Nigel Farage‘s press conference yesterday was an extraordinary political event. The leader of Reform UK did not so much tear up the rule book as incinerate it.
He knows that immigration and asylum constitute the most pressing issue of our time – significantly more even than our basket case economy, according to a recent poll – and he put forward policies to deal with it that he wouldn’t have dared raise a year ago.
My immediate reaction was to exclaim ‘At last!’ After all the failures of first the Tories and now Labour in preventing boats from crossing the Channel – numbers have risen to a record high on Sir Keir Starmer‘s feeble watch – Nigel Farage has finally grasped the nettle. In fact, he has torn it up by its roots.
But this was not just about coming up with a set of effective measures that would probably slow the small boats coming across the Channel to a trickle. Perhaps even more significantly, Farage announced a war on all illegal immigrants, of whom there may be at least a million in the UK.
A Reform government would follow Trump’s example in America, and round up illegal immigrants before sending them back to their countries of origin. There are some practical and moral aspects to this policy that Reform hasn’t yet thought through. More of that later.
First, the largely excellent plan to stop the boats. The Tories claim Farage is merely copying their ideas. That is rubbish. Reform’s main proposal is for the UK to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and to scrap 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.
