UK Health Secretary defends Conservative pledge to cut immigration
British Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said the Cabinet is "completely united" behind Theresa May's pledge to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands.
Mr Hunt said it was important that politicians listened to last year's Brexit vote and took control of Britain's borders, adding that Mrs May was a Prime Minister who would listen to voters.
The comments came after years of Conservative failure to reduce net migration to below 100,000 people, which it has pledged in two previous election manifestos.
Former chancellor George Osborne, now editor of the London Evening Standard, also tweeted a link to an editorial in the newspaper on Wednesday which said no senior Cabinet ministers support the Tory target and the goal should be scrapped.
Mr Hunt told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I think you'll find the Cabinet, and including me, are completely united behind Theresa May on this because we believe that the worst possible thing we could do is to take that Brexit vote and to pretend that we were listening to it, and then not actually listen to the real message which is that many people have concerns about immigration, that they think the political establishment has ignored for a very long time.
"What Theresa May is saying is well I'm not going to ignore those concerns, I'm going to listen to those concerns because that is the kind of Prime Minister she wants to be."
He added: "The reason we are making this promise again is because we are listening to the message that people gave the political establishment on June 23 last year, which said that they wanted control of the border, of our borders, and they wanted immigration reduced."
