Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has said the UK must leave the ECHR if it is to have an effective deterrent as new data shows only 495 illegal migrants have been sent home.
Speaking on GB News, he said: “96,000 people have come here seeking asylum, and 495 have been sent home. If you can get to the United Kingdom, you’re basically going to be here for life.
“That’s the message from the figures that have come out this week, and it’s why people are willing to spend thousands of pounds to risk their lives in small boats, to take dangerous journeys, to pay people smugglers to get here, because the reward is so great if they succeed.
“What you need is deterrence. You need to make sure that people aren’t able to stay, and therefore you need to have a system of removing people.
“But we can’t do that, because every effort the last Conservative government made to remove people was vetoed by the courts. Every time a step was taken, it was ruled not to be possible by the court.
“So the Rwanda scheme was shut down, even when Parliament said that, in its view, it was a legitimate way of proceeding. Parliament was overruled by the courts because Parliament gave the courts the power to do it by passing the Human Rights Act.
“What we need is to return to a principle of the sovereignty of the British people, the British voter making the choice of the parliamentarians elected by the British voter, deciding how we run this country and who can come here and who can stay here.
“The Centre for Policy Studies did a study that showed that 700 million people might have a right to come to this country under the agreements, under Refugee Convention and under the Human Rights Convention that we’re signed up to.
“This is impossible and it’s impractical. We don’t have the space for those very large numbers, and we find that people come here and they take benefits at huge cost to the British taxpayer.
“They’ve already got to a safe country; they should not be coming on to this country. We should stop them staying here, and we should take the legislative measures that are necessary to do that, which means leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act and leaving the Refugee Convention.
“Then we can make our own laws. We can make the system work.”
