Rishi Sunak plugs for ‘common sense’ refugee system as UK PM

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss will face off each other in a televised debate on the BBC on Monday

Rishi Sunak on July 24, 2022 focussed on the sensitive issue of immigration by promising a “healthy dose of common sense” approach as part of his bid to win over Conservative Party voters in the leadership race for a new party leader to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

The 42-year-old British Indian former Chancellor laid out a 10-point plan to secure the UK’s borders if he wins in the Tory members’ postal ballot, the results of which will be known on September 5.

Writing in ‘The Daily Telegraph’, he also promised to curb the power of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), withhold aid money if countries refuse to take back failed asylum seekers and criminals, and use cruise ships to house illegal migrants.

“The ECHR cannot inhibit our ability to properly control our borders and we shouldn’t let it. We need to inject a healthy dose of common sense into the system, and that is what my plan does,” he wrote.

The Tory MP for Richmond (Yorks) suggested that the government has so far failed to deliver on the Vote Leave Brexit pledge to “take back control” of the country’s borders, as he describes the country's asylum system as chaotic and “broken”.

“Numbers [of refugees] should be determined by need. Our Parliament will be given control of the number of refugees we accept each year,” he writes in the newspaper.

Reviving his Brexit credentials as someone who campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union (EU) in the 2016 referendum, Sunak pointed out that immigration and a desire to control Britain’s borders was one of the factors that motivated him towards that decision.