The prime minister yesterday announced a deal with Iraq to tackle people smugglers and a white paper to overhaul the visa system, before demanding "an explanation" from the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, for her party's decision to "deliberately liberalise immigration" following the Brexit vote.
His accusation followed the release of revised official figures that showed the number of people entering the UK, minus those leaving, reached 906,000 in the year ending June 2023, according to updated estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This has been revised upwards from a previous estimate of 740,000.
At a Downing Street press conference, Starmer said the failure of successive Conservative governments to control the numbers entering the UK was "unforgivable", adding: "Failure on this scale isn't just bad luck. This happened by design, not accident.
"Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalise immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose, to turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders."
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