The British people never voted for mass migration and so it’s time to bring it under close control at last, says Jacob Rees-Mogg

Yesterday was the day when 20,000 migrants had crossed the English Channel so far this year.

If we continue on this trend, we will reach another record number of crossings in one year.

Unfortunately, with the cancellation of the Rwanda plan as well as the legalisation of channel crossings, there is no serious effort by the Labour party to solve this problem.

And that is why, along with legal migration, dealing with the problem of illegal migration, indeed protecting and securing Britain’s borders, will be a fundamental issue of the Tory leadership contest.

The next leader of the Conservative Party will want to do the following things if they are serious.

First of all, we must leave the European Court of Human Rights.

The modern left loves to remind us of how Winston Churchill was instrumental in its inception. This is true.

However, what Churchill intended to create was an institution that protected the individual from the state.

But what the ECHR has come to represent is the antithesis of democracy, something by which Churchill would be horrified.

Judges on the court now invent rights that were never included in the original convention despite a lack of democratic sanction for them.

Second, the next Tory leader must leave, or make ineffective in UK law, the other worldly Refugee Convention.

The refugee convention set the definition of refugees very broadly in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The founders failed to anticipate the globalised world that now exists.

As former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, pointed out, the convention effectively grants the right to come to this country to three quarters of a billion people, ten times our current population.

It’s time to leave the convention and set our asylum policy on democratic terms.

Third, the next leader must create a deterrence for channel crossings as the Rwanda policy did.

Without a deterrence, the problem will not end.

And finally, the next Tory leader must bring an end to mass legal migration permanently.

It was clear at the election that there was little appetite for Labour. The government lost the election, the opposition did not win.

The reason we lost was because we neglected our voters who then stayed at home or voted for Reform which ran on a reduced migration ticket.

The British people never voted for mass migration and so it’s time to bring it under close control at last.

These steps would represent a modest start towards rebuilding trust with the voters we abandoned before we can begin to reconstruct this country in a conservative vision, unleashing our latent growth and improving the standard of living for everyone.