Labour’s hypocrisy on immigration is now exposed for all to see


Labour’s hypocrisy on immigration is now exposed for all to see

10 December 2024 7:00am GMT Do I owe Diane Abbott an apology? I’m starting to wonder. In 2017, the veteran Left-winger boasted on live radio that a Jeremy Corbyn government would recruit 10,000 police officers – at a cost, she said, of “about £300,000”. This figure, her interviewer pointed out, would give each new officer a salary of £30 a year. At the time, I’m sorry to say, I teased Ms Abbott for her mathematical ineptitude. Now, though, I’m feeling rather bad about it. Because I’ve realised that, next to the members of Sir Keir Starmer’s Cabinet, she’s a latter-day Isaac Newton. This was demonstrated to excruciating effect on Sunday, when Sir Trevor Phillips interviewed Angela Rayner on Sky News. Labour, noted Sir Trevor, had pledged to end Britain’s housing shortage by building 1.5million homes over the next five years. Yet over the same period, they were planning to let 2.5million immigrants into the country. The vast majority of Labour’s 1.5million new homes, therefore, would inevitably have to go to the 2.5million new immigrants, wouldn’t they? Bizarrely, however, the Deputy Prime Minister denied this. How she can do so, I don’t know, unless she expects these 2.5million new immigrants to sleep either a) in a hedge or b) 20 to a room – thus leaving lots of the new houses free for people who were born here. Even more bizarrely, though, she then started insisting that there’s “plenty of housing in the UK already”. This was the same woman who’d spent the past week proclaiming that the country has “a housing crisis” and vowing that Labour would “deliver the homes that people desperately need”. At any rate, if we do still have a housing crisis, here’s a thought. Last week Sir Keir accused the Tories of turning Britain into a “one-nation experiment in open borders”. If he disapproves of this experiment, has he considered ending it? Then perhaps he wouldn’t need to build quite so many houses. And his deputy wouldn’t be made to look either stupid or dishonest on live TV.