Kemi Badenoch, the UK Conservative Party leader, has lamented that Britain is now favourable to illegal immigrants and unfair to bona fide citizens who pay bills and taxes.
Ms Badenoch, in an Op-Ed piece published by the Daily Mail on Saturday, argued, “Britain today seems to work more favourably for those who jump the queue, who break the rules, who get into our country illegally but then denigrate our customs and our culture.”
“And those of us who work hard and do the right thing, hoping one day to leave a better life for our children, are left footing the bill,” Ms Badenoch said.
The Tory leader lamented that taxpayers’ money was used to fund hotel accommodation for asylum seekers and how such immigrants end up becoming eligible for benefits as British citizens.
“The billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money we are spending to put asylum seekers up in hotels, for example, is well known. Less well known, however, is the fact that low-paid immigrants and refugees who stay here for five years qualify for ‘indefinite leave to remain’,” Ms Badenoch said.
She added, “This allows them to claim the same benefits British citizens are entitled to, such as social housing and Universal Credit. They become automatically entitled to make such claims regardless of whether they’ve paid taxes or have simply lived off the state throughout those five years. To my mind, that is fundamentally unfair to all the hard-working Brits who have dutifully paid into the system – and I’m determined to stop it.”
The Tory leader argued, “The issue of immigration is a simple one for the Conservative Party: we need to crack down on it in every form, both legal and illegal.”
