Karl Williams: Despite the holes, and missing costings, Farage’s plan for immigration is a serious one

Karl Williams is Research Director at the Centre for Policy Studies.

Nigel Farage has always been one of those rare politicians who ‘makes the weather’.

But thanks to three decades of failure on immigration by both Tory and Labour governments, he’s now on course to be Prime Minister following the next general election.

In his own words, ‘you’re not laughing now, are you?’ Naturally enough, thoughts are turning to what policies a Reform government would pursue, and how effectively they would do so. Can Farage and his allies pivot from being political communicators par excellence to chunking through ministerial red boxes and running a G7 nation?

This week we saw the first signs that the answer to that question might be yes.

Previous policies pushed by Reform have tended to have an off-the-cuff, back-of-the-fag-packet quality – illogical energy policies and implausible spending commitments come to mind. However, Reform’s pamphlet on mass deportations, ‘Operation Restoring Justice’, though incomplete and confused in places, is a decent effort.

For a start, its fundamental presupposition is entirely correct.

People seek to enter and remain in the UK illegally, either via the small boats and lorries, or by overstaying legitimate visas, because they know that once they have lodged an asylum application, there is very little chance they will ever have to leave. Even if human rights laws ultimately fail to shield migrants from deportation, lax enforcement means it is easy to slip off into the grey economy.

So the best way of deterring illegal migration is to make it a certainty that if you are here illegally, you will not get to stay, and will never be allowed back.

This was the principle behind the Australian approach to stopping their version of the small boats crisis in the early 2010s. From a peak of over 20,000 “boat people” in 2013, numbers dropped by 98 per cent within a single year. So successful was ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ that since then, crossings have been measured in the tens rather than the tens of thousands. In ‘Operation Restoring Justice’, Reform have obviously been studying the Australian example.

Indeed, there is not much proposed in the Reform paper that is actually new or innovative.

About two-thirds can be found in the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) paper ‘Stopping the Crossings’ I co-authored with Nick Timothy in 2022 – and much of the rest in a raft of think tank papers from the likes of Policy Exchange, Prosperity and others, not to mention the ‘Deportation Bill’ introduced by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp earlier this year.

But that is not in any way a black mark against the Reform policy pamphlet – good ideas are good ideas, regardless of provenance.

On the legal side, the key proposal in the Reform paper is of course repealing the Human Rights Act (HRA) and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Importantly though, the paper’s authors understand that this is necessary but not sufficient. Other international treaties like the 1951 Refugee convention are to be suspended for a period. Barriers to deportations that now exist within English common law are to be overridden with statute.

On the other hand, replacing the HRA with a British Bill of Rights is a more fraught proposition.

It risks recreating the judicial activism we currently have, just with a different charter as its basis. Much better to revert to the pre-1980s system, where who we allowed to stay in Britain was almost entirely a political and administrative question, not a judicial one.

It was also apparent from the Reform press conference for the paper’s launch that there is confusion about whether leaving the ECHR would undermine the Good Friday Agreement. As Peter Lilley argued in his recent CPS paper ‘Britain and the ECHR: Past Myths, Present Problems and Future Options’, this is a misapprehension. But it does at least show Reform figures are thinking about the wider implications and second-order effects of their policies, even if they’ve not arrived at all the answers yet.

Once the legal framework is in place, Reform’s operational plans are scaled to facilitate the deportation of 600,000 illegal migrants over the course of the next Parliament. This is not just about deterring the small boats, but also about reducing the stock of illegal migrants already in the country. This is the genuinely radical thing about Reform’s plans, and very obviously influenced by what is going on in Donald Trump’s America, where the foreign-born share of the population seems to have fallen for the first time since the 1960s.

The population of illegal migrants in Britain is estimated at around 800,000 and could be as high as 1.5 million. This means Reform’s proposals would entail the eventual removal of 1.3- 2.2 per cent of current residents in a multi-parliament programme of mass deportations. An ‘initial voluntary return window’ allowing illegal migrants to come forward for a financial reward will help, as in America. But most of Reform’s proposal are about the stick, not the carrot – deportation centres and flights, third-country return deals and so on. All sensible stuff.

However, where the pamphlet falls short is the lack of detailed legislative drafting, and the missing costing of the operational proposals – the assertion that ‘a budget has been allocated for this’ is not entirely reassuring.

Closing the hotels will save money. Deterring crossings will save money.

But recruiting border agents will cost. Building detention centres will cost. Flights will cost. Deporting the first illegal migrant will be cheap, but the marginal cost of finding and removing the millionth is likely to be high – so what tranches are being prioritised?

Reform says the sums add up to large net savings, but we are being asked to take them at faith.

This vagueness may be deliberate.

According to James Heale, the 6-page pamphlet is the bare-bones version of a 100-page internal document that took six months to produce. The legislative detail has apparently been kept back so as not to give pro-migration lawyers four years to prepare a rear-guard action. Fair enough.

Yet not providing the costings and assumptions in an appendix was a real missed opportunity to build policy credibility. It’s true that Farage’s primary audience is the country at large, not Westminster policy wonks with a proclivity for combing through spreadsheets. As with Donald Trump and ‘build the wall’, some things are meant to be taken seriously, not literally.

If Reform doesn’t care about Westminister though, it should care about the bond markets and how they might react to opaquely costed policy agendas of this magnitude. My sense is that Reform is playing it safe, over-estimating the costs and under-estimating the savings. But it’s impossible to know with the information available.

On the whole then, I take some encouragement from Reform’s first serious policy offering. Hopefully this signals that policy development is now starting in earnest – though I’d be a lot more sanguine about the prospect of a Reform government if I knew they also had 100-page policy papers in the works on housing (500,000 newbuilds per annum, at least), energy (fracking and nuclear, please) and eliminating the deficit (utterly essential).

Of course, with three or four years to go, the Conservatives shouldn’t be written off yet.

But with immigration once again the most important issue for voters, and despite heroic efforts by various shadow ministers and backbenchers, it will be an uphill battle after the record of the last government.

According to YouGov, just 6 per cent of voters think the Conservatives are best placed to handle asylum and immigration (down from 37 per cent in 2020) versus 38 per cent who trust Reform (Labour are second on 11 per cent).

So at least for now, it is Farage and Reform who have undeniably captured the zeitgeist.