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Tory leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat has made a brazen appeal to the right wing of his party with a pledge to cap net migration to 100,000 a year.
The former security minister has been portrayed as the leading candidate of the left of his party but has tried to change minds on his reputation with a series of hard-right policies.
After launching his campaign to replace Rishi Sunak with a pledge to consider leaving the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) to prevent asylum seekers from coming to the UK, he is now playing to the rightwing gallery on curbing legal migration.
He told an audience at the Royal Society of Medicine in Mayfair that “an honest and open conversation about population size is the only way to have a country that is happy with itself”.
Pointing to ideas such as reforms of visa policies and welfare, he said that “the pressure on housing, on infrastructure and on services is just one reason why the Conservative Party, under my leadership, will commit to a legally binding annual cap on non-British annual net migration of 100,000”.
Such a policy has previously led to dire warnings from universities, the NHS, agriculture and the hospitality sector among others about the impact on Britain’s competitiveness and state of its economy.
However, polling of Conservative party members from YouGov released earlier this week suggested that more than half of party members would “support” a policy of “a freeze in all migration coming into Britain for the next five years”.
In the question and answer with journalists which followed the speech he denied that his reputation as a pro-EU Remainer would harm his chances.
And he also insisted that the Tories needed to own up to their own failures when in government, including promising to cut net migration to the “tens of thousands” and then allowing it to peak at more than 750,000 in a year.
Taking aim at NHS reforms, he said that his party created “the biggest unaccountable quango in the western world” by making NHS England independent.
“By allowing it to centralise power we stopped trusting frontline professionals and local staff. By creating complex clinical commissioning procedures we created a bureaucracy instead of eliminating it.
“By putting so much power into the hands of the NHS chief executive, we made her responsible for everything but accountable for nothing,” he said.
Mr Tugendhat is one of six candidates for the Conservative leadership, with Priti Patel, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Mel Stride and Kemi Badenoch.
There have been claims that he has lost support to former home secretary Mr Cleverly who is vying for MPs from the centrist left of the Tories.
A new leader will be announced at the start of November, after Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first Budget, due in October.
Shadow security minister Mr Tugendhat said that while he wishes that the contest was “quicker”, it is “important that the Conservative membership have the chance to see” their candidates.
Mr Tugendhat also attacked the Labour government over its claims it had to fill a £22 billion black hole to justify tax rises.
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Sir Keir warned of a "painful" Budget in the autumn, but Mr Tugendhat accused him of having "splashed the cash on his friends and left you to pick up the bill".
In his speech, Mr Tugendhat said that Sir Keir is "already losing control of pay across the public sector, with other unions now demanding more and threatening more strike action. It feels like we are heading back towards the 1970s and the days of wage-price spirals.
"Just as importantly, it's a missed opportunity for reform and a chance to make our public services better".
