Behind Flashy Pledges Lies Reform UK’s Great Immigration Bluff

The seismic emergence of immigration as the UK’s most prominent political issue is catalysing Reform’s exponential successes as a firmly anti-immigration focused party. The problem is, they’re not.

In the last 18 months, as the enormous pressures of net migration have increasingly been laid bare for all the public to see, Reform UK has been able to make local and national electoral gains so unprecedentedly great as to cause tremors deep within the very foundations of British politics. In many voters’ eyes, it is now the only party currently able to command any meaningful legitimacy on the subject. The reality is, whilst Reform talks the talk of being tough on illegal immigration, they’ve utterly failed to walk the walk. In a world where democracy as a whole is being shaken to the core by voter disenfranchisement fuelled by unmet and false promises, a promise fulfilment failure this great would have impacts felt by every UK household.

Firstly, it’s fast becoming abundantly clear that, whilst insisting that they themselves are the only party with the answers on curbing immigration, the loose framework of partial solutions offered range from, at best, a duplication of the exact same Conservative policies Reform have spent the last few years decrying, and at worse are fundamentally unworkable and likely politically impossible to attempt or to even justify to their own voters. Over 120 days later than promised, Reform’s flagship immigration plan, entitled Operation Restoring Justice, contains just three full pages of text littered with recycled slogans, policy headlines and a cacophony of spelling and grammatical errors.

More alarming, however, are what the few scant details scattered amongst that actually are.

Central to Reform’s immigration solution is their proposal for how they will detain, house and deport all illegal immigrants residing or arriving in the UK.

Once detained, Reform proposes to temporarily house up to 24,000 in new detention centres built within repurposed disused RAF bases. Such a controversial plan involving RAF bases already began to be attempted by the previous Conservative government and proved to be incredibly controversial among voters of all parties. Requisitioning of RAF Scampton in 2023 caused significant public outrage as it jeopardised economic development plans worth £2.1 billion to the economy of the communities surrounding it, which Reform county councillors in Lincolnshire alongside other parties promised to protect before winning a majority of seats in May’s local elections. Reform HQ insist that a shortlist already exists, but have so far refrained from naming any sites in the plan’s crosshairs for fear of sabotage they claim the current Labour government may attempt. If RAF Scampton or any similar former bases which local Reform candidates have pledged to protect are on the list, then only one promise can be kept to their voters.

When it comes to what to do with illegal migrants once they’ve been detained, Reform propose a mix of third-country rehousing agreements (a Conservative policy which Reform campaigned against at the 2024 general election) and country-of-origin deportations facilitated through direct returns deals (also pursued by the previous Conservative government). Where Reform’s proposals differ, however, is with who they claim they would have the ability or be willing to negotiate such direct returns deals with - states such as Iran and Syria.

For a start, payments to incentivise the most problematic states to take back illegal migrants could serve to just encourage the states to perpetuate migratory flows for greater reward, and Reform’s policy pamphlet offers no suggestion of any safeguards. Most controversial of these planned agreements is the proposal for direct financial cooperation with the Taliban, who, since the war in Afghanistan ended, continue to be recognised as terrorists by the UK and the majority of the western world. To send financial assistance of any form to a proscribed terrorist organisation is a crime currently punishable by a maximum of 14 years imprisonment under sections 15-18 of the Terrorism Act, yet Reform make no mention of any plans to de-proscribe the group. A proposal for de-proscription of radical Islamist terrorists that we ourselves were at war with until just four years ago would surely be political suicide even for the most unsinkable of popular movements, let alone one with such an outspoken core voting base to the contrary. Farage, having condemned the Taliban as terrorists in tweets in 2021, actually acknowledged some of the threat posed to repatriated citizens by the Taliban’s liberal use of torture and execution for disloyalty against their regime. His answer: to leave the UN’s convention against torture and absolve the UK of all responsibility as we throw escapees of Kabul to the dogs. For a plan devoid of so many other details, it is impossible to feel such intentionality in including this one chilling.

Beyond this, it seems nonsensical to expect the very groups, especially terrorist organisations, who weaponise the opportunities afforded to them by the crisis against the UK to cooperate with us in closing the exact vulnerabilities that they exploit. Many culprit countries may simply not even entertain the idea of cooperation at all.

By Reform’s own admission, this principle of paying foreign governments, many of whom having vested interests in UK-bound illegal immigration continuing, has never worked before. France, Farage says, is colluding with smuggling gangs in escorting illegal small boat crossings to the British half of the Channel and perpetuating the crisis, despite receiving £800 million from the UK Treasury to avoid exactly that. If such payments to France are considered collusion, then how on earth could handing over taxpayers’ money to terrorist groups like the Taliban be considered any more reasonable under the same framework of considerations?

