Farage has thrown down the gauntlet on illegal migration

Nigel Farage threw down the gauntlet today on illegal immigration. The Reform UK leader was speaking in an airport hangar in Oxfordshire, in front of a giant Union flag. To his side was a mock airport departures board showing where illegal migrants might soon be sent back to if his party takes power. With the public mood on the small-boats crisis now souring to the point of ‘total despair’, Farage said the issue of illegal migration can now be boiled down to a simple question. ‘Whose side are you on?’, he asked, rhetorically, of embattled Labour prime minister Keir Starmer. ‘Are you on the side of women and children being safe on our streets? Or are you on the side of outdated international treaties backed up by a series of dubious courts?’

I think we all know the answer. Indeed, one of the few policies that the opportunistic Starmer hasn’t jettisoned or u-turned on in his first year in office is his commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the international human-rights framework more broadly. And it is this that Farage and much of the right have correctly identified as the main barrier to taking back control of Britain’s borders, as the public is demanding.

The Reform plan unveiled today, named Operation Restoring Justice, aims to strike at the heart of the treaties and laws that have frustrated the deportation of illegal migrants. It envisages leaving the ECHR outright and disapplying other migration-related international treaties, such as the Refugee Convention, for five years. It would also overturn certain domestic laws, most notably the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the ECHR into UK law. These changes, Farage says, are necessary steps to meet his new target of detaining and deporting everyone who has arrived in Britain illegally.

It would strike most people as common sense that illegal entry to the UK should lead to removal. Yet in Britain, in 2025, illegal migrants are instead funneled into the asylum system. They are housed in hotels and HMOs around the country as the Home Office processes their claims. Not that this process counts for much, as rejected claims are highly unlikely to lead to deportation. Even migrants who arrive illegally and commit serious criminal offences can claim a right to stay indefinitely with the help of the ECHR. In some cases, the criminal behaviour itself is cited as a reason to block deportation – as in the recent cases of an Afghan sex offender, a Zimbabwean paedophile, a Nigerian terrorist and a Jamaican gang member, all of whom were allowed to stay because their crimes would supposedly put them at risk in their home countries. The threat such people might pose to the UK population isn’t even an afterthought. It never seems to factor into the thinking of immigration-tribunal judges at all.

We have ended up with an asylum system that is now impossible to defend. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy to dismantle. As John Vine, the former independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, rightly notes, the ‘establishment’ will form the biggest roadblock to Farage’s plans.

The elite hysteria has started already. Leaving the ECHR, says Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper, shows Farage wants to ‘follow his idol, Vladimir Putin, in ripping up the human-rights convention’, drawing a bizarre equivalence between fulfilling a popular demand to secure the UK’s border and abolishing liberal democracy.

Other critics have raised practical concerns about the Reform plan, from the cost of deporting potentially hundreds of thousands of people to the legal challenges it would undoubtedly face. Still, it’s striking that many liberal-left politicians, perhaps noting the vibe shift in the country, know they can no longer oppose border control on the moralistic grounds they once did. And so they have had to resort to legalism and bean-counting.

Labour knows it cannot afford to stay silent on the border as it sheds votes to Reform. And so it has adopted a tough-sounding – and I stress, sounding – posture. Responding to Farage’s announcement, Starmer has tried to insist that anyone arriving illegally ‘will face detention and return’. But he surely knows this is not true. After all, only four per cent of small-boats arrivals have been deported since 2019. As long as Labour is committed to the human-rights regime, then these promises are worthless.

Whose side are our rulers on? Certainly not the side of the public, whose reasonable demands for a secure, controlled border have gone totally ignored for far too long. The elites can scream at Nigel Farage all they like, but they only have themselves to blame for leaving him a wide open goal.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.