Nigel Farage has pledged to shut down the asylum system for five years and deport 90,000 applicants immediately. The Telegraph has the story.
In his most stringent border policy to date, the Reform UK leader said that if he were to become Prime Minister, he would declare a “national security emergency”.
He said he would also announce a suspension of all asylum tribunals, legal refugee routes and resettlement schemes.
The policy, which Farage is announcing on Monday, would mean tens of thousands of applicants would be immediately deported and any refugees granted asylum in the past five years would have their cases reviewed by the Home Office.
It would prevent any new refugees from settling in Britain and end grants of humanitarian protection – a legal status given to asylum seekers who do not qualify as refugees but cannot return to their home countries for safety reasons.
Legal resettlement routes, including the Homes for Ukraine scheme, will be abolished, although Ukrainians who have arrived in the UK since it launched in 2022 will be allowed to stay.
Farage told the Telegraph: “The country is currently facing a national security emergency and the first duty of government is to protect its citizens.
“We cannot accept more asylum seekers while we still have no idea how many people are in the country illegally and the threat they pose. A Reform government will always put British people first and protect our borders.”
Under Reform’s plan, named “Restoring Justice”, all officials currently working on asylum cases would be tasked with “reviewing and overturning previous refugee grants”.
The party would also reverse the decision to reopen the UK resettlement scheme, announced by Shabana Mahmood last month to increase the number of legal Afghan and Palestinian refugees arriving in the UK.
The party has promised to deport up to one million people in its first Parliamentary term by identifying undocumented residents and small-boat arrivals.
Under the new policy, the applications of 90,000 people currently on asylum waiting lists – many of whom are housed by councils – would immediately be voided and the claimants returned to their home country or a safe neighbouring country.
Reform says it would apply “maximum diplomatic pressure” to other countries to force them to accept asylum seekers returning, including by imposing visa bans on states that refuse to comply.
The party has singled out Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan as likely targets for visa bans because they each have large numbers of citizens in the UK.
Other countries with few nationals in the UK will be hit with tariffs to force them to accept returning asylum seekers, under Reform’s plans.
Worth reading in full.
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I’d love to see it, but when you have ranks of activists where our judiciary should be and hundreds of millions of taxpayer cash going to shady “NGOs” and the like I remain sceptical. That’s before we even think about any kind of deals with other nations and the presumed costs involved in that.
That’s exactly right.
The judges don’t even have to stop it. All that is required is some sort of judicial report that says that going ahead COULD result in legal liabilities for officials who go ahead with the plan. Farage (or anyone else for that matter) won’t want to assume any personal legal risk and so in the end won’t do it. He and everyone else involved will only do it if they can be sure there will be no legal implications for them, an assurance which is impossible to obtain.
This country is going to go down the toilet because every government since Blair has tied the country down in legal knots, tethering it to a series of political positions – climate change policy, mass migration – from which it will never be able to free itself.