MONDAY saw a swathe of media reports and responses to the first really firm ideas to come from the Reform Party regarding deportation as a tool for handling mass immigration.
It’s a topic that Reform were, up to now, reluctant to supply actual plans for or comment on. It was Rupert Lowe discussing the need for significant deportations to address Britain’s migrant crisis that led to the rapid breakdown of his relationship with the party leadership. Since all the other claims made at the time about Lowe’s alleged behaviour have been dropped, it was Lowe’s language on deportations, as Farage himself now admits, that was to blame for the split. Nigel Farage and Reform simply didn’t want to sully themselves with talk about deportations.
Suddenly, however, Reform have adopted a new and tougher stance, ironically delivered by Zia Yusuf, the former Reform chairman who is now their Home Secretary designate, the person whose allegations of physical assault and violent threats led to Lowe being the subject of a Metropolitan Police investigation which resulted in no further action. Yusuf announced a Reform plan for deportations that includes creating a British version of the much-maligned US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
Suddenly Reform’s presumed fear of accusations (such as Amnesty’s that ‘Reform’s framing’ is ‘poisoning the public debate and scapegoating immigrants’) no longer seems to bother them.
Indeed the Reform proposal, delivered by Yusuf in the clip shared by Jack Hadfield on X, appears to go further than the proposals of Lowe’s Restore Britain party.
Hadfield wrote: ‘Restore’s very own policy paper on mass deportations only estimates the forced removal of 150,000-195,000 migrants a year, whereas @ZiaYusufUK and @reformparty_uk can almost double those numbers under their plans, at 288,000 a year, 1.4M per term.’
Key to Yusuf’s promise is the establishment of a UK Deportation Command modelled on ICE. ‘Deportation Command’ would have the capacity to detain up to 24,000 illegal aliens at a time, and would be in charge of deportations on five flights a day, removing up to 288,000 people per year.
Why we are seeing this tougher stance from Reform and the dropping of their previously internal bar on even mentioning deportations is not rocket science.
Craig Monro, commenting in Metro, nailed it when he wrote: ‘With right wing challengers including Restore Britain and even the Conservatives also trying to take advantage of voter anger over migration, he’s [Yusuf] under pressure to get it right.’
In a nutshell, the threat of Lowe’s party has forced Reform’s hand. There’s a huge irony in this. Lowe’s announcement about his new party came hard on the heels of Advance UK’s highly successful conference at which its leader, Ben Habib, who Farage dispensed with in favour of Zia Yusuf, set out his party’s comprehensive national emergency policy on immigration control and deportation including the establishment of of an ‘immigration enforcement force’. (See summary list at the end of this article.)
In the following two weeks the Overton window shifted. Lowe’s announcement turned his Restore Britain movement into another party of members and votes that Reform needs, people for whom deporting illegals is not just a popular policy but an urgent one. Reform’s hand was forced. No matter how much leftist media and organisations screech about it, the same kind of hysterical responses that have greeted the operations of ICE in the US, Reform knows that Habib and Lowe would have no trouble in facing them down. Time will tell whether Yusuf and Farage themselves will have the courage or the clarity to call out all the now classic features of leftist dishonesty on borders and immigration law and enforcement.
Take this example from Amnesty’s press release: ‘Anyone seeking power without restraint, including human rights protections, should set alarm bells ringing. Human rights exist to stop governments abusing power and to make sure no one is above the law. Proposals to sideline courts and weaken legal protections should concern anyone who cares about freedoms and accountability in the UK.
‘Real security means protecting rights, upholding justice and bringing communities together, not scapegoating migrants or minorities to chase headlines . . .
‘Language that frames migration as an “invasion” poisons the public debate and emboldens ideas many believed we had left behind generations ago. Appealing to racism or aggressive nationalism as a shortcut to power is reckless and dangerous.
‘The UK does not need or want a British version of ICE. Proposals to mirror the United States through mass detention and rapid deportations risk unleashing a system built on fear, aggressive raids and discrimination, where enforcement operates with sweeping powers and too little accountability. That is not security. It is a blueprint for division, harm and lasting damage to our freedoms.
‘Rights take decades to win and moments to lose. Plans to expand mass detention, restrict legal oversight and withdraw from international human rights frameworks would drag the UK towards a dystopian, authoritarian future that most people simply do not want.’
The above is worth quoting at length for giving such a classic summary of leftist dishonesties on this issue.
