do often will cost us far more than we gain. A carer worker on £18,000 is certainly doing productive work, but why is the visa open-ended, and why can he or she bring numerous family members? Why aren’t we making benefits contingent on training our own unemployed to do this work? Why is indefinite leave to remain indefinite? I am not saying that no one should be able to transfer to longer term status, but for low-paid work, the assumption is that a work visa should be fixed-term, especially given the Boriswave tsunami. Indefinite Leave to Remain needs to become Leave to Remain, and in most cases stays in Britain, especially in low-skilled menial jobs, needs to be brought to an end at the end of the current visas. Why is getting a temporary work visa a passport to permanent residency and welfare?

We continued to see asylum and immigration as an asylum and immigration issue, rather than a public safety problem, which it increasingly is. We are importing criminals into our country. We know this because hundreds of asylum seekers end up in court – and these are for crimes which are reported, investigated and prosecuted. Given that an estimated four crimes are reported for every ten committed, the true number of migrant crimes will be higher. Don’t we have enough problems with home-grown criminals?

The Government is so worried about us finding out the link between crime and nationality that it is going to court to block the release of data which shows crime by different ethnic groups. Why? Are we prioritising the right of developing world, undocumented males over our duty to protect our society?

Over and above individuals, Britain now has a serious problem with ethnic organised crime. Albanian gangs controlled the London drug market. Over 10 percent of the foreign prison population is Albanian. Iraqi Kurdish gangs control much of the people smuggling into this country. A recent study highlighted the link between Pakistani heroin gangs and child grooming, with corrupt politicians and officials providing cover. It’s been suggested that accusations of ‘racism’ were used to prevent people investigating.

What pressure has the Foreign Office put on Pakistan or the Iraqi Kurdish authority? Precious little, is the answer.

But more broadly, why do we allow foreigners who commit crimes to stay? Thousands of foreign criminals remain in the UK years after they should have been deported. It’s great that Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has announced that dual nationals who’ve lived here less than 15 years and jailed for five would lose their passports. But may I ask: why 15 years? And why five years?

Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful we are moving, but it’s baubled with caveats.

Imagine a scenario; a teenage girl is raped. The CPS builds a case. The defendant agrees to plead guilty to sexual assault, but not guilty to rape. The CPS want the conviction, so lets the defendant pleads to the lesser charge and the judge gives him three years. They family expects the rapist will be deported. He won’t. He’ll be back on the streets after 15 months, having cheated deportation and living in the same area as his victim. Rape is a road bump in his happy stay in Britain, and the evidence shows over half of sex offenders commit further acts of sexual violence, whilst many have committed multiple crimes before being caught. So, the stats show there will be other victims, before and after. She, on the other hand, lives with being raped for the rest of her life.

If we are to change our thinking, and prioritise public safety, we need to take our chances to get foreign criminals out. And that means a low bar to deportation. A high bar means too many foreign criminals stay in Britain. Why not make it genuinely tough with no caveats? Why not seek to expel every grooming gang member we can? Why do we allow people to renounce citizenship of other countries so we cannot deport them?

So, Chris’s pledge is a great start, but let’s build on that.

How about deportation for any custodial sentence over six months within 20 years of coming here? Let’s be like Singapore and have a (near) zero tolerance, especially the harassment of women, children and Jewish citizens especially in any form. No small print. And let’s build more prisons and ensure that custodial sentences are longer, so that prison is a deterrent.

Finally, on the British Security Services extended terror watch list. It’s now up to 40,000 apparently, with 3,000 priorities. Why can’t we use deportation orders much more freely than we do now? If someone is on a watch list with credible evidence, I don’t really care about their ‘rights’. If they are a danger, why do we allow them to stay here, or do we have so many potential dangers that moving to deport those we can would spark violence? In which case, what an appalling position for us to be in.

What do we want?

What would I do if I were advising Chris Philp or Kemi?

There is some good work being done at Migration Watch and the Centre for Migration Control, and also by Guy Dampier at the Prosperity Institute. I would ask one of more to conduct an inquiry into what legal powers are currently available, and what laws we need to change or make, to achieve what we want.

I’d look especially at other countries with better functioning systems. Socialist Denmark – Denmark – is a good example to follow. Refugee status is temporary. If the home country is safe, permits are revoked. There is a high bar for permanent residency, with a precondition – Chris P please note. There are strict family reunification rules. Rejected asylum seekers are houses in detention centres if they cannot be deported for any reason.

I’d prioritise this work.

I’d ask them to initially report by next Spring in case of an early election, with final work produced by early summer. It needs time to be socialised well before the next General Election.

We are going in the right direction, I am delighted that Kemi and Chris, as well as Nick Timothy, Katie Lam and others are changing our position to a more conservative one. There is more to do, and we need to move at pace. We need to work together, and we need to get it right. We need to stop being embarrassed to defend our security and safety of our people, regardless of background, gender and race.

For all our sakes we need a tolerant society with clear rules, but our broken system is jeopardising that.