Conservative MP says immigration is ‘number one issue on the doorstep’ in Sheffield constituency

Miriam Cates, the Conservative Party’s candidate for Penistone and Stocksbridge, who served as the area’s MP between 2019 and 2024, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the number one issue on the doorstep was immigration.

When looking back at the last 14 years since the Conservatives have been in power, Ms Cates admitted it has been a “very tough” period – from the coalition government through the Brexit deadlock to the pandemic.

She said: “If you’re honest and realistic about the last 14 years, it’s been tough – tough for the country, tough for the Government, tough for everybody.

“I think the honest question people have to ask is would Labour have done a better job – and my verdict is 100 per cent no.

“During the pandemic they wanted us to borrow more money, they wanted us to carry furlough longer, they wanted us to keep children out of education for longer, longer and longer.

“All the problems we’ve had since then – inflation, difficulties with public services, long waiting lists – would have been worse under Labour. I know that’s a negative message and I don’t want to sell a negative message but we can’t just sweep it under the carpet and say ‘Oh, look, the last 14 years you failed to do this and that’.

“Yes, we have, but we also managed to get the country through some really really difficult circumstances.

“I think, of course, we should hold our hands up and say there have been mistakes, 100 per cent, and I have challenged the Government on many things in the last five years but I also think you need to be fair-minded and say any government would have struggled and the fact that we have now brought inflation back to two per cent we are starting to make progress on some of these things.”

She added she understood why some people were cross with the Conservatives for all those reasons, particularly on immigration.

“I think people have an absolutely legitimate grievance about that and that is the number one issue on the doorstep”, she said.

While Ms Cates said a dynamic economy needs a certain number of people coming in and out, she added: “But there is a difference between 10,000-20,000 a year and 700,000.”

She added the big question people need to answer on July 4 is whether they trust Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak more in sorting this out.

Rishi Sunak is the fifth prime minister in 14 years and the third in the last two years or so.

Ms Cates admitted the Conservatives shot themselves in the foot as a party by changing leaders so often.

She said while issues around the boats have not been sorted, Mr Sunak was the first prime minister who said he would be willing to leave the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) and “we know that flights are going to take off on July 24”.

“Is that a perfect solution? No, it isn’t. But is it more progress than anybody has ever made? Yes, it is”, Ms Cates added.

In 2019, after she was elected as the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, Ms Cates said her number one priority was public transport.

So, how did that go?

She said “great”.

Ms Cates said: “We’ve got the number 25 and the number 26, we’ve got a bus from Barnsley to the Northern College.

“We finally signed off these new buses for Stocksbridge and Deepcar so within the next three months hopefully maybe four months we should see hopper buses going around in Stocksbridge and Deepcar to Bolserstone.

“So in terms of rural transport, which is what I’ve really focused on, yes, it’s been slow progress but we actually have new bus routes.”

Ms Cates criticised Oliver Coppard, the South Yorkshire mayor, saying it was disappointing that he has “a lot of money but he chooses not to prioritise rural transport” and when it comes to franchising he has wasted a lot of time and money “on consultants, paperwork and reports about reports about reports and got nowhere”.

“The Government keeps giving him more money and the service doesn’t get improved”, Ms Cates added.

As a result, she said she had started her own service review in the area.

Ms Cates has been a nationally well-known figure for her thoughts on, among other things, immigration and gender, and she is one of the co-founders of a parliamentary group called the New Conservatives.

She was asked to explain what the difference is between them and Reform UK.

She said “not much on immigration” – there seems to be an overlap.

However, Ms Cates said there are some significant differences in economics.

She said: “Nigel Farage is a Thatcherite – we are not Thatcherites. Margaret Thatcher certainly did a lot for the economy and had specific battles to fight which she won very resoundingly but I think those of us in Red Wall seats also recognise that Thatcherism did a lot of damage to industrial areas like South Yorkshire.”

She admitted that the fact that those lost jobs were not replaced with anything else substantial “left this area behind and still the damage is visible”.

Ms Cates said she, her generation and other Red Wall MPs didn’t want a massive state or high taxes but they acknowledged that “there is a role for the state in supporting industry and reviving the economy here”.

She added: “So unlike Farage and his Thatcherite gang, we do believe in state intervention where necessary.”

Ms Cates said she had “a lot of respect” for Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, the leaders of the Reform UK party, whom she described as “consummate professionals” but added a lot of their candidates were not credible.

She said there are a lot of Reform UK voters who are “small-c conservatives” and cross with the Government for not being conservative enough.

But, she added: “We’ve got to be very very careful that those views are represented by mainstream, credible parties and don’t become fringe.”

She called out “the Westminster elite” who she said failed to recognise over the last two decades how important national identity and their communities are for people.

Ms Cates said: “In Stocksbridge, where there are areas of deprivation, lots of people still love their town and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else because that rootedness means something.”

She said those thinking people wouldn’t care about immigration if there were enough houses were wrong because “it’s as much about identity and security as it is about economics”.