The enforcement of border and immigration laws is actually a right that citizens deserve to have respected, rather than a right taken away from non-citizens. Nobody has an inalienable right illegally to enter another country. Nobody has an inalienable right to claim benefits and welfare from a foreign population after illegally arriving in their country. These are modern legal distortions of the proper meaning of citizenship, where citizens should have more rights legally protected in their own country than non-citizens possess (otherwise citizenship is meaningless). Asylum in very unusual cases of emergency, limited in ways that recognise the rights of existing citizens to safety and priority, is a different thing from the offer of universal asylum, or the unconditional acceptance of anyone from anywhere regardless of their behaviour, regardless of their lack of integration, and regardless of the wishes of your existing citizens.
To speak of fear when laws are enforced is to emotively distort the real world truth that immigration laws have to be enforced to protect everyone who is already a citizen, and to show zero regard for the fears of your existing populace too. To talk of border agencies protecting citizens as if that task is a version of authoritarian Nazism is to show utter contempt for the democratic reality that people are allowed to want their nations’ culture and their own lives protected by their governments via a sane border policy and a reasonable limit on the numbers of unknown persons arriving and settling in a country. What is really authoritarian is telling people they must accept open borders, never ask for anything else and never vote for anything else. What is divisive, reckless and dangerous is the kind of contempt for existing citizens that Amnesty shows, and the kind of demand they and similar groups deliver both in the US and the UK that foreign rights always matter more than those of resident British or American people.
Neither Habib nor Lowe have been afraid to express the view that the majority want their nation to be familiar, safe and a place that prioritises the citizen above the illegal immigrant. Or that deportations are necessary for people who won’t integrate, won’t obey laws or pose a threat of crime and harmful behaviour from which citizens suffer. Reform has been forced to be more honest on that too.
The UK, like the US, has experienced huge and unprecedented immigration which has an economic and a cultural cost, a level of immigration far beyond what is reasonable and which has caused harm to citizens who don’t deserve that harm. Like the US, it has become a perverse moral imperative of the left, of the mainstream media, and of powerful backers who obtain short-term political and financial advantages from open borders, to pretend that wanting some sanity on levels of immigration is authoritarian or evil. It is not. Foreigners who commit crimes should be deported as a basic protection. Limits on immigration have to exist, or your country falls apart. Expecting people to integrate is not Nazism. Deportations of those who enter a country illegally are urgently necessary, no matter how hysterical and false the screeching about proposing or doing it becomes.
There is possibly an argument to be made against Advance UK and Restore Britain for potentially splitting the right-wing vote. But on deportations they have already forced Reform to show a courage they refused to show. Whoever delivers it, a British ICE is exactly what Britain needs. But whether Reform UK will indeed have the guts to implement it when the time comes while withstanding the near overwhelming onslaught that Donald Trump continues to endure is quite another matter.
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Advance UK’s Immigration, Asylum and Deportation policy summary:
– Declare a National Emergency on immigration to pass urgent laws
– Abolish indefinite leave to remain
– Anyone granted Indefinite Leave to Remain since 2019 will have it revoked (‘Boriswave’ gone)
– All asylum applications suspended; all approved asylum since 2019 will be revoked
– Stop the granting of British Passports to foreigners – Work Visas only granted to people on country’s Green List
– Every other country will be on Red List and NO ONE will be allowed in from these countries
– All visas granted to families of students will be cancelled
– When current work visas expire they CANNOT be renewed
– No benefits will ever be granted to foreigners
– All foreigners settled in the UK will be encouraged to GO HOME (time limited incentives will be given)
– Those overstaying their visa you WILL BE ARRESTED AND DEPORTED
– All illegal immigrants will be deported
– Every foreign criminal will be deported
– Every Visa granted will have a set of requirements: must obey the law, must only work for company named on visa
– Foreigners to be banned from politics
– Foreigners cannot take part in protests
– Foreigners will not be able to proselytize for religions or ideologies
– Temporary Work Visas will only be granted to people from: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Israel, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City
– Illegal immigrants will be arrested, detained and deported en-masse. No exceptions. No right of appeal. Any country refusing to take back illegal immigrants will be sanctioned and their citizens arrested
– Royal Navy will be instructed to turn back every illegal migrant boat. No more payments to France. Immigration enforcement force established to Police borders and deportations and will have powers over Police and legal process. There will be NO RIGHTS OF APPEAL
