When my party was in power, we failed to stop the boats. All barriers to deportation must be removed
By Nick Timothy MP, Published in the Daily Telegraph on 18 September 2025
Every now and then, a minister sounds like they might just get it. Earlier this year, Keir Starmer said he worried mass immigration would turn the country into an “island of strangers”. But his party went berserk, and the PM blamed his speechwriters, saying he had not read his own keynote speech until he stood up to make it.
This week the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has noticed illegal immigrants are making “vexatious, last-minute” legal claims to thwart deportation. A concerned citizen might have taken this intervention to mean curbs on the laws that allow these appeals were forthcoming. But hard words will be followed by limp action.
Mahmood’s statement followed High Court injunction blocking the deportation of an illegal immigrant to France as part of the Government’s “one in, one out” treaty. An illegal immigrant had abruptly claimed to be a victim of human trafficking and said he would be destitute if sent to France.
The Home Secretary promised to fight these claims in the courts, but has not said she will change the laws that make the claims – and the rulings – possible. There is no government plan to reform or repeal the Modern Slavery Act, reform or withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, or change our immigration laws to address the problem Mahmood called “intolerable”.
When the Modern Slavery Act was first passed, the number of cases sent to the National Referral Mechanism were in the low thousands per year. But gradually, as Left-wing NGOs and claimant immigration lawyers realised this was an opportunity to keep illegal immigrants in the country, case numbers exploded. In the last six months, there were nearly 11,000 referrals. Three quarters are made by the immigration agencies.
If the Modern Slavery Act is to survive at all, its criteria must be tightened and evidential thresholds raised. There should be – like with the rest of the immigration system – ouster clauses to limit judicial review. There should be time exclusions so claims cannot be brought at the last minute, and ministers should be able to exclude whole nationalities of claimants where there is evidence of organised abuse of the law.
Neither is there any sign of radical changes in human rights laws. Mahmood says she will legislate to limit the application of claims made under Article 8 of the ECHR – the right to a family life – and she wants to work with European governments to change the Convention overall. But Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, has admitted this is a “political trick”, Labour have not joined other governments campaigning for change, and Mahmood, like the Prime Minister, says she remains “a supporter of the Convention”.
Tinkering with the precise definition of Article 8 will do very little. Push it very far, and the courts will declare the definition incompatible with the Convention. Do anything less, and the change will be unhelpful. Foreign criminals and illegal immigrants will continue to appeal using unqualified rights granted by other articles – such as Article 3, freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment – to frustrate their removal.
And this is the truth. Any government that hopes to secure the border and deal with the problem of illegal immigration will only succeed with total and uncompromising change. All barriers to deportation must be removed. Every single legal right of appeal needs to go. Anybody who enters our country illegally should never – ever – be allowed to stay in Britain.
In power when the Channel crossings began, my party – the Conservatives – failed to stop them. Together with the explosion in legal immigration, that failure almost destroyed us: we were fortunate to survive the election. Now, we must do everything in our power to show the country we have not only the policies and the plan to stop and reverse these waves of legal and illegal immigration, but the unwavering political will to get it done.
We know Labour lack all these things. Their policy response has been to speed up asylum decision-making, and say yes to more claimants, cynically preferring to hide illegal immigrants in the welfare and social housing statistics. But the numbers will keep going up, because there is no reason for immigrants not to try to come here illegally. Whatever the words ministers use, this is a crisis that is only going to get worse.
