Reform’s Big Immigration Reveal: All Pyrotechnics, No Policy
Farage’s “Operation Restoring Justice” Promises Mass Deportations, Exits From International Law, and Even Deals With the Taliban. Except the Maths don't Math and Reality Refuses to Play Along
Today was the day.
The day that Nigel Farage finally unveiled his masterplan for immigration. The much vaunted policy had been trailed for months and months and what was delivered… well, it’s exactly what you’d expect from something called “Operation Restoring Justice,” a name that I can’t help but feel should come with pyrotechnics worthy of a Michael Bay film.
And it’s not necessarily that it’s bad (even though it is) or poorly thought out (so, so poorly thought out), it’s that it’s just yet another round of the same mummery that we’ve come to expect from the Frother-in-Chief. What was announced today isn’t so much a policy platform or framework than it is a campaign rally extended into a PDF document with just enough polish to nearly make it look like something a grown-up would pull together.
Anyway, the fact is, it has dropped, and I’m in the lucky position to have a few hours free this afternoon to have a bit of a go at analysing things, so instead of my original plan (which was to have a cuppa on my patio with my book), I’ll now be wading through what has been thrown out.
What Reform is Actually Proposing
A good place to start is to get the numbers and headlines out of the way, because boy-oh-boy, do we have some meaty ones! You can really tell that the strategy of “BIG SCARY NUMBERS!” that Reform so often relies on has been morphed into “BIG EXCITING NUMBERS!” and “BIG EXCITING CLAIMS!”
To begin with, we have:
600,000 deportations in five years is what Farage has promised, which works out to roughly 120,000 people a year, or just about 320 a day.
The above would be achieved through five deportations a day - kind of like a grim, reverse package holiday industry.
Reform has earmarked approximately £2bn to get returns deals over the line. And yes, this does include money earmarked for Afghanistan.
The creation of a “UK Deportation Command” which relies on a lot of your data - a helluva lot of it.
And then the piece de resistance - a full exit from International law. This would include leaving the ECHR, the Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture and, of course, ripping up the HRA of 1998.
This is a veritable smorgasboard of bad (and badly thought out) ideas. It’s a deportation fantasy novel, and it is not, in any way or form, designed to survive contact with scrutiny.
Which is why we’re now going to do just that and go into some more details about why this is such an incredibly poorly thought out plan.
The Scale Problem
Let’s start our scrutiny adventure (scrutiventure?) off with the numbers, because they are definitely big, bold and I can guarantee you that Reform is hoping that people don’t take too close a look.
We’ve already broken down the 120,000 a year number, and yes, that looks mightily impressive on a leaflet. On stage, it sounded strong, but in reality, it collapses when you poke too hard at the maths.
For some much needed context, the UK had its highest number of deportations in 2024, since 2016, which worked out to around 33,000 people deported. This was a much heralded achievement by the Conservative and Labour governments who split the year. It involved years of planning, hundreds of staff, and what probably accounted to about a million legal battles.
Reform’s proposal is to multiply that ten-fold, for half a decade, done in the context of them not only not hiring new civil servants, but cutting £50bn from the civil service budget.
Moving onto the flights, this would become a kind of a grim parody of a low cost-airline, and if you’ve flown with Ryanair or Easyjet, you’ll understand that there are things like infrastructure that would be necessary - little bits and pieces like airports to run from, additional security, etc.
This doesn’t even touch on the sheer number of Human Rights cases that would need to be waded through by our already nearly-overwhelmed court system. How Reform imagines they’ll get the equivalent of 1,825 flights in the air completely baffles me (and it probably baffles them as well).
So, yes, 600,000 deportations is a nice, lovely, round headline number - it looks very impressive on a lectern and terrifying on a tabloid front-page, but in practice, it’s about as realistic as promising to deport every single wasp in Britain by poppy season. The whole thing is complete fantasy.
The Taliban Clause
Now, if the “five-flights-a-day” malarkey promise belongs in the fantasy section, then the “returns-deal” bit belongs under dark comedy.
“Operation Restoring Justice” succeeding doesn’t just depend on some very questionable mathematics that aren’t mathing very well, it also leans very heavily on “returns deals” with countries that most governments in the civilised world would stay well clear of. The budget line that we have here is £2bn, which is presumably to grease some palms and smooth out some negotiations.
And yes, nestled right in there in the small print, is Afghanistan.
There is a very special kind of political creativity to have a look at Afghanistan, the country currently being governed by the Taliban (a regime that’s not exactly know for humane treatment, women’s rights or really any rights at all) and say, “yes, those are the guys we should trust with British taxpayer cash end people fleeing persecution.
Yet here we are.
Now, I do wish (I really, really wish) I was making this up, but we have it well on record from the former party chairman doing the media rounds this morning that saying that it would be “quite reasonable” to pay the Taliban to take returnees back.
If the above isn’t clear to you, let’s spell this out:
The people coming to the UK fleeing the Taliban, would be put on flights and returned to the Taliban in exchange for money given to… The Taliban. Britain, the country that we live in, would in effect be creating a direct income stream straight into the coffers of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes.
If that sounds like the premise of a dystopian satire novel rather than a serious policy proposal, then you have your head screwed on straight. The problem of course being that this isn’t satire - it’s a deadly serious proposal.
I’ll let you think on that before we move onto the next even darker bit.
International Law, Schminternational Law
If the non-addy-uppy maths and the genuine scary bits about British taxpayer money going to the Taliban hasn’t left you somewhat concerned, then this next part is what should make you sit up and really pay attention.
Going by Nigel Farage’s modus operandi, one of the main parts of the plan is to leave things. What things? Important ones.
Specifically, the European Convention on Human Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against Torture and, to top it all off, set fire to our very own Human Rights Act of 1998.
