The opening of the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester has been accompanied by a flurry of announcements as the leadership finally abandons the leisurely timetable originally set out for the policy review.
Day one focused on immigration, with Kemi Badenoch unveiling a seven-point border control plan. Below the headline pledge to deliver 150,000 deportations a year were some specific proposals, including quitting the European Convention of Human Rights and setting up a new ‘deportation force’ modelled on America’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Both of these seem to have gone down well with the membership, with almost nine in ten respondents to our latest survey either supporting or strongly supporting each.
That was always likely, of course. The next question is whether or not these are simply top-level pledges or fully worked-out proposals – and here Kemi Badenoch might be at risk of offering some hostages to fortune.
Last night, for example, she said that because the Party had taken the time to do its homework on leaving the ECHR, she was now ready for any question Laura Kuennsberg might throw at her.
As she said this, I couldn’t help but notice a couple of people in the room with close knowledge of the Party review into the question (recently conducted by Lord Wolfson) looking slightly stricken – not because they don’t think that Britain should leave the Convention, but because the Party report addresses the question of why Britain should leave, rather than how it should leave. There is a huge amount of technical work still to do.
Likewise, it is not yet clear how HM Deportation Police, or whatever we end up calling it, will work in practice. The core problem when it comes to deportations is getting other countries to take their citizens back – especially if we can’t immediately prove their citizenship because, you know, they chucked their passport in the Channel.
No volume of personnel, and no British government policy, can guarantee deportations unless there is some location guaranteed to accept deportees. If a future Badenoch Government were to make good on her pledge, she’d likely need a supercharged equivalent of the Rwanda deal, with some third country prepared to take tens of thousands of people a year. That’s going to be tricky.
Fortunately, so far Labour’s knee-jerk response has been to focus not on any of these technical questions, but this absolute howler:
Labour source: “Congratulations to Kemi for noticing that the US and NZ aren’t in Europe. It’s this keen analytical mind that has the Conservatives languishing at 15%. In Europe, only Russia and Belarus aren’t in the ECHR – has anyone at the Conservatives stopped to wonder why?” https://t.co/2U03K1KOju
— Kevin Schofield (@KevinASchofield) October 5, 2025
It takes some cheek to make digs at someone else’s “keen analytical mind” whilst making this argument. Badenoch’s point – that it is perfectly possible for respectable western democracies to function without the ECHR – is perfectly sound. Labour’s counter-argument that it would somehow make us like Russia and Belarus is basically a Venn diagram of ‘signatory of the ECHR’ and ‘situated on the European tectonic plate’. The moral valence of the European tectonic plate is, of course, zero.
It’s like those people who argue that only Britain and Iran have clerics in their Parliament as if this suggested any significant similarities between Westminster and the Tehrani theocracy; all it really shows is that the thing they’re using to draw equivalence between our country and the dictatorship in question is not actually important.
