AT an airport in Oxfordshire, Nigel Farage grins while pointing at a giant mock departure board illustrating his plans to deport “illegal migrants” to places like Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan.
He is here to launch Reform UK’s “operation restore justice”, a programme to send asylum seekers who land on English shores to some of the most dangerous places on Earth.
The party has unveiled plans it says will result in the deportation of up to 600,000 asylum seekers in the first term of a Reform government – a prospect the polls are telling us is increasingly likely.
Farage’s voice echoed round the vast room. He spoke in front of a colossal Union Jack, warning that the level of immigration constituted a “genuine threat to public order”.
Naturally, actually existing threats to public order such as far-right rioting and tense demonstration outside hotels housing asylum seekers, were explained away as the protests of “mothers and concerned citizens”.
Farage hammered home his point, setting up the ordinary people of Britain against the impersonal, “outdated” system of international law, asking: “Whose side are you on?”
Reform’s prescription is expansive and brutal: detain everyone, including women and children, who arrives in Britain on small boats; scrap the Human Rights Act and quit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); quit international treaties which ban torture and enshrine the rights of asylum seekers; ban anyone who arrives in Britain by small boats or other illegal methods from ever claiming asylum.
While Reform’s plans – which also include using data from the state and private companies like banks to zero in on suspected illegal immigrants – appear to be as comprehensive as they are chilling, Farage’s dramatic rhetoric, that Britain is facing an “invasion”, covers up the fact that his plan is a mess.
Reform’s programme to quit or ignore any treaty or aspect of international law that stands in its way puts it on course for what would likely be an almighty collision between parliament and the state.
Advisors and officials tasked with helping a Farage ministry destroy swathes of the international rulebook would surely quit in their droves.
Or take the pledge to quit the ECHR, which would put Britain in the company of Belarus and Russia, the only two European nations not party to the agreement.
It underpins human rights laws in the UK through the Human Rights Act and is a bete noire of the right because it is frequently employed by immigration lawyers fighting the deportation of their clients.
But the ECHR also forms an integral part of the Good Friday Agreement.
Past suggestions from Tory politicians that it should be scrapped or altered in some way bring up the same grim warnings that have been rehearsed in response to Reform’s deportation programme: scrap the ECHR and reopen the possibility of civil war in Ireland.
For a party which would pride itself on its support for former servicemen and women, Reform seem relaxed about committing British troops to protracted, bloody conflict with Irish nationalists once again.
Elsewhere, Farage foundered on the specifics of who exactly would qualify for deportation. A good many people who now have indefinite leave to remain arrived in Britain illegally, or have broken immigration laws in other ways – working when they shouldn’t have, overstaying visas. And that’s before you even start to consider the particular issues around children.
Asked about this, Farage admitted: “I’m not standing here telling you all of this is easy, all of this is straightforward.”
In a clumsy reference to the Windrush scandal – which pertained to legal migration – Farage suggested there was an “exercise of common sense that has to come in here”.
Look to America, where gangs of immigration enforcement officers prowl cities hunting for people to deport and ask whether there is much room for “common sense” once a system of mass deportations gets going.
Farage promises his voters that it will all be quite simple but reality tells a different story. Reform’s plans wouldn’t just upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who came to the UK for a better life, they spell political chaos that would make the Brexit wars seem tame.
