At a press conference in Oxfordshire on 26 August, Reform UK’s Nigel Farage outlined the architecture of a mass deportation machine. Dubbed ‘Operation Restoring Justice’, the plans include building detention centres across the country to house up to 24,000 people (over 10 times the current capacity), an increase in deportation charter flights to five a day, and an intent to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and to repeal the Human Rights Act.
The announcement was made following Britain’s recent protest wave, which, as HOPE not hate and The Guardian have revealed, was organized in part by key figureheads in the radical right Homeland and Britain First parties. At the Oxfordshire conference, Farage framed this as “total despair and rising anger”, rather than organised hate.
Reform plans to deport 600,000 migrants over five years
Reform has since released the four-page document on the party’s website outlining the operation. Its more cartoonish suggestions include:
- housing overflow migrant detainees on remote UK territories like Ascension, a volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
- creating the ‘Deportation Command’, a new enforcement unit that would compile personal data from “the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the police”.
- introducing mandatory biometric capture at police encounters.
The aim: to deport up to 600,000 within five years. These plans would devastate the UK’s human rights record, undermine our economy, and align the country with a worldwide network of autocracies including Russia, Belarus and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
The legal fallout of Reform’s deportation bill
Instrumental to the proposal is leaving the ECHR and “disapplying” the UN Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against Torture, and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention. As The Guardian notes, this would make the UK “an outlier among European democracies” and risk forever damaging our international reputation as a leader in human rights legislation.
The Institute for Government outlines both the international and domestic consequences of Reform’s proposed legal shakeup. One key issue of leaving or disapplying these conventions would be to risk ending the post-Brexit EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the Good Friday agreement. The Guardian has also pointed out the plan’s potential to reignite calls for Scottish independence, which, combined with the possibility of Irish reunification, could leave the United Kingdom unrecognisably fractured.
The ECHR and the Human Rights Act protect everyone
In England, the fallout from repealing the Human Rights Act, replacing it with an undefined ‘British Bill of Rights’, could reshape the state’s relationship to its citizens. The ECHR sanctifies the rights to a fair trial, freedom of expression and respect for private life, while also banning torture, slavery and discrimination. A potential Reform-written Bill of Rights could dilute these protections.
Another concerning domestic consequence comes from Farage’s promise to remove Hardial Singh safeguards, a legal precedent limiting the state’s ability to detain a person for immigration purposes. Not only could this lead to tens of thousands of people being detained indefinitely at Reform’s proposed RAF bases, but combined with the rewriting of citizens’ rights, this builds the legal groundwork for a profound dismantling of political rights in the UK.
Changing Britain’s relationship to autocracies
The moral, financial, and legal costs of Reform’s plan are devastating to British democracy, but getting bogged down in any one aspect of this bill could cause us to miss its overall effect: the shifting of Britain from the democratic world to the autocratic world.
In 2024’s Autocracy Inc, historian Anne Applebaum outlines the emergence of a worldwide autocratic bloc comprised of countries as diverse as Russia, the Philippines, Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and Iran (just to name a few). Applebaum argues that the intricate web of kleptocracy, economic and military assistance, and diplomatic alliance between these countries is strong enough to merit considering them a network of states, which she dubs Autocracy Inc. Interestingly, Applebaum even links the isolationist instinct revealed by the Brexit campaign (itself spearheaded by Farage) as indicative of underlying autocratic currents.
Reform’s pathway to autocracy
Critics who point out the damage this bill would do to Reform’s standing with Europe are missing that this is a concerted effort to tie Britain’s economy to the autocratic bloc. Key to the plan is the party’s ability to negotiate returns agreements with theocracies and single-party states including Iran, Eritrea, and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The Guardian points out that withdrawing from the ECHR would leave Britain a pariah among European nations, “in the company of only Russia and Belarus”; incidentally, Applebaum identified both of these countries as key players in the global network of autocracies.
Farage’s autocratic intentions are unsurprising. In January of this year, 10 Reform councilors left the party over his “increasingly autocratic manner”, and he famously told GQ magazine in 2014 that Putin was the world leader he most admired. ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ puts Farage’s autocratic streak on full display.
Is Reform’s bill even possible?
Many have already dubbed the plan unworkable and with good reason. The Times has made clear that most of its proposals would be incredibly difficult to implement, and Joshua Rozenburg of the popular Substack A Lawyer Writes has pointed out that the bill would take at least a year to implement, with regular charter flights unlikely before a further two years.
Donald and Grogan have noted in The Conversation that the rooting of many human rights protections in British common law could still offer some similar protections. Scaling up deportations at the rate the plan is aiming for could therefore embroil a Reform government in endless legal battles. Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve has made the same criticism, while also expressing serious doubt over the party’s ability to negotiate return agreements with host countries.
Possible economic consequences of Reform’s plan
On top of legal contestation, the plan could prove economically unviable. Farage has argued that the cost should amount to £10bn over the course of five years, saving up to £42bn over the next decade on existing costs. But these numbers have already been questioned by the Guardian and the BBC, with the former pointing out that Rupert Lowe’s similar (yet more financially detailed) deportation plan was estimated to cost £47.5bn in the same 5-year period.
The BBC has estimated that the proposed detention space required could cost £12bn by itself, with The Guardian arguing that past attempts at constructing cross-government databases have cost billions; combined, these estimates already place Reform’s plans beyond their stated budget. When considering the costs of charter flights, the risks posed to European trade, and the economic incentives offered to host countries to take back and/or hold returned migrants, the impact on the wider economy could be significantly higher than any suggested savings.
But just because ‘Restoring Justice’ could harm Britain’s economy wouldn’t necessarily stop a Reform government going ahead with it, meaning that Farage is presenting us with two options: autocracy or ruin. If he is allowed to subject the country to such oppressive power, we could even get both. Not only will Reform drag us all into the autocratic mirror world, but they’ll also risk breaking Britain apart.
