Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp addresses Conservative Party Conference 2026

Today, Chris Philp MP, Shadow Home Secretary, delivered his speech at Conservative Party Conference 2026.

Please see the full text of the speech below:

Checked against delivery

Thank you, conference, and thank you Nick.

It's been quite a year,

As you may have heard, I'm the first Brit to have been shot at in the Channel by the French navy since the Napoleonic war.

It's lucky they still can't shoot straight.

I must confess I was tempted to return fire.

I have some bad news as well,

In the past year, I have also acquired an obsessive online stalker.

A strange man called Zia.

Poor Zia is constantly on Twitter pretending to be the Shadow Home Secretary.

All I can say is that anyone who spends all day fantasising about being me, is in urgent need of a good therapist.

That will probably send him into a complete meltdown.

Conference, we Conservatives believe in safe streets and secure borders.

It is non-negotiable.

But it's not enough just to wish for that,

We must do whatever it takes, the tough, difficult things, to actually make it happen.

We have the plan and we have the team.

But we've got more than just that,

Because in Kemi we've got the best leader, and the best person to be our next prime minister.

Like all of us, I want my children to grow up safe and secure. 

I remember, vividly, attending the funeral of a 15 year-old girl tragically stabbed to death in Croydon on her way to school one Wednesday morning. 

No one should ever suffer the overwhelming grief I saw etched on her parents faces that day.

A pain no parent should ever have to feel.

I know we didn't get everything right in Government.

But we now have a plan to make things better, whereas Labour is making things worse.

Dangerous men released early from jail.

Police numbers, down by 2,000.

Stop and search, opposed.

92% of crimes unsolved.

Illegal immigrants and foreign criminals not deported.

Because Labour doesn't believe in consequences for wrongdoers,

And without consequences, things get worse.

Crime rising.

Shoplifting rife.

Migrant boats arriving daily.

And we feel unsafe on our own high streets.

Who pays the price?

Not the criminals. It's the decent, law-abiding majority.

Labour has failed them, we will not.

The next Conservative government will make sure crime actually has consequences.

That's why Nick will deliver fifty thousand extra prison places.

The Bob the Builder of the next government.

Can he fix it? Yes, he can.

I will make sure those prison place are full of criminals.

We plan 10,000 more police officers and I would like to pay tribute to all of our police officers up and down the country.

We will intensely hotspot patrol high crime areas.

We will use live facial recognition to catch wanted criminals,

And we will make sure evidence of crime, like a Find My iPhone signal, is always followed up.

Crime must have consequences.

Criminals must be caught and end up where they belong,

Not causing havoc on our streets, but in prison.

In a decent country, criminals should be the ones afraid, not the law-abiding majority.

The grooming gangs should certainly be afraid.

Men who raped girls as young as 12 years old again, and again, and again.

Shockingly, those in authority covered it up because they were afraid to say the perpetrators were mainly of Pakistani origin.

The father of one girl being abused was actually arrested when he tried to rescue her.

A council social worker even attended the Islamic wedding of a 14 year old girl to her abuser.

The authorities cared more about being accused of racism than they cared about protecting young girls.

That is shameful.

I've met survivors, including Fiona Goddard.

I will never forget how their lives have been destroyed by this evil, perpetrated by these criminals.

So to Fiona, and to the other brave survivors who have spoken out, let us all say this: thank you.

Yet when we called for a national public inquiry, Labour said it was a far-right band wagon.

The Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, even claimed raising the issue was a dog whistle.

Well, standing up for victims is not a dog whistle, it's not a band wagon and it's not racist.

Labour may not realise that, but we do, and we will never stop fighting for justice for those young girls.

But some lessons of this scandal still have not been learned.

In just May last year, the National Police Chiefs Council published their anti-racism commitment.

Its title is designed to sound reasonable, but it expressly says police should treat different ethnic groups differently, to artificially engineer the same arrest rates.

Treat people differently based on the colour of their skin.

That is literally racist,

And this approach costs lives.

Valdo Calocane was not sectioned after a violent attack,

When mental health professionals considered research claiming, I think wrongly, saying too many black men are detained under the Mental Health Act.

