Committed to control immigration

After a decade of uncontrolled immigration, Gordon Brown's first speech last week for two years on this subject has been properly pilloried for its hypocrisy. He promised to tighten up the system and claimed his Government had stepped up action on removal of foreign criminals and illegal immigrants.

Britain benefits from immigration, but not uncontrolled immigration. Since 1997 Labour's open-door immigration policy has seen the largest and most sustained rise in immigration in the UK's history, a five-fold increase in the ten years to 2007.

Recently published figures showed that 512,000 people came to the UK as immigrants in the year to December 2008, little changed on 527,000 in the year to December 2007. These figures show the pressure immigration places on public services such as housing, health and schools. It also accounts for 70% of the projected increase in the country's population projected for the next 20 years.

A future Conservative Government is committed to deal with Labour's deliberate policy of increasing immigration. Amongst our proposals are introduction of an explicit annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants. We will ensure our borders are properly policed, by introducing a dedicated border police force to protect the UK from illegal immigration, organised immigration crime and human trafficking.

But we will also introduce measures to ensure that everyone coming to this country is ready to embrace the core values of British society.

Being committed to deal with immigration allows Conservatives to provide a credible alternative, not only to Labour's failures in this area, but also to those political extremists who are seeking to exploit people's understandable concerns over future population pressures.

We must reject extremist views of racism, intolerance and brutality that fly in the face of this country's history and heritage.