The Conservatives lost the election because they failed to control immigration. That is the closest thing to a consensus at the party’s conference.
“We did betray people,” declared Neil O’Brien MP, one of the Tories’ foremost policy thinkers. Speaking at a fringe event hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies on “taking back control” he added: “We promised again and again at every election since 1992 that we would cut the numbers and then we increased them to a record level.” (Net migration reached a record high of 764,000 in 2022.)
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