Nigel Farage has rowed back on a pledge he made to the party’s conference to stop small boat crossings within two weeks of taking office, just one day after making it.
It came as Reform UK’s conference entered its second day in Birmingham, with key party figures taking aim at the chaos within the Labour government and calling for an early election as the party set out its plan for government.
The Reform UK leader had told an audience at the conference on Friday that it would take a fortnight of him entering Downing Street to halt small boat arrivals, if he won an election.
But on Saturday, Mr Farage backtracked on the claim, telling Sky News: “I didn’t say that”.
He instead said Reform would stop the boats within two weeks of passing their proposed legislation.
The party has proposed quitting the European Convention on Human Rights and repealing the Human Rights Act to be replaced with a British bill of rights – a process which is likely to take more than a year.
Mr Farage also said he would introduce similar laws to those passed by former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott over a decade ago to stop arrivals from Indonesia.
“As soon as the law is in place. As soon as you have the ability to detain and deport, you’ll stop it in two weeks,” he clarified to the BBC.
On Friday, the Reform leader had said: “You cannot come here illegally and stay – we will stop the boats within two weeks of winning government.”
It's the second time Mr Farage has sparked confusion with his migration policy over the last month, after he went back and forth on whether or not the party would deport women and children.
On Saturday, he confirmed he would deport female asylum seekers back to the Taliban in Afghanistan if he wins the next election.
Speaking to Sky News on the second day of the Reform conference in Birmingham, he was asked whether he would detain women and children and “send them back” – to which he responded: “Yes.”
But he said the UK has a “duty of care” if a four-year-old were to arrive in a dinghy.
It comes after Mr Farage faced condemnation last month when he said everyone who arrives in the UK via small boat, including women and children, would be detained.
He later rowed back to clarify that the party was “not even discussing women and children at this stage”, and then, in a separate interview, said that single women could face deportation if they didn’t arrive with children.
His latest comments came on the second day of the party’s conference after he had told attendees on Friday to expect a general election in the next two years amid disarray in Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
Attendees at the conference passed motions on Saturday, including one that will call for Reform’s immigration policy to be broadened to include a review of asylum approvals by Labour and Conservative governments.
Lancashire County Council deputy leader, councillor Simon Evans, proposed the motion, which would see a review of immigration decisions on potential illegal migrants, where the police national computer and counterterror checks were bypassed.
Similar motions on repealing the 2008 Climate Change Act and removing “gender ideology from public organisations” were unanimously passed.
The conference also saw Mr Farage admit he misspoke when he said he bought a house in Clacton before the last election.
The Reform UK leader said last year he had bought a home in his Clacton constituency, but it was later reported that his partner had actually made the purchase.
“I should have said ‘we’. All right? My partner bought it, so what?” he said.
He said it was “her money” and “her asset”, adding: “I own none of it. But I just happen to spend some time there.”
“I should have rephrased it. I didn’t want … to put her in the public domain.”
Mr Farage’s deputy Richard Tice had earlier said the party leader’s tax affairs are “irrelevant” to voters after questions about the purchase resurfaced following Angela Rayner’s resignation. The deputy prime minister resigned on Friday over underpaying stamp duty on a seaside flat she bought this year.
Meanwhile, Reform’s newest MP, Sarah Pochin, used her main stage address at the conference to promise to do away with “woke policing”, saying she has “had enough” of police that appear to “sympathise with protest groups that simply do not reflect the views of the majority of the British people”.
Lee Anderson, who has been tasked with putting together Reform’s plan to crack down on benefits, told the conference that the benefits system should be “a safety net, not a career option”.
“The best way out of poverty is education, training, opportunities and a bit of decent graft,” he said.
“Benefits should be a safety net, not a career option. Work should always pay more than benefits, which is why Reform UK will overhaul our benefits system and reward our workers, not the shirkers.”
And on Saturday afternoon, Lucy Connolly appeared on stage in a special live recording of The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, telling the conference that the justice system is “broken”.
The former childminder and wife of a Conservative councillor was jailed for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers in the aftermath of the Southport murders last year.
“Never in a million years did I ever think I was going to end up in prison. And it’s not funny, but as I said earlier, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry,” she said.
“However, I learnt a lot in there and things that you’d never see in any other walk of life, and I really hope that I can change some things having come from there.
“Because it really is such a broken system, the whole system just needs completely reforming.”
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