The former immigration minister, currently the bookmakers’ favourite to become leader, will take part in a Q&A at the Tory party conference todayGood morning. The Conservative party conference is essentially a four-day hustings event this year, but there are hustings within hustings and some of the most important are the Q&As taking place on the main conference stage. This afternoon Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat are up; tomorrow it’s Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly.There is not a lot of non-leadership action at the conference, but today we’re also getting Liz Truss, the former PM, and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor she brought in to repair the damage caused by her mini-budget. It will be interesting to see what sort of reception Truss gets. The conference slogan is “review and rebuild”, and yesterday there was a session in the conference hall devoted to the general election. But, when talking about why they lost, there are almost no Tories willing to admit the obvious – which is that between 2019 and 2022 and party gave up governing properly and instead decided to stage a ‘Who can be the worst prime minister ever?’ contest, and that as a result its poll ratings dropped like a stone. None of the four leadership candidates are addressing this.Our party’s survival rests on restoring our credibility on immigration. If we continue to duck and dance around this question our party has no future.Despite what others might falsely claim, we’ve never had a legal cap on legal migration. Unless we introduce one – where no visas will be issued unless net migration is in the tens of thousands or lower – we will be powerless to end the cycle of broken promises. Anyone who is not prepared to commit to a specific cap just doesn’t understand the depth of public anger. Continue reading…
Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/sep/30/robert-jenrick-kemi-badenoch-conservative-party-conference-uk-politics-news-live-updates
Author : Andrew Sparrow
Publish date : 2024-09-30 09:23:24
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