Party wants foreign workers to spend 10 years in UK without claiming benefits before being eligible for leave to remain

The Conservatives have denied putting out their new migration policy as a direct response to the Reform UK surge in the polls.

When this accusation was put to Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, on Sky News this morning, he replied:

This isn’t about opinion polls. This is about doing the right thing. It’s about identifying a problem the country faces, which is [that] we’ve had far too many people coming in in recent years.

I think that people need to look at the past. This is not the first time we’ve been in this situation.

I remember 2019, the elections when the Brexit party won [the European elections], we were 9% in the polls. I remember when the SDP was polling at 50%.

When we thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Government roll out their latest attack on our farming community and UK food production, setting the direction that they want to replace food production with around 20% of farmland being dedicated to solar farms, tree planting, biodiversity offsetting and wildlife habitats, all to meet green targets.

The proposed figures are astonishing, with well over a million hectares being proposed to be taken out of food production by this Government, and the economic analysis already predicts that well over 12,000 farms will be lost within a generation as a result of this government’s policies …