The claim has been proven to be factually incorrect

Delivering his keynote speech to Conservative Party conference, where Rishi Sunak appeared to forget that the Tories have been in power over the last 13 years, the Prime Minister once more reiterated an entirely made up claim about the Labour Party’s supposed deal with the EU.

It will come as little surprise given that this entire Tory party conference has been defined by lies, conspiracy theories and an attempt to whip up culture wars, however we must keep on calling out Tory lies wherever we see and hear them, given that the right-wing Tory press will just swallow them up without any interrogation.

During his speech, where he tried to portray himself as the change candidate and where he confirmed he was scrapping HS2, Sunak also made a factually incorrect claim about Labour’s approach to the EU.

He told the conference hall: “Labour’s plan is to cook up some deal with the EU, which could see us accepting around 100,000 of Europe’s asylum seekers.”

That claim has been proven to be factually incorrect, with fact checking organisation Full Fact proving the claim to be false.

The Tory Party has repeated the claim after Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer told The Times on 14 September that his party would seek a migrant returns agreement with the EU, which the Tories say would mean the UK taking “100,000 migrants” a year.

It has previously been made by Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick as well as Greg Hands. However, Full Fact has checked the claim that the UK would take 100,000 migrants a year under Labour’s plan and found it to be unreliable as well as misleading.

Full Fact has stated: “This is misleading. The 100,000 figure is a Conservative party estimate which is not reliable, because it makes several assumptions and appears to misinterpret a recent EU agreement on relocating asylum seekers. We don’t know how many migrants the UK might take under a future returns deal with the EU—Labour has not said what such a deal would involve, or how many migrants it would accept.”

Among the assumptions underpinning the Conservative Party’s 100,000 claim is the belief that the UK would be part of an EU quota system even though it is not in the EU. It’s therefore unclear how this would happen, and Labour has since explicitly denied it would join an EU quota scheme.

Full Fact also states: “And perhaps most significantly, the Conservative analysis assumes the EU solidarity mechanism would see all asylum seekers arriving in the EU relocated across the bloc, even though this is not what the EU’s new agreement appears to indicate.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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