Ann Widdecombe

Thank you, conference, the last time we met we had no MPs and today we meet with five MPs and in 5 years’ time we shall meet with more than 300 MPs. Meanwhile we have Keir Starmer, now you know I’m a spokesman for immigration and yet I didn’t hear one single policy from Keir Starmer during the entire general election, other than that he was going to drop the only deterrent, admittedly a rather weak one, but the only deterrent that there was up till then, which was the Rwanda scheme and instead what he was going to do, having dropped the only deterrent that we had, what he was going to do was he was going to smash the gangs.

Well, you know I may have got it wrong but as far as I can see the boats are still arriving, almost daily and promising to smash the gangs is a bit like promising to eliminate the mafia or to smash the drug gangs or to make it impossible to smuggle drugs into the country and quite honestly, if he believes that he can just smash the people smuggling gangs and somehow turn the tide that way, then he is even less sensible than King Canute and still he has no policy.

Now, Reform UK of course does have a policy and it has a reserve policy. Reform UK makes it very clear as neither Keir Starmer nor whoever it is who’s going to lead the Conservatives, whoever it may be, are making clear, we’ve made it very clear that if you arrive in this country illegally from a perfectly safe country, which when I last looked France was, then you have no claim to asylum and you will be refused.

So that the message goes out, if you think you can come to Britain and claim asylum and settle here as a result of that, when you have come from a perfectly safe country then the answer is, we shall meet you with the word no, then we say what we are going to do is to try to make sure that they don’t arrive here in the first place and a part of that is deterrence, but another part of it is actual activity in the channel and we will turn the boats around and send them back and before you say that’s impossible, the Australians did it, the Belgians did it and the only reason that we haven’t done it is we’ve never had a government with the will to do it, but of course we acknowledge that there is no such thing as one plan only and that some of the boats even with a great deal of activity on our part in the channel, some of the boats will still get through.

So, what we say is we are not going to house the people who come in on those boats in hotels at the cost of billions a day to the British taxpayer, we will instead house them in secure reception centres and then the message goes out if you arrive unlawfully in this country from a safe country then you will be refused, you will be dealt with quickly and you will be sent back and let me say throughout all of this, I am talking about those who come here unlawfully. There will always be every year some cases of a genuine claim for political asylum, but those people don’t come from safe countries and that is the point that we must always remember.

Now of course in order to enforce any or all of that you do need an effective Border Force Fleet and we need to actually renew lot of the fleet and we are now being told that because of pro Post Brexit Trading Arrangements we won’t be able to do that before 2030 because we are going to have to advertise all the tenders internationally.

How can a nation be sovereign if it cannot immediately and at its own expense and at its own wish replenish the control of its borders as and when necessary? The whole idea of getting rid of the EU was that we should take full control of our own borders and if we haven’t done that up till now then we will do it the day after Nigel Farage enters number 10 Downing Street and then the other half of my brief is Justice. What Justice?

The scenes of prisoners being released early, not because they’ve been frightfully good but because the government has run out of spaces and prisoners have been released early to celebrate with champagne, to declare undying loyalty to the Labour party, well all I can say is the Labour part is welcome to them but what sort of justice is that? Now, all governments from time to time and it happened in my time when I was Prisons Minister, all governments from time to time find that there is undue pressure on prison spaces and they begin to run out and at that point you have a choice you either let the prisoners out or you provide more prison spaces and I’m not talking about the longer term plans for new prisons, I mean that.

If you see a situation coming down the path at you when you are going to run out of prison spaces then you take temporary measures to supply those new places, it isn’t rocket science and I did, I brought in a prison ship from the United States, the Labour party derided it at the time as the hulks but they then kept it for another nine years. I also used disused shipping containers, as it happens from decommission Norwegian oil rigs and put them down in the grounds of the lower security prisons for more spaces.

I even proposed, but the general election got in the way, I even proposed to take over a disused holiday camp, now all you have to do because the accommodation is already there, you put up a secure perimeter and low you’ve got a low security prison. Of course, you do take away the cinema and the swimming pool before you do that, but in short it can be done.

Just as the control of illegal immigration can be done, just as policing knife and gun crime can be done and yet what we’ve got is a government that holds up its hands and says everything is the fault of the wicked Tories and there is nothing we can do. Well, they were elected to do something, they seem to have lost sight of that but we haven’t and we know that when we are elected it will be down to us to get this country working again and we shan’t say oh it’s all the fault of the wicked Labour party because everybody is getting that message anyway and there won’t be any need to say it.

Now, we’re on the move, we’re really on the move and that is thanks to Nigel and to Richard who brought us through these years when we were brand new and everybody was dismissing us as a lot of swivel eyed loons, David Cameron’s phrase ladies and gentlemen, they brought us through and they brought us through to where we are now.