Nigel Farage wants to deport 500 to 600,000 illegal migrants in his first term if Reform were to win the next election.
It’s a radical idea, but it's never been achieved in this country on anything like this scale.
It does, however, echo Donald Trump's immigration and customs enforcement scheme in the United States, which has been remarkably effective reducing illegal migration in April by 91 per cent.
These proposals are not for the faint hearted. Deportation deals even with awful, evil, oppressive regimes like Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran, ones that everyone thinks of unsafe countries would see people sent back to them.
Jacob Rees-Mogg said Reform UK's plan to deport swathes of illegal migrants is 'potentially exciting'
|GB NEWS
Nigel Farage is once again setting the pace of the immigration debate. He's pushing against what it's thought people will put up with.
But already, the Government this afternoon has said it would look at deporting failed asylum seekers to Afghanistan and Eritrea. Radical? Yes. Popular? Almost certainly. But are they actually workable?
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Deportations on this scale would require a remarkable legal overhaul. It's not just quitting the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights, or appealing the Human Rights Act and leaving the Refugee Convention.
The Government says that it's committed to deporting illegal migrants, but today, in its wishy washy way, it said this:
Nigel Farage (right) and Zia Yusuf at the launch of Reform UK's plan to deport asylum seekers | PA‘We've been very honest about the fact that we were never going to fix the broken immigration and asylum system we inherited overnight. But we are making tangible progress in terms of deporting people with no right to be here. This ambitious pilot scheme we've got in place with France now, asylum seekers have been detained under it. We'll see removals to France in the coming week. But when it comes to the ECHR, we don't think it's in our national interest to withdraw completely, put ourselves in the same camp as two other countries, Russia and Belarus. But that is not to say that we don't think the convention needs reform.’
That's absolute nonsense, frankly. We can't do it inside the convention and that's what Farage has realised. And to do this, frankly, he has to take on the blob and win.
But that's not going to be easy, because one legal eagle has even claimed that common law, the basis of British law, would debar such deportations, and that there would be a battle over the supremacy of Parliament if that turned out to be the case.
The old parties, my party, indeed, and the Labor Party, have never pledged action as radical as this on such a large scale, and the measures they have brought in have been repeatedly blocked by the courts under human rights grounds and vigorously opposed by the House of Lords by the blob.
Reform seems to me to be seeking a constitutional showdown with the establishment, the likes of which has not been seen since Lloyd George's budget in 1909. It's potentially very exciting.