All of the above is what is otherwise known as every single piece of legislation that underpins modern asylum and refugee protections as well as the laws that protect us as citizens and residents of the United Kingdom.
It goes well beyond tinkering at the edges of legislation that may need a bit of a polish and it’s blowing up over seventy years of legal precedent and international commitments and hoping for the best.
This will, of course, be familiar to quite a few of us - we’ve been here before with the Tories and their Rwanda scheme when it spectacularly collapsed the moment it brushed up against the ECHR, except Reform doesn’t just want to avoid Rwanda-style embarrassment, they want to completely remove the refugree from the pitch. No courts to appeal to, no treaties to cite, no external body to say “whoa now, this here looks mighty illegal to me!”
The first thing to always remember is that the UK is not an island in the legal sense, no matter how much Farage and his ilk would like it to be. In order to negotiate trade, extradition and even things as basic as air travel rights, we need international treaties, and you don’t, as a rule, get to pick and choose only the bits that make you look terribly manly on stage.
As soon as you do something like leave the ECHR, you start unravelling bits and pieces like the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Chuck the Refugee Convention in the bin and you’re going to have a bit of trouble with persuading other countries to take British citizens abroad seriously when they make their own claims.
Secondly, the ideal that ripping up decades of international law would “restore justice” is laughable at face value - justice without law isn’t justice. It’s just power - the strong doing whatever they please to the weak (which ironically is exactly the sort of world that the Taliban thrives in… just saying).
Finally - and this bit is important - the treaties and bills that Farage is looking to destroy aren’t just about migrants, they’re about you as well. The international treaties and local laws that would be in the firing line are the frameworks that make sure that your government can’t arbitrarily lock you up, deny you a fair trial or decide that your rights are conditional on whether you happen to be in favour that week.
The moment you get rid of them, you’re left with nothing. You’re at the mercy of whatever “British Bill of Rights” Farage and his merry band of grievance merchants decide to draft in their place, and, hand on heart, would you honestly trust them to design the rulebook that determines your freedom of speech, right to protest or your right to privacy? I personally wouldn’t trust them to design a half-passable pub quiz, let alone the entirety of the architecture of British rights.
This is the point where the mask really slips - it’s very easy to sell the idea of “restoring justice” when you frame it as “tough talk against migrants”, but once you’ve ripped up those protections, they don’t just vanish for “illegals” - they vanish for everyone.
Enforcement Delusions
Front and centre of Reform’s big plans is something called the “UK Deportation Command” - a shiny “data fusion centre” that is going to supposedly knit together records from the NHS, HMRC, DVLA, Banks and police databases to track down anyone who shouldn’t be here.
Leaving aside the small matter of civil liberties - a government gobbling up every delicious morsel of your health data, tax records and bank details to fuel round-ups is not exactly the United Kingdom most of us think we live in - there’s a more practical question that I have:
Who on god’s green earth is actually going to run this?
We’ve already touched on the fact that Reform is planning on pretty much getting rid of the civil service, so how will this shiny new security state be run without the legions of staff, training, oversight and, yes, enormous amounts of money1?
Then we get to the imagery of it all - the five deportation flights a day, enforced by a “command” with sweeping detention powers, backed by algorithms trawling through your latest GP records and bank statements. It doesn’t feel like a policy that’s designed to work per se, it feels like something written to make a Reform voter’s spine tingle with the fantasy of “order being restored”.
The final reality bit that we have to contend with (beyond the fact that introducing anything as basic as ID cards in this country has been met with instant outrage) is that mass round-ups and invasive surveillance on this scale aren’t things that should happen in liberal democracies. Not necessarily because the will isn’t there (we’re seeing some very dark things happen under the Bright Orange Gameshow Host on the other side of the Atlantic these days), but because the machinery required to do so is so incredibly intrusive, prohibitively expensive and so wildly corrosive to rights that the country implementing immediately ceases to look like much of a democracy at all.
Enforcement by Reform is not serious policy - it’s just all theatre. It’s a stage managed promise that makes the pretty-much impossible sound decisive while blatantly ignoring the cost, legality and consequences.
Political Mummery
Now, if you’ve made it this far, I’m sure you’ll have noticed a them. None of the policies we’ve seen from Reform are actually designed to work. The numbers don’t add up, the enforcement is undeliverable, the treaties are not nearly as easy to wave away with a Union Jack as they might want you to think and the international “partners” needed to make this work include regimes that no sane government would come anywhere close to.
But, as ever with Reform, that’s not really the point, is it? The point is theatre. Mummery of the worst kind. Big round numbers and big bold promises, all on a PDF that looks like policy but reads like a rally speech. It’s all about the domination of headlines (and one commentator’s afternoon), filling those column inches and making Labour look weak and indecisive.
Once you start tearing away at the pyrotechnics, bluster and performance of it all, what you’re left with is… nothing, really. There’s no real idea about the governance that would make this plan work, no sign of the scaffolding that will hold up the promises. Just a shiny Michael Bay title with a Whetherspoons draft inside pretending to be policy.
On paper, “Operation Restoring Justice” looks bold - but, in practice, it’s numerically impossible, legally incoherent and diplomatically completely batshit. It won’t be implemented because it can’t be implemented.
And that is the real tell - this plan was never written for government, it was written for headlines. Reform doesn’t want to govern Britain, it wants to perform Britain.
Though, with that said, I’m sure that there would be very few qualms with handing a nice, fat government contract to a company that has a name that rhymes with alantire.
And I expect the media is lapping it all up and nobody is asking any of the questions that will reveal just what a total crock all of this is. We need people like the guys behind South Park to start doing the journalists' jobs for them.
The only thing more crackpot than Farage is anyone who believes this is even vaguely realistic, humane or will solve the problem