Brexit’s Nigel Farage asked the political and media class if they’re on the side of British women and children or of international law and “dubious” foreign courts, as his Reform Party spelled out its plan to “track down, detain, and deport all illegal migrants in the United Kingdom”.
A Reform UK government would — and present polling shows it is well on its way to forming one — establish a new “UK Deportation Command” and use a “Illegal Migration Mass Deportation Act” to kill every law and court that would prevent the government from executing the will of British people, it has been revealed. Standing at an ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ podium with a black-styled remigration flight branding, Nigel Farage put flesh on the bones of a new anti-illegal-migration policy announced last week.
Declaring “we are pro British in this country having more rights than those that have recently come, yes, yes, yes”, Mr Farage said a future government led by him would work to rout the “invasion” and mused that for ordinary Britons, “frankly these measures can’t come soon enough”.
Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage at the launch of Reform UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers, at Oxford Airport in Oxfordshire. Picture date: Tuesday August 26, 2025. (Photo by Jacob King/PA Images via Getty Images)
In the key moment of his address, Farage said:
…here’s what we have to do to make Operation Restoring Justice actually work. We have to leave the [European Court of Human Justice], no ifs and no buts. It may have been a good idea 80 years ago, but frankly it isn’t today. We have to repeal the Human Rights Act of 1998, brought in by a Blair government, many of whose families seemed to do well off the back of it.
We will for a five-year-period disapply the 1951 refugee convention and any other barriers that can be used by lawyers in this country to prevent deportations, to prevent the right thing from happening. We will create a legal duty for the Home Secretary to remove those who come illegally. And crucially we will detain all illegal migrants who come, and we will do so immediately.
The only way we will stop the boats is by detaining and deporting absolutely anyone who comes by that route. And if we do that, the boats will stop within days because there will be no incentive to pay a trafficker to get into this country. If you come to the UK illegally, you will be detained and deported and never, ever allowed to stay. Period. That is our big message.
Saying that President Donald Trump in the United States had absolutely proven that large-scale returns for illegal migrants is possible, Mr Farage also compared his plans to Australia’s wildly successful turn back the boats campaign. Under an initiative by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, illegal arrivals to Australia collapsed to zero near-immediately after it became apparent to would-be migrants that cash paid to human traffickers was simply being wasted.
A Farage-led British government would employ a “carrot-and-stick” approach to compliance in terms of migrants returning and their home nations to taking them back in, it was stated.
For migrants, they would be offered a window of opportunity to hand themselves in for self-deportation, in return for which they’d get a “comfortable” seat on a flight and £2,500 cash-in-hand to start a new life at home. Those who attempted to avoid deportation would be rounded up and flown back anyway, but without the benefits.
For foreign nations, Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf stated: “Return agreements will be secured, countries of origin will take back their illegals. Where persuasion and financial incentives fail we will use leverage. If a country refuses to take back illegal migrants we will stop issuing visas to that country, and if that fails we will sanction them.”
He said: “When Nigel is Prime Minister there will not be a lawyer nor a judge in the country who will be able to prevent a deportation flight from leaving”. Ultimately, he said that the plan is for “a five year emergency programme to track down, detain, and deport all illegal migrants in the United Kingdom”.
The cash incentive for migrants to self-deport is good value for money, Yusuf said, because it would be considerably cheaper for the taxpayer than utilising intelligence and border control assets to track down and forcibly deport illegals. Either way the system would save the taxpayer billions just in the first Parliament, they said, and potentially “hundreds of billions” in the decades to come.
After presenting the plan, Mr Farage faced a battery of questions from legacy media outlets, who to a man asked the same question repeatedly: would Mr Farage feel comfortable sending a genuine asylum seeker who had nevertheless entered the country illegally to potentially face danger at home. The Reform boss responded that the primary purpose of the British government is to protect the British people, and foreigners must by definition come second.
He said: “…the alternative, of course, is to do nothing. We just do nothing. We allow this problem to magnify and grow… we cannot be responsible for all the sins that take place across the world, it’s just literally impossible. But we can recognise that the primary duty of the British government is to protect the integrity, the safety, the security of its own people and that’s why we have to do this”.
Indeed, the key question posed by Farage at Tuesday’s speech — held in an aircraft hangar before a large Union Jack and beside an illustrative mock-departures board with removal flights to foreign nations displayed — is whether the UK’s political and media class is truly on the side of the British people or not. He asked: “one big, fundamental question.
“Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of women and children being safe on our streets, or are you on the side of outdated international treaties backed up by a series of dubious courts”.
Mr Farage suggested: “I have a feeling that what we’re doing today with Operation Restoring Justice is going to be very popular in the wider country indeed.”
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