Nigel Farage’s press conference yesterday was a remarkable political spectacle. As the leader of Reform UK, he not only disregarded the rule book but obliterated it entirely.
He understands that immigration and asylum are the most urgent issues of our time, outweighing even our troubled economy according to a recent poll. Accordingly, he proposed policies addressing this issue that he wouldn’t have dared to propose just a year ago.
My initial reaction was to declare, ‘Finally!’ Given the continual failures of both the Tories and Labour to prevent Channel crossings, especially with the record high during Sir Keir Starmer’s ineffective period, Nigel Farage has confronted the issue decisively. In fact, he has uprooted it entirely.
However, this wasn’t solely about devising effective strategies to reduce the flow of small boats across the Channel. Perhaps even more importantly, Farage declared a campaign against all illegal immigrants, of which there might be at least a million in the UK.
A Reform government would emulate Trump’s policies in America, rounding up illegal immigrants and deporting them to their countries of origin. There are some practical and ethical considerations to this approach that Reform has yet to fully address. More on that later.
First, let’s look at the mainly strong plan to halt the boats. The Tories assert Farage is simply mimicking their strategies, but that is incorrect. Reform’s primary proposal is for the UK to exit the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and abolish Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act.
It was the ECHR and the Human Rights Act that scuppered the Tories’ plan to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda. But, fearful of a liberal backlash, they didn’t have the guts either to pull out, or repeal the Act. Yet perfectly civilised countries such as Australia and New Zealand aren’t signed up to the ECHR.
Even now, Kemi Badenoch, though evidently sympathetic to the idea, has not yet committed herself to leaving the ECHR. She has been too timid and too slow. If, as expected, she announces a change of policy at the Conservative Party conference in October, she will be accused of trailing in Reform’s wake.
Nigel Farage poses in front of a screen displaying ‘Deportation Departures’ at the launch of Reform UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers if they get into government
Farage also said that a future Reform government would ‘disapply’ the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees for five years. The object of all these proposals is to deprive ‘activist’ judges and human rights lawyers of legal devices that frustrate or delay the deportation of illegal migrants.
Central to Farage’s thinking is deterrence. A Reform government would build detention camps holding up to 24,000 people to which all illegal immigrants crossing the Channel in boats would be sent before being despatched to their countries of origin.
Both Farage and his sidekick at the press conference, Zia Yusuf, are confident that arrangements with such countries could be reached. They think the palms of some foreign leaders will have to be greased.
I believe that for the first time a British political party has produced a credible plan to deter migrants from crossing the Channel which (unlike the Tories’ Rwanda scheme) wouldn’t be undermined by judges and lawyers relying on human rights law.
How will the Government respond? It would be wonderful if it took a leaf out of Farage’s book. Indeed, doubtless with tongue in cheek, the Reform leader suggested yesterday that people in Labour constituencies should press their MPs to put pressure on Starmer & Co.
They won’t listen. Labour is addicted to a piecemeal approach it develops on the hoof – signing yet another agreement with the French here, promising to speed up the appeals system there – that will at best have a marginal effect.
Human rights lawyer Sir Keir Starmer won’t be brave enough to withdraw from the ECHR or other international arrangements. He won’t even have the bottle to take up the recent suggestion of former Labour Home Secretary Lord Blunkett that the Government should suspend our membership of these bodies.
How rich of Labour to dismiss Farage’s ideas as being ‘put together on the back of a fag packet’. If anyone is making up policy as they go along, it is Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. Reform has come up with a detailed and coherent plan.
Zia Yusuf and Farage show the programme Operation Restoring Justice at the press conference at Oxford Airport, Kidlington
That said, there are loose ends. During the press conference, several journalists asked Farage about genuine refugees fleeing tyranny. Would he be happy if they were sent back to certain torture and death?
The Reform leader’s response was that there was no middle way. The ‘alternative was to do nothing’, and the British people were fed up with the threat to national security and the rising crime which ‘undocumented single men’ are bringing to our shores.
No doubt they are. But could Prime Minister Farage really countenance packing off genuine refugees to their graves? I hope not and I don’t believe so.
There was a similar absence of reality in plans to deport illegal immigrants already living here. Nigel Farage claimed a Reform government would send back 600,000 in its first term.
According to Zia Yusuf – the Muslim son of immigrants, who yesterday often sounded more hardline than Farage – there may be more than one million illegal immigrants in the UK. Yet only 180,000 have come across the Channel in small boats, of whom some have been returned.
In other words, most illegal immigrants have arrived in this country by other means. They have either overstayed their visas, or come here by some illicit route.
Many people would probably think it right that a person who remained in the UK after his visa expired a couple of years ago should be deported. But what about someone who has been in this country for 20 or 30 years, is married with a wife and children, and has a job and a house?
Should they all be forced to leave what has become their home? And how, in any case, will hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants be identified? Doesn’t Farage’s new department of deportation sound a little sinister and un-British?
Exercised though many of us are about illegal immigration, I don’t believe that mass deportation of established residents would be thought acceptable by the majority of British people, including some Reform voters.
More thinking needs to be done, and a distinction made between recently arrived illegal immigrants who may pose a threat, and those who have lived here for a long time and clearly don’t.
There is scope here for Kemi Badenoch, late though she is in arriving at the party, to inject some humanity into plans that sometimes sound draconian in the mouths of both Farage and Yusuf. If she can come up with proposals that seem both effective and humane, she might win back some support.
All that said, Nigel Farage is the first British politician to announce policies that have a good chance of cutting future illegal immigration. His next challenge is to show how he would reduce this country’s enduring dependence on legal immigration, which is many times greater.
For all his occasional wrong notes, here at last is someone who recognises the enormity of the problems posed by uncontrolled immigration, and has a plan to do something about it.
