Nigel Farage’s plan for mass deportations has many flaws, but the ambitious, maximalist messaging will appeal to a public frustrated by the never-ending arrival of small boats.
Reform UK will face practical, political and legal challenges, but that is the point. Farage aims to foster the belief that Britain is broken, that incremental fixes fail, and that only radical reform will work. He will go where no other politician is prepared to tread.
“Frankly, the public have now just had enough, and what began as a protest of mothers and concerned citizens outside the Bell Hotel in Epping has now spread right across the country, and all of it really poses one big fundamental question: whose side are you on?” Farage said in a draughty aircraft hangar in Oxfordshire today.
“Are you on the side of women and children being safe on our streets or are you on the side of outdated international treaties backed up by a series of dubious courts?” he added.
Farage went further in his rhetoric than even he has before, arguing that illegal migration is a scourge, that Britain is facing an invasion and that social cohesion is on the brink of collapse. Reform’s head of government efficiency, Zia Yusuf, accompanying Farage, repeatedly referred to asylum seekers from Afghanistan as “fighting-age males”, lumping them in with the Taliban they are running away from.
Reform’s policy is just as aggressive as its rhetoric. Britain would leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and other international treaties. Authorities would arrest, detain, and then deport illegal immigrants to countries of origin, including Afghanistan and Eritrea, when they arrive. Reform would build accommodation for 24,000 people on “surplus” military bases.
The party has a lot of questions to answer; its costings seem ambitious to say the least. It has only allocated £10bn in funding over five years, despite the Home Office currently spending £5bn a year to deal with the issue.
Unilaterally withdrawing from international agreements, including the ECHR, risks the hard-won peace under the Good Friday Agreement and would also detonate the post-Brexit trade agreement with the EU, hitting trade and economic growth.
Farage claimed that a Reform UK government could deport some 600,000 asylum seekers in its first parliament. But, in answering a question on the parameters of the mass deportation plans, he could only reply: “How far back you go with this is the difficulty, and I accept that.”
Equally, responding to queries about what would happen to children, he added: “I’m not standing here telling you all of this is easy, all of this is straightforward.”
Under the party’s proposals, there would be a “fallback” plan of deporting migrants to Ascension Island, rejected by previous administrations as unworkable. British citizens in the South Atlantic might well protest if their island becomes overcrowded with migrants. Reform said they would also revive the Rwanda scheme, which never worked, as a third country destination.
With it taking up to 18 months to build the detention centres, the public bill for those in hotels and housing remains. And as detention centres are built, the risk of migrants absconding from hotels will rocket. Currently, hotels hold 30,000 people.
Having encouraged local communities to seek legal challenges against migrant hotels, Farage was remarkably dismissive of the likelihood of objections from residents in areas surrounding air force bases where the detention centres could feature. Perhaps aware of the risk of alienating voters in those places, he declined to spell out where they would be.
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But by far the biggest obstacle to Farage’s plan is the moral grimness of paying the Taliban, Iranians and other countries tens of millions of pounds to take back their probable dissidents only for those individuals to face torture, imprisonment and execution.
Between April 2024 and March 2025, six in 10 small boat arrivals were made up of just five nationalities: Afghan (15 per cent), Syrian (11 per cent), Eritrean (11 per cent), Iranian (11 per cent), and Sudanese (8 per cent). The United Nations has warned that the rape of women and girls is being used as a systematic weapon of war in the conflict taking place in Sudan.
Over 5,100 asylum-seeking women and girls were identified as modern slavery victims last year, some experiencing daily rape. Will they also face deportation?
A broader contradiction also exists. Farage says he would use Britain’s diplomatic strength to make deals with countries like Albania, which has so far rebuffed proposals to process asylum seekers. But he is also shrugging his shoulders and essentially removing Britain from its international duties. “We can’t be responsible for all the sins that take place around the world,” he argued.
A Britain transformed into a pariah state by withdrawing from the UN Convention on Torture – even if only to give its judiciary no grounds to block deportations – is unlikely to be welcome at international summits.
Yet despite all the objections to his plans – and they will keep coming – Farage has shown himself a master of timing.
An intensifying debate about asylum hotels, and specifically the decision by a High Court judge to grant an injunction that means up to 138 male asylum seekers must leave the Bell Hotel in Epping, no doubt helped.
But Reform’s deliberate strategy of using the summer holidays to press the issue has worked. When Parliament returns next week, the debate will be on Farage’s terms.
At this point of the electoral cycle, campaigning is still at the vibes stage. Just as the Leave campaign revelled in its claim that Brexit would mean an extra £350m a year for the NHS, so Reform benefits from the furore surrounding its migration plans.
The more debate, the bigger their reach, and the more the public pay attention to Reform overall.
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