TORY calls to cut net migration to Britain are part of the government’s “hateful and divisive agenda designed to distract from its attacks on ordinary people,” campaigners warned today.

Downing Street should instead focus on tackling the cost-of-living crisis to avoid “families relying on foodbanks and the elderly having to choose between heating and eating,” the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) told the Morning Star.

The intervention followed calls from Home Secretary Suella Braverman — already under-fire for pledging to send asylum-seekers in small boats to Rwanda — for less migration as “you cannot have immigration without integration.”

The widely criticised speech, which came as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak grapples with signs of discontent and division within Tory ranks, was delivered to a “national conservatism” conference in central London.

Paradoxically, the event, which was disrupted by hecklers and an Extinction Rebellion protester, was organised by US think tank the Edmund Burke Foundation, founded in 2019 to push right-wing low-tax populism on Western democracies.

Ms Braverman said: “We need to get overall immigration numbers down, and we mustn’t forget how to do things for ourselves.

“There is no good reason why we can’t train up enough HGV drivers, butchers or fruit pickers. Brexit enables us to build a high-skilled, high-wage economy that is less dependent on low-skilled foreign labour.”

But JCWI’s director of communications Ravishaan Rahel Muthiah told the Star: “This government manipulates figures to further its hateful and divisive agenda.

“A net migration figure obfuscates the reality of successive governments pursuing immigration policies whose sole purpose is to fill skill shortages while keeping those in need of sanctuary out.

“This government has done nothing but demonise those seeking refuge on our shores by scapegoating them in a shoddy attempt to distract from their inability to manage the real problems besieging ordinary people.

“We cannot allow this government to distract and manipulate us — all of us are victims of its attacks on ordinary people.”

Former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott slammed the “completely fake” focus on the alleged benefits the move would bring, tweeting: “It is a permanent dog-whistle campaign while at the same time encouraging migration instead of pay rises.”

And migrant workers’ union IWGB stressed: “It’s not migrant workers, who are just as much an integral part of society as anyone else, who are responsible for the multiple crises we’re facing.”