It seems surprising that the EU would want Patel’s advice on migration, given she launched the Tories’ disastrous Rwanda plan
Tory shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel says she met with European Union officials last month to advise them on migration policy.
Patel told The London Economic that she regularly talks with EU leaders, due to her experience as former Home Secretary, as European countries search for strategies to deal with the migration “crisis”.
Speaking to The London Economic, she said: “I’ll tell you one issue, migration in Europe. There is a crisis. I told them there’d be a crisis five years ago on migration and legal migration.
“Now they are coming to us for some remedies around third-party country processing and changing their laws.”
Patel’s claims that the EU would be looking to her for advice may raise eyebrows, given she launched Boris Johnson’s disastrous Rwanda plan and made tough sounding pledges to halve small boat crossings in 2019 and then end them in 2022, which never materialised.
The Tories spent £700 million on the Rwanda scheme, and sent just four volunteers to Rwanda.
Despite making anti-migration rhetoric central to their fourteen years in power, net migration went up two and half times since 2010, hitting 860,000 in December 2023.
Her comments also appear to directly contradict Kemi Badenoch’s suggestion that she is looking at copying an EU country’s policy that would see migrants forcibly moved out of inner cities to avoid the build-up of “ghettos”.
Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank on Monday, the Tory leader said that Denmark’s so-called “ghetto laws” are a policy she’ll talk about more in the future.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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