Calocane was so dangerous he later killed three innocent people; Barnaby, Grace and Ian.

Similarly, when Axel Rudakubana s headteacher warned about the danger he posed,

A social worker said that was racial stereotyping and the risk assessment watered down. 

Rudakubana went on to kill three innocent young girls.

And when Henry Nowak was murdered, the police were so keen to believe his killer's false allegations of racism, they handcuffed Henry as he lay dying and ignored his last words, I can't breathe.

I've met the parents of Barnaby, Grace and Henry.

I can hardly begin to imagine their sense of betrayal when the system supposed to protect their children instead abandoned them.

So, this obsession with racial politics above public safety must end. 

Left wing activists should listen to Martin Luther King,

When he said people should be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin,

That means everyone should be treated the same. 

The police should stick to their jobs, protect the public and catch criminals. So when I'm Home Secretary the disgraceful police race commitment will go.

Conference, a year ago Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby died in an attack by an Islamist extremist at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. 

Since then, I have twice visited Golders Green in the aftermath of antisemitic attacks.   It is a test of our civilisation that Jews are safe here in Britain, when in so many countries, including much of the middle east, they are not.

So let us all resolve again,

On this anniversary today of the October 7^th massacre,

To fight the ancient evil of antisemitism, wherever we find it. 

We will have no tolerance for antisemitic or Islamist crime and any foreign citizen guilty of either will be deported.

And I must come now to the disgraceful Green Party motion a few days ago,

Dispicable.

Telling Jews it's racist to go to Synagogue, is antisemitic and it is inciting hatred.

The Green Party has become a disgrace and they should hang their heads in shame.

Conference, without strong borders we are no country at all.

Many on the left think we should let in anyone who wants to come.

That every person with any tenuous claim to sympathy should be accommodated.

They think only of the supposed rights of illegal immigrants and foreign criminals.

We can't keep on like this. It isn't fair to the British people.

The cost, financial and social, is simply too high.  

Borders matter.

Control matters 

Numbers matter.

Because, here is the truth, ass immigration without integration will destroy our culture and destroy the foundations of our nation state.

It's not racist or far right to say that,

It's common sense.

So as Home Secretary I would put the rights of our citizens first.

Now, Shabana Mahmood won't do that. 

She spent the last year claiming to be tough,

But under pressure from Angela Rayner and open borders Labour MPs, she now plans to emasculate her own ILR reforms.

This will mean hundreds of thousands of low-wage or no wage migrants will stay here forever, costing taxpayers billions. 

Shabana has surrendered. 

And Shabana, I wouldn't take advice on immigration from Angela Rayner any more than I would take her advice on taxes.

Labour now also wants to bring more people here directly from Afghanistan and Gaza,

Gaza, a place where the October 7^th massacre was openly celebrated on the streets.

It wasn't just Hamas, it was many of those citizens in Gaza as well.

And those coming will have the right to bring in their whole extended families, thanks of course, to the ECHR.

While illegal migration is rife,

The government should not be opening our borders even further,

And we Conservatives will close this scheme down immediately.

And now let me come to the channel.

A source of much interest to me this year as you saw in the video.

20,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the Channel so far this year.  

As I saw myself, mostly young men, often from cultures that have no respect for women. 

And the ECHR means most can't ever be removed.

Siobhan Whyte knows better than anyone why this matters.

Her daughter, Rhiannon, worked at an asylum hotel.

Rhiannon was brutally stabbed to death by a Sudanese small boat illegal migrant,

A man who should never have been allowed into this country in the first place, and had certainly, not been allowed to stay.

Girls as young as 12 have been raped by illegal small boat migrants. 

Afghan men are 22 times more likely to commit sex offences than average.

One of them, recently, brought a 14 year old girl he was abusing into the UK on a small boat.

This is not just a borders crisis, it is a public safety crisis, especially for women and girls and we must end it.

What is Andy Burnham's answer?

Well I'm afraid to say conference, it is not deportation.

He thinks every town and village up and down the country should have its own share of illegal immigrants.

Brilliant Andy, thank you.

Like Piddington, in Oxfordshire, which I recently visited and Kemi has too.

This tiny village will have over a thousand male illegal immigrants forced upon it them in just a few weeks time.

