Nigel Farage’s ‘mass deportation’ plan is doomed to failure

Nigel Farage is like a chatbot trained on social media posts. "It's perfectly simple," they begin. "Send them back to France", or "Detain them all and deport them." If it was so easy, why do these armchair gold commanders think that three prime ministers who knew that their survival depended on it have so far failed to stop the boats? The one thing that ought to be obvious from the start is that the solution to the problem is not obvious. Therefore, the test of Farage's proposals today is whether they are creative and rigorous enough to meet and overcome the legal and logistical complexity of the challenge.

Let me explain why the Reform UK plans fail this test. The main proposal is to detain and deport everyone who arrives by small boat, and to refuse to consider them for asylum — which is essentially what Rishi Sunak proposed and indeed legislated for, but never put into practice.

Farage's plan has the added ingredient of disapplying a series of treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), as proposed by Robert Jenrick. Sunak said he was prepared to do that "if necessary", and Kemi Badenoch seems to be about to conclude that it is necessary. But the reason Sunak never went ahead with the plan was not in the end the constraints of treaties. The next obstacle was that there is nowhere to put the detainees, and the obstacle after that is that, in most cases, there is nowhere to deport them to.

Of course, it would be possible to build mass detention camps. The Farage plan talks blithely of putting up temporary "secure immigration removal centres", at a cost of £2.5bn. Where will these centres be? "This will be modular accommodation built in remote parts of the country," the plan says. Farage either doesn't know, or isn't saying where he has in mind.

That is £100,000 per place for 24,000 places, which is about half a year's intake from small boats, so the credibility of that part of the plan depends on being able to deport most of the detainees quickly.

This is where Farage, and Zia Yusuf, his spokesperson, sound least convincing. Farage said he hoped to strike an agreement with Albania. Given that Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania who is an ally of the British Labour Party, bluntly rejected the idea of hosting a "return hub" for the Labour government, the chances that he would cooperate with a Reform government are low.

Reform was delighted to discover that Germany has twice returned migrants to Afghanistan, something Farage himself said was "impossible" as recently as last year. But these were Afghans who had committed crimes in Germany, and who were returned to Kabul.

Never mind the Taliban denying education to women who are returned, or torturing or killing deportees — Farage at the weekend said: "I'm really sorry, but we can't be responsible for everything that happens in the whole of the world." Would he be willing to pay millions to the Taliban? He didn't say. Would he pay the Iranian regime to take back its citizens? No answer.

So far, Farage has implied that he could simply copy Donald Trump and threaten other countries into accepting deportees, but Britain does not have much leverage over Afghanistan and Iran.

Then there are the further complications about which Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, warned in an interview with The Independent yesterday. Not so much the implications of repudiating the ECHR for the Good Friday Agreement or the EU trade deal — I assume that those could be overcome - but the obstacles in common law to deporting people. It is not just treaties, or even the Human Rights Act, that dictate how would-be refugees should be treated, but pre-existing British law.

For all that, Farage claims that Reform's advisers have come up with a comprehensive plan, today's document is thin and unconvincing. He has dropped the "simple" idea of taking migrants straight back to France without French permission: his advisers have at least realised that this might just invite the French to bring them back to Britain.

But the problem for Keir Starmer is that Farage's plan does not have to be very convincing. If the Labour government cannot stop the boats, or at least reduce them to a trickle, many voters will be tempted by the forceful solution offered by the plausible salesperson who, unlike the Conservatives or Labour, bears no responsibility for the arrival, uninvited, of thousands of people a year.