Nigel Farage’s plans to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, including women and children, and withdraw the UK from vital human rights protections have triggered fierce condemnation from campaigners, legal experts and political opponents, who said the proposals would dismantle Britain’s postwar commitments and shred fundamental rights.
Unveiling Reform UK’s “Operation Restoring Justice” at a combative Oxford press conference, Farage claimed his party would detain and deport “absolutely anyone” arriving by small boat and ensure they are “never, ever allowed to stay”, insisting this would stop crossings “within days” and “save tens and possibly hundreds of billions of pounds”.
Pressed by reporters, Farage confirmed that women and children would also be detained under the plans, conceding that “how we deal with children is a more complicated and difficult issue” but insisting all arrivals would be subject to removal.
But Farage repeatedly dodged questions about how the scheme would work in practice. He was unable to name a single RAF base to be converted into secure detention facilities, despite insisting they would be central to his plans.
He offered no detail on how Reform would secure deportation agreements with countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan, many of which have no return treaties with the UK and are considered unsafe by British courts. Farage could not explain how Reform’s scheme would be funded, beyond claiming costs would be a fraction of independent estimates.
Reform’s leadership said it would repeal the Human Rights Act, leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and disapply the 1951 refugee convention and UN convention against torture, with senior figure Zia Yusuf declaring that “no lawyer and no judge” would be able to prevent deportation flights from leaving.
Kolbassia Haoussou, director of survivor leadership at Freedom from Torture, called the plans “a gift to repressive regimes” and said Britain would be abandoning one of humanity’s “clearest moral lines”. He said: “This is not who we are as a country.
“Men, women and children are coming to the UK looking for safety. They are fleeing the unimaginable horrors of torture in places like Afghanistan, Sudan and Iran. These laws were created in the aftermath of the second world war to protect us all. If Britain were to abandon this legacy it would hand repressive regimes around the world a gift and undermine the promise to defend our shared right to live a life free from torture.”
Human rights lawyer Adam Wagner KC said Reform’s promises were not only “legally extreme” but fundamentally misleading.
“A lot of the rights contained in the European Convention come from British common law: the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and the right not to be tortured,” he said. “Farage may believe repealing treaties clears the path for mass deportations, but UK courts are not bound to ignore centuries of legal tradition.”
Politicians have swiftly challenged the scale and practicality of the plans. Daisy Cooper, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: “Farage’s plan crumbles under the most basic scrutiny.
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“The idea that Reform is going to magic up places to detain hundreds of thousands of people and deport them to countries who haven’t agreed to take them is taking the public for fools. Of course Nigel Farage wants to follow his idol Vladimir Putin in ripping up the human rights convention. Winston Churchill would be turning in his grave.”
Farage claims the programme would deport up to 600,000 asylum seekers in a single parliament, yet the costings remain opaque.
A report by the Centre for Migration Control, which produced costings alongside the MP Rupert Lowe but is not led by him, estimated a near-identical mass deportation scheme would cost £47.5bn over five years. Farage insists his plan would deliver the same scale of removals for £10bn, but offered no operational blueprint or independent evidence to support the claim.
Farage argued that “over three-quarters” of small-boat arrivals were “young undocumented males from “cultures entirely different from ours” who were “unlikely to assimilate” and “pose a risk to women and girls”, language likely to draw criticism from equality groups and anti-racism campaigners.
He also spoke of a “genuine threat to public order” if his proposals were not adopted, framing his plan as the only bulwark against rising anger and “civil disorder”.