Mothers I spoke to there are scared for their daughters' safety.

Andy Burnham thinks this is  all fine. 

Well, Andy Burnham is all wrong.

And let me tell you who else was wrong on this,

The Liberal Democrat MP for the area whose name, deservedly, resides in obscurity.

He was also wrong when last year he opposed deporting illegal immigrants and in 2023 called for unlimited numbers to be housed in Oxfordshire. 

We all know this and the country needs to know it as well,

The Lib Dems are even weaker on borders than Labour.

The good news for all of this is there is a solution,

The solution for this can be found in the Conservative BORDERS plan which we published last year.

The truth is we cannot have strong borders while in the ECHR.

Successive governments have tried, and it hasn't worked.

The definitions of ECHR of rights given to illegal immigrants and foreign criminals have expanded by the courts year, after year, after year, in ways that defy common sense and stop us controlling our Borders.

So the next Conservative government will leave the ECHR.

That way we can deport illegal immigrants within a week of arrival.

No asylum claims.

No human rights claims.

No legal aid, no court case, no nothing more, just detention followed by rapid deportation back to the county of origin or a safe third country.

The consequences of illegal entry will be immediate removal,

Because if illegal immigrants know they will quickly be deported, they won't come in the first place. 

It worked in Australia 13 years ago and it will work here today.

Tough?

Yes.

But it's the only thing that will protect places like Piddington, protect young women like Rhiannon and protect our borders.,

And we will do it.

And when it comes to foreign criminals, my view is simple, we cannot allow them to stay in the UK. 

The story of Gift Oladele explains why.

Oladele was here illegally.

He was sent to prison for kidnapping a woman he planned to sexually assault. 

On his release, he avoided deportation by making a claim under the ECHR, based on his supposed family rights. 

But then, just months later he dragged a 19-year-old girl into woods and violently raped her.

The victim told the court she thought Oladele was going to kill her.

I'm afraid, this is not an isolated case.

There are now over 21,000 serious foreign criminals like Oladele still here, not deported, but still here.

 Because their supposed human rights are treated as more important than protecting us.

Conference, this has to end.

By leaving the ECHR, banning asylum and modern slavery claims by foreign criminals,

Abolishing the immigration tribunal and sending foreign criminals back to their home countries we will keep this country safe.

The consequence for foreign criminals must be deportation.

And legal migration needs dramatically to reduce too.

The truth is that far too many people have come and wither worked in low-skill jobs or frankly, not worked at all.

When we have 9 million economically inactive adults here already, this is madness.

Completely parallel societies have developed in some parts of the country,

And that is deeply divisive.

So the next Conservative government will introduce binding annual caps on legal migration. 

A limited number of genuinely high skilled workers?

Yes. 

We recognise and value the contribution they make.

But we cannot have huge numbers on low wages or no wages.

It is bad for the economy and it is bad for social cohesion.

So mass migration must end.

Conference, only the Conservatives have proper plans and the right team, to make sure crime has consequences and our borders are strong.

Labour under open borders Burnham, has no plan and they have no clue.

The Lib Dems are even weaker than Labour.

And all Reform have to offer is the financial probity of Nigel Farage,

The calm geniality of Zia Yusuf,

And, of course, the selfless loyalty of Robert Jenrick. 

I think everyone knew where that last one was heading before I said it.

Big upgrade.

And all of that from Reform is available for the bargain price of £72 million.  Their catchphrase at the next election will be Nigel Farage, the best leader money can buy. 

Never have cheap slogans been quite so expensive.

So it's pretty clear there is only one party that will put this country back on its feet.

It's up to us,

The Conservative Party,

 To the team of serious people in this room and beyond. 

We are the ones who must stand up for people like Rhiannon, Grace, Barnaby, Henry, to Fiona and the mothers of Piddington.

Andy Burnham last week in Liverpool,

Openly boasted that he wants a return to the 1970s,

Which we all know means stratospheric unemployment,

Rampant inflation,

National bankruptcy and it means trade union chaos.

Well, the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher turned our country around in the 1980s,

And we can do it again.

So if we work, together, we can win, together,

And we will once again rescue our country, together.