Katie Lam, the Conservative MP for Weald of Kent described by the Guardian as “something of a rising star” in the party, made an uncomfortable discovery during Home Office questions in the Commons on Monday: that the immigration statistics she was using to attack the Labour government covered a period when the Conservative Party was in office for most of it. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was happy to point this out. “I congratulate her on exposing the track record of the Tory government,” she said.
It is the kind of moment that circulates on social media before the minister has finished speaking. Lam’s attack was well-constructed in theory – a specific set of statistics about non-EU migration, youth emigration and workforce composition, designed to make the case that “mass migration has wrecked economic opportunities for young people.” The problem was the statistics.
What Lam said
Lam told ministers: “The latest estimates indicate that 627,000 non-EU migrants, mostly from low income countries, came to the UK between December 2024 and December 2025. Meanwhile, 61,000 Brits aged 16 to 24 left the UK, as did another 65,000 aged 25 to 34.”
She also said that “in recent years, for every young Briton who has been employed, 27 young migrants from outside the EU have also joined the workforce.” She asked Mahmood whether she accepted that “mass migration has wrecked economic opportunities for young people.”
The statistics were real. The attribution of responsibility was the problem.
What Mahmood said
The Home Secretary explained that the employment statistics Lam had just cited ran from January 2020 to December 2025. She paused to let that land.
Labour came to power in July 2024. The statistics Lam was using covered roughly five and a half years in total, of which approximately four and a half were under the Conservative government that Lam sits in opposition to defend. The period from January 2020 to July 2024 represents the Conservatives’ pandemic response, their post-COVID economic management, their record on net migration which reached 944,000 under Rishi Sunak – a figure cited by Jenrick and others during the election campaign as a crisis requiring urgent action, as we reported in our net migration piece.
“So I congratulate her on exposing the track record of the Tory government,” Mahmood said.
The broader context
The exchange is a neat illustration of a recurring problem for the Conservative Party on immigration. For fourteen years the Conservatives ran immigration policy. Net migration rose from roughly 150,000 when they took office in 2010 to a record 944,000 in 2023. They pledged repeatedly to bring it down to the tens of thousands. They never did.
Robert Jenrick, who served as Immigration Minister under the Conservatives before defecting to Reform, was asked about the 48% fall in net migration under Labour – to 171,000 – and responded by complaining that too many British people were leaving the country, a framing we covered in our net migration piece. The same politician who oversaw record net migration is now in Reform, campaigning on the premise that the Conservatives should have been tougher on the issue they spent fourteen years failing to address.
Lam’s Commons exchange is a different version of the same structural problem. The Conservatives built their entire 2024 election campaign around the failure of immigration policy. Their candidate to succeed them built his entire Reform career on the same ground. The statistics that Lam reached for to make this argument happened to cover the years when that failure was most acute – and they belonged to her party.
Katie Lam is indeed considered a rising star in the Conservative Party. Whether this particular exchange advances that rise will depend partly on whether the clip achieves the circulation it deserves. It is currently achieving it.
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