Besides the detentions system, Reform are proposing an Assisted Voluntary Return policy, which they tout as a new and innovative solution emulating the US by offering every person currently residing illegally in the UK the opportunity to repatriate themselves of their own volition for a £2500 payment through a new app. The problem is, this policy has already been in full operation in the UK since 2006 as the Voluntary Returns Service and offers participants £500 more via a fully operational gov.uk webservice than Reform’s own scheme. At the end of a six-month long policy development process, do Reform really believe that they can convince more than the five-year average of 5,670 annual claimants to partake in a scheme offering £500 less than before, or had Reform just genuinely not discovered that one of the most crucial schemes announced within their flagship policy already existed? Either way, voluntary returns are simply not successful to anywhere near the extent that Reform’s pledged deportation figures require.

Finally, there’s the most glaringly obvious detail of them all - that the policy pamphlet, and Reform as a whole, are completely silent on identifying or tackling the other 97.4% of the migratory pressures placed upon the UK since 2019 - the near completely unfettered deluge of 5.9 million legal migrants up until the beginning of this year on top of those who remain from the 151,000 crossers within the same period. The fact is, a 10.7% increase to the country’s population from legal migration alone in such a rapid timescale will be placing almost immeasurable strain on public services and will be catalysing major socioeconomic and cultural shifts, and yet Reform does not have a single word to say about it.

It’s certainly not that no one has the answers. In fact, Reform’s lack of detailed answers exist in stark contrast against the Conservatives’ own solutions both government and in opposition. The conservatives brought their own deportation bill to parliament all the way back in May, which, along with outlining their own pledge to automatically deny asylum to anyone entering the UK illegally, was also fully furnished with measures designed to tackle the much larger issues of exorbitantly high legal migration as well - including increasing visa salary thresholds, doubling the time requirements for obtaining citizenship and even going as far as to pledge a legally binding annual cap on migration altogether. Even the fringe movement Homeland, who, though far smaller in number, outflank Reform to the right, have a lengthier, more detailed, and broader scoped immigration policy outline on their website than Reform’s paltry pamphlet affords the public, albeit advanced within a framework many of us would consider unconscionably far right. In reality, Reform’s pseudo policy announcement discloses purely a continuation of its flagship pseudo policy - confirming only that Nigel Farage seemingly finds insufficient issue with the prospect of funding Islamist terrorists to take back asylum claimants who may well face brutal torture upon return.

That is all of course if Reform actually intend on delivering upon any of this in the first place.

So far, not a single one of Reform’s four MPs have signed Rupert Lowe’s mass deportation early day motion, which is currently the only mechanism available to parliamentarians to show support for such large-scale repatriations as Reform have proposed. In contrast, Lowe’s EDM has garnered signatures from a number of Conservative and DUP MPs, as well as James McMurdock, who, being cleared of his Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority investigation, opted not to retake the Reform whip. Disagreements about the direction of immigration and deportation policy were a central factor of Lowe’s own departure.

Furthermore, in a recent interview with Channel 4 on women’s safety, Reform’s Greater Lincolnshire Mayor Andrea Jenkyns was quick to deflect the conversation around the heightened rates of crimes against women committed by asylum seekers onto crimes committed by ethnic Brits themselves - the polar opposite of both the party’s messaging around illegal immigration risks and the views of many Reform voters themselves.

So it’s no surprise then that Nigel Farage’s own view, which he claimed when announcing Operation Restoring Justice has been consistent for at least the past five years, completely opposed his assertions just seventeen weeks ago - that deportations of illegal immigrants on a scale anywhere near the ones he’s now pledged would be “impossible to do, literally impossible”, that it’s “pointless even going there” and that it would never be Reform policy. 

Though these glimpses of what Reform’s potential real intentions have so far failed to proliferate into the consciousness of much of the British public, their echoes will only louden if Reform’s policy proposals continue to not stack up.

Surely then, if the details within Reform’s immigration proposals fundamentally fail to stack up against reality or Reform’s own rhetoric, and if rhetoric from Reform is impossible to reconcile even against itself, then the only explanation must just be that either their approach to immigration is all one big bluff, or that they are just so ill-prepared and disunified that it might as well be.

As Labour and the Conservatives have both found out, holding flashy press conferences to repeat and recycle soundbites and slogans are a magic trick whose spell only lasts for so long. Time is ticking before Reform’s core voter base see its pseudo solution for the baseless bluff that it is, and if polling has shown us anything in the last two years, voters will not hesitate to be unforgiving when they feel core party promises are not being met. There are plenty of fringe parties and a convalescing Conservative Party waiting in the wings for when they do.

Illustrations:Will Allen/Europinion