Marco Longhi MP: We must stop economic migrants from abusing asylum system

A life in politics can be brutal. This is not a complaint, it’s a fact I was aware of before I signed up for it, and if the last few days, weeks, and months are anything to go by it’s also a test of one’s moral compass and mental resilience.

Politics is also about playing as a team, so even if I don’t like the coach’s decisions I will still play as asked to because a gaggle of prima-donnas will never win a game.

Loyalty also matters to me; the consequences of disloyalty are there for all to see right now.

I cut my political teeth in local government, at the coal face of making a difference to peoples’ lives.

You must really care to make a difference because the ‘computer says no’ barriers are always there. Resilience and resourcefulness are the name of the game and to an extent this applies to life as an MP.

But there is also a big difference.

Power and the ability to change things are concentrated very much in one place: No 10. Whoever resides there needs to have the political will to overcome the treacherous Whitehall blob and the oppositions.

I used the plural because, often, the most incisive opposition is not across the benches, it is behind you. This is where the ability to deliver has been hampered most.

So, while I cannot predict the future, I want to openly set out my stall on the key thing that I know the good people of Dudley North, and I suspect much of the ‘Red Wall’, voted for: dealing with illegal immigration.

We made a promise to control our borders and our laws. We have yet to deliver on this and we will be unequivocally judged on it. Either we stop the farce that is taking place, or we do not. It really is that simple.

Continued illegal immigration offends our sense of fairness. It is patently obvious that most asylum seekers, or claimants of ‘modern slavery’ are not genuine. They are young men, economic migrants abusing a system that is there for genuine refugees such as Ukrainian women and children.

While we continue to be a magnet (free housing, jobs, welfare, free health services and so on) to bogus asylum seekers, without enforcing immediate removals, we will fail in our endeavours to stop this abuse.

How is it fair on all the local people who come to my advice surgeries who are desperate for social housing? When challenging me that housing they had identified had been allocated to these so-called refugees, what should I say?

People now struggle to book a hotel for a wedding or a wake, because the Home Office has started to use them to house migrants.

I hear stories of them complaining about the hotel’s food, so they use their ‘welfare’, or money gained from taking up local jobs, on Uber Eats. No doubt there will be a lawyer somewhere wondering if a human right to a tasty meal has been broken.

So how am I supposed to advise my constituents? Should they catch a ferry to Calais, jump onto the conveyor belt of dinghies coming over, claim modern slavery so that they can stay indefinitely for free in a hotel most would struggle to afford to visit even occasionally? It is insane.

The pressures on housing are huge so how can it be right for Serco, contracted by the Home Office, to offer gold-plated five-year tenancies to private landlords to house these people in?

Not only is this morally wrong, but all this does is to remove more houses from the rental market driving prices up. Housing and rental prices respond to a simple equation of supply and demand.

We have too many people needing homes and we are not building enough of them. So, every day we hear about 1,000 migrants that 1,000 housing units we should add in that day alone. It’s not happening.

But the pressure doesn’t just stop at housing. Demands are inevitably made on GP surgeries, hospitals, and other public services that taxpayers are funding but are not receiving anything like a good service from.

Illegal immigration is costing the taxpayer several £billion per year and this money should be being spent on improving these services and less demand should be placed on them.

Many things are at play here. Labour and Lib Dems would want to re-join the EU and reopen free movement of people, but the truth is that a few colleagues of mine do find a home within this ‘liberal elite’.

So, the Rwanda plan offends them; push-back of boats offends them; the mere possibility of being accused of breaking even a made-up ‘human right’ scares them.

These are, typically, people with a law degree standing in a safe seat who have never even seen a person needing social housing, never mind a queue of them.

I used to be a big fan of former Home Secretary, Priti Patel. I do think she understood the problem, but she never delivered an implementable solution.

The effect was to build up peoples’ expectations only to let them down time and time again. It was extremely frustrating to watch all these initiatives be scuppered by the European Convention on Human Rights or ‘international law’ when the Home Office team must have known this would have happened.

The solution resides in political will. The will to find solutions that some might find offends their sensibilities even though, it would ultimately save lives at sea and beforehand by acting as a deterrent from attempting the trip over.

What is certain, and completely unsustainable, is the continued abuse of our system. I do have very serious reservations about No 10’s stance to engage with France again as the new solution – when did that ever yield success recently or historically? Haven’t we parted with dozens of millions of pounds paying the French already?

The virtue signalling liberal intelligentsia will scream, “we must not break international law”.

The truth is, we have already done so before we even voted for Brexit. Who remembers when we were instructed by the EU to give the vote to people in prison?

This happened in 2005. We chose to ignore the EU during both a Labour and subsequently a Conservative government. We found a way around the issue, but ultimately, we did not agree to this “international law”.

So the precedent is there, but it needs the political will to deliver it.

Delivery is key. I cannot predict what might happen in the remaining term of this parliament. But what I can say is that I will always, whilst an MP, do my best for the people of Dudley North.