The UK’s Demographic Future

Baroness Buscombe Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I associate myself with all the good things that have been said thus far by noble Lords about my noble friend Lord Hodgson. I pay tribute to him for securing this debate and say a major thank you. I well remember him encouraging me back in in the early 1990s, when I first met him and his wife, my noble friend Lady Hodgson, at my first Conservative Party conference, to become much more engaged in politics. I took his advice and very quickly found myself first as a district councillor and then as a parliamentary candidate for Slough in the 1997 election. That latter experience taught me a lot and has stayed with me. I realised that just 20 miles from my home, in a sweet riverside village, another world of different cultures and beliefs existed and was growing rapidly.

This report, Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, is excellent in many ways. I want to delve a little deeper into the social and cultural impact of mass immigration—in particular, the challenge within the report of managing different cultures that do not necessarily see eye to eye among themselves and do not necessarily respect our British way of life or our rule of law.

In Slough, I was quickly introduced to clashes between different communities in nearby Chalvey, just a few hundred yards from Windsor Castle. These were knife fights between young Sikhs and Muslims. The authorities did nothing so as not to upset community relations, a term that, with the ascendance of Blair, became “multiculturalism”—a crazy failure, given the absence of any need for meaningful integration into British culture.

At that time, I was often invited for tea by Hindu families who said, “We have too much immigration in this country”. They could see and experience what was happening 27 years ago, and some of them were afraid. Animosity between cultures that have brought their difference with them to this country is still something that few dare to talk about, as other noble Lords have said. One stark example is the current rise in antisemitism, which is so appalling, unsettling and upsetting. It degrades and shames us all as a people. I well remember young Muslim men who were born in this country telling me, “Our people do not respect your people because the British are weak and don’t stand up for what they believe”. I entirely agreed with them. Multiculturalism allowed difference and division to entrench. We were weak and afraid to confront that for far too long, for fear of causing offence or being called a racist.

The treatment of women by some other cultures and nationalities is still a huge problem. The rape gangs say it all. In addition, Pakistan outlawed polygamy years ago, yet here it is funded through ever more generous state handouts, while most working British couples are seriously asking themselves whether they can afford to have any children at all. As for the appalling disabilities that are caused by first-cousin marriage, which continues to have a major impact on our NHS children’s wards for the long term, what on earth were and are some of our politicians of all persuasions thinking—and why has the taxpayer been funding this barbaric and immoral practice for so long? In addition, how many prosecutions have there been for another barbaric practice, FGM, in the past two years? I have heard from midwives who have been threatened and are afraid to intervene. Successive politicians have tried to persuade me that polygamy is definitely illegal in this country—so where are the prosecutions? All these practices create division and anger, and an enormous shift in the political landscape.

In 2004, when I was shadow Justice Minister, Blair opened our borders for so-called economic migration and told us that an estimated 7,000 people a year would come to our country. We now know that legal migration has far outstripped all estimates. Where was, and is, the infrastructure to support it? Meanwhile, a net 170,000 highly skilled workers, mostly young, have left this country in the past year to work and live a different life—a life where there is an energy for growth, prosperity and a future.

Anger has been growing, heightened by not only the massive increase in legal migration but illegal migration, the latter bringing a deeply worrying force of criminal gangs to our shores. This has not happened overnight. However, politicians have for too long lacked foresight and been blinkered by their politics. A cross-party House of Commons Defence Committee report, Future Maritime Surveillance, during the Session of 2012-13, did not address any threat of illegal migration using boats. In addition, the disbandment of the Nimrod maritime force, together with the short-sighted failure to renew the final maritime patrol aircraft contract with the commercial contractor Cobham in 2015, meant an almost total loss of our surface maritime aerial surveillance around the British Isles. In response to this extraordinary lack of foresight, I had the audacity to suggest in a debate in September 2015:

“My immediate concern regards maritime security, particularly the security of our borders … I say this given the clear and present increased threats from uncontrolled migration”.—[Official Report, 15/9/15; col. GC 237.]


Again, that was in 2015; my concern was unanswered.

Recently, things have deteriorated. Now we know that serious criminals arrive and we then lose them, either from the hotels or from prisons. Is the Home Office not telling the truth to its political masters, or are the politicians afraid to tell or even learn the truth? At least the Home Office has now admitted that immigration is out of control.

Thanks to good journalism and our police and crime commissioners, we now know that illegal arrivals do not necessarily stay in the hotels, as we also know that the domestic network to manage and assist the illegal boats is to be found in those working in the absurd number of Turkish barbers, vape shops et cetera. Why are these people, who have not been vetted, not confined? Why are they given money to take the trains and disappear into illegal cash-only networks and hang out on our streets? This Monday, we learned that heroin and cocaine are being imported in the stomachs of illegal immigrants. Why have the Government withheld that information? Why are we not warning every citizen that these shops may well be, and often are, sanctuaries for criminal gangs involved in organised crime, money laundering and the grooming of our young people into dealing in and delivering drugs—gangs often run by Albanians, with Kurds and others, who may have walked out of the asylum hotels with absolutely no right to be here?

I have now learned from a Written Question that we release convicted foreign adult male criminals awaiting deportation from the category C prison, HMP Huntercombe, owing to the Home Office’s failure to provide the necessary deportation documents in time. We are not told how many and how often. In addition, it is now clear from another Written Answer I have received that the Home Office does not know how many illegal immigrants have simply walked out of asylum hotels in the past five years and are not accounted for. The Home Secretary, we are told, is speeding up removals. However, I have now asked: how can illegal migrants be removed if we do not know where they are?

Noble Lords can tell that I am angry—angry for the love of my country and for the future, for our children and our grandchildren. This is not about being far right; this is about love of country, a love that all those who come from other cultures to live here will naturally feel for their own country. We must stop bending to the absurd notion that mass uncontrolled immigration can work on our small island, nor must we keep bending to the criminal and those who take pleasure in trying to destroy or usurp our traditions and privileges. I will not talk about rights; only others who try to change us talk about their rights. I thank my noble friend Lord Hodgson for this opportunity to speak the truth.