Priti Patel’s removal as Shadow Foreign Secretary simply made me wonder: Why was she ever appointed in the first place?
She was, after all, the politician who did the most to open Britain’s borders to low-skilled, third-world migration. Patel also failed to stop the boats, and oversaw the policing of tweets.
Priti Patel was appointed Home Secretary by Boris Johnson in July 2019. Five months later Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, an Afghani, smuggled himself into Britain. He told Patel’s Home Office he was 14, and they believed him; he was sent to a school in Dorset, where he assaulted children and carried knives; he was placed in foster care, where he assaulted his foster mother; he was reported to police for carrying a machete; then, in March 2022, he plunged a knife into the heart of 21-year-old Thomas Roberts, killing him instantly during an argument over an E-scooter. If the Home Office had properly vetted Abdulrahimzai, they would have found he was a 19-year-old on the run for a double murder in Serbia. They didn’t, and Priti Patel left her role as Home Secretary five months after Thomas’s murder, removed following Boris Johnson’s downfall.
Roberts was not the only Brit murdered by illegal immigrants under Priti Patel’s watch. I count Lorraine Cox, James Furlong, David Wails, and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett among the victims. Their killers had no right to be in the country, yet Patel and the Conservative Party failed to prevent their deaths.
During her three years in post, Darren Grimes was investigated for failing to censor David Starkey in a YouTube interview, Darren Brady was arrested for retweeting a meme, and a police officer was arrested and prosecuted for sharing a George Floyd meme in a private WhatsApp group.
Patel’s infamy, however, stems largely from her role in the Boriswave.
From 2019 to 2022, 570,000 Indian nationals, 263,000 Chinese, 200,000 Nigerians, 122,000 Pakistanis, 49,000 Bangladeshis, 28,000 Ghanaians and 27,000 Zimbabweans made Britain their home. These figures do not include the many hundreds of thousands who came after her tenure, enabled by her immigration reforms. They came because Priti Patel (and Boris Johnson) wanted them to come.
Patel opened new routes for “skilled” workers, healthcare workers, international students and their dependants, while abolishing the cap on skilled migration. She also lowered the salary and skills thresholds for skilled workers.
Her skilled visa route allowed kebab workers, Halal butchers, call-centre supervisors, bar managers and gym instructors to come to Britain. The scheme meant that one butcher in Preston alone sponsored 91 visas; one kebab house in Bradford sponsored 14, while another in Birmingham sponsored 12. Across the country, 56 kebab houses and 83 businesses with “Halal” in their name sponsored skilled worker visas between 2021 and 2023.
Patel’s Health and Social Care Visa was meant to fill gaps in the care system. Instead, the number of vacancies in the sector actually increased after the route was opened. Care workers and their dependants were also exempted from paying the immigration health surcharge. And so it became a route for hundreds of thousands of low-skilled migrants from outside of Europe to access Britain. Between January 2021 and June 2024, 647,000 people received Health and Care visas, 270,000 workers and 377,000 dependants. Some care providers sponsored hundreds of workers: one had 498 visas granted since May 2022, while Home Office inspectors found that 275 visas had been issued to a care home that did not even exist.
Patel’s reforms did more to transform Britain demographically in three years than Tony Blair managed in thirteen. The migrants who entered Britain, illegally and legally, under her watch will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions in welfare, the NHS, schooling and housing. She has accelerated Britain’s demographic change, turbocharging the decline of the white British population relative to ethnic minority groups.
In January last year, Patel defended her immigration record, describing those she had allowed into Britain as the “brightest [and] the best coming to the country”. She repeatedly called them skilled migrants and suggested the NHS would have collapsed without them. She refused to apologise to voters who had supported Brexit and the Tories, believing doing so would reduce immigration.
Kemi Badenoch had the perfect opportunity to sack and expel Patel from the Tory Party, as she has done with others, to represent the party’s total break with its immigration betrayal. The fact she did not do so signalled that the Conservative Party hasn’t changed a bit.
The Priti Patel problem was not even resolved by removing her from the front bench. Instead, she was simply given a new role, which Patel described as an opportunity to “strengthen diplomatic links with international sister parties and centre-right movements around the world”. To Marine Le Pen, the AfD, Vox, PiS, MAGA and all the conservative movements around the world, if you want to learn how to open your country’s borders and tank your party to its worst position in over a century, book your meeting with Priti Patel today.