On no issue are Britain’s established political parties so compromised as on efforts to stop illegal immigrants gatecrashing our borders via the English Channel.
For half a decade the Tories told us they would stop the crossings and yet the volumes of arrivals kept increasing. Rishi Sunak has just declared that the biggest regret of his premiership is not that he failed to ‘stop the boats’ but that he promised to do so in the first place, showing that his reverse electoral Midas touch is very much intact.
Since July, Labour has been peddling a different three-word promise, ‘smash the gangs’. Yet so far the gangs have remained resolutely unsmashed – illegal arrivals via the Channel are at record levels.
Given the intensity of public anger about the chronic failings of the old duopoly, it is entirely unsurprising that Reform is focusing on the need to stop illegal immigration. It has the obvious advantage of ideological unity on the matter – there is no ‘One Nation’ wing of Reform that refuses to countenance drastic measures.
And yet its concrete policy proposals on this, its flagship issue, are risible. On Tuesday Reform put out a post on its X social media feed mocking Labour’s efforts and hailing its own ‘Four point plan to end the national security emergency in the Channel.’
The problem is that Reform’s ‘plan’ will not stop the boats either. Point one is to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. This is a necessary step, but not a sufficient one. The UK’s Human Rights Act will also need to be disapplied or abolished. There are also United Nations compacts that Britain is signed up to which limit national freedom of action against illegal immigrants.
Point two of Reform’s plan states, ‘Zero illegal immigrants to be settled in the UK.’ This is a laudable aspiration, but that’s all it is. Rishi Sunak shared it but failed to implement the policies to make it happen despite including it in his Illegal Migration Act.
Point three is to set up ‘a new Government Department of Immigration’. The idea here is that the subject deserves its own dedicated ministry. Yet those familiar with past Whitehall reorganisations will recognise the risk of displacement activity that yields precious little improvement and mainly wastes a small fortune on new name plates and letterheads.
So we must turn to point four for the crux of Reform’s approach: ‘Pick up illegal immigrants and take them back to France.’ The party claims that the incursions into French territorial waters this would entail would be permitted under the 1982 UN Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Yet article 19 of UNCLOS, on the meaning of ‘innocent passage’, actually states the opposite – that a foreign ship in another country’s territorial waters can be considered ‘prejudicial to the peace’ if ‘it engages in the loading or unloading of any… person contrary to the immigration laws’ of the home jurisdiction.
But let us indulge the Reform idea for a moment and suppose that France would not do anything so drastic as to sink a UK Border Force or RNLI vessel taking Channel migrants back to its coast without authority. Let us agree that it will instead allow the trespassing vessels to dock and unload their human cargo and then merely impound those vessels. Within ten days or so the entire Border Force Channel contingent of three cutters and two coastal patrol vessels would be detained in France, probably with a smattering of smaller RNLI vessels alongside them. The only way to get them back other than via a naval war with France would be for a British prime minister to apologise for the incursions and promise they would cease – in other words to mount a humiliating climbdown.
The blunt truth is that Reform’s four points do not add up to a viable policy but are merely a series of saloon bar talking points and totemic top lines reminiscent of those Private Eye lists that end with ‘err… that’s it’.
In fairness to Reform, their manifesto contained fleeting references to a couple of other ideas not mentioned in the four-point plan. There was, for instance, a line about ‘secure detention for all illegal migrants’, which would certainly create an element of deterrence, yet would involve a high up-front cost and the need to identify dozens of major sites for detention facilities – work which does not seem to have been done. There is also a passing reference to the potential for offshore processing ‘if necessary’. But no proposal for that is included either.
No wonder that some senior figures in the party are getting jumpy about its failure to make the leap from protest party to potential party of government. In an interview in today’s Daily Mail, the increasingly high-profile Reform MP Rupert Lowe says pointedly: ‘We have to start behaving as if we are leading and not merely protesting…We have to start developing policy which is going to change the way we govern. I’m not going to be by Nigel’s side at the next election unless we have a proper plan.’ He’s certainly right when it comes to immigration – Reform needs a better plan.
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