Sunak took an election question from a 'voter' who turned out to be a Conservative councillor, Ross Hills.Source: Reuters
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00:00 Thank you for coming to Airwatch this morning. I imagine you're a pretty busy guy right now.
00:02 The biggest issue I think is going to be immigration over this general election campaign.
00:07 You've obviously got your Rwanda plan, but is it going to see results and stop the small boats
00:11 coming? Yeah, thank you. You're right. It is an important question. And I guess the question
00:15 first is why, right? And for me, it's about fairness. It's a simple question of fairness,
00:20 as I was saying, right? I just don't think it's fair if people jump the queue and come to our
00:25 country illegally. Like our country, one of the central things about our country's character
00:29 is the notion of fairness. And we play by the rules. We put in our fair share. We wait our turn.
00:34 That's just who we are. And this, I think, offends my sense of fairness. And it also puts pressure
00:38 on public services, on housing, in particular, on schools, on health care. But it also puts people's
00:45 lives at risk. Who can justify a trade where, as we saw a little while ago, a seven-year-old
00:52 child died? Who can justify that? And we've got to break that cycle. And that's why you need a
00:58 deterrent. There's lots of different ways you can solve this problem. And we have made progress. And
01:02 we've got the numbers down by a third last year, doing lots of different things. But fundamentally,
01:06 you've just got to break the cycle. You've got to be clear to people. If you come here illegally,
01:10 we're going to detain you. And then we're going to send you somewhere else. So there's no point
01:14 in you paying someone thousands of pounds to try and come here in the first place.