Nigel Farage has appeared to row back on his claim that women and children would be detained and deported if they arrived in the UK on small boats, saying it was not Reform’s “priority”.
The Reform UK leader gave a news conference on Tuesday in which he outlined plans to deport around 600,000 illegal migrants in the first five years of his government if he wins the next election.
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He did not recoil from including women and children in his deportation plans, which could see those arriving on small boats sent back to countries with poor human rights records, including Afghanistan and Eritrea.
Asked initially by Sky News’ political correspondent Serena Barker-Singh whether women with children and unaccompanied minors would be included in his plans, the Reform UK leader admitted that the question of “how we deal with children is much more complicated”, but added: “Women and children, everybody on arrival will be detained.”
The justification Mr Farage gave for sending people back to countries where they face mistreatment and torture was that his priority was the safety of people in Britain, which he argued had been undermined by “undocumented males” entering the country.
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However, holding another news conference in Scotland on Wednesday to announce the defection of a member of Scottish parliament from the Tories to Reform, Mr Farage claimed it was “not true” that he had “committed to sending women and girls back to countries where they can be raped, tortured and killed”.
Mr Farage told the reporter: “I was very, very clear yesterday in what I said, that deportation of illegal immigrants – we are not even discussing women and children at this stage – there are so many illegal males in Britain, and the news reports that said that after my conference yesterday were wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Asked whether women and children would be “exempt” from deportation, the Reform UK leader added: “I didn’t say exempt forever, but at this stage it’s not part of our plan for the next five years.”
On Tuesday, senior Reform figure Zia Yusuf said “phase one” of the party’s plans would focus on adults, with unaccompanied children being removed “towards the latter half of that five years”.
But asked to clarify his comments further, the Reform leader appeared to say women and children were not “top of our list” for deportation.
“Deporting children is a very difficult thing to do – who do they go to, what are the wards of care,” he said.
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“Women and children intimating families that have been here illegally for some years: are they top of our list? No. So there’s a slight confusion over this.
Pressed on what his plan was for “women and children who come to claim asylum”, Mr Farage said: “If a single woman…comes to Britain, they will be detained and deported. If a woman comes with children, we will work out the best thing to do.
“But the big message here is that the vast majority of those that come are young males, upwards of 75% of those that come are young males. They will not be staying. Any of them.”
Under Reform’s “operation restoring justice programme” – which has been denounced by opposition parties as “inflammatory” and “unworkable” – anyone who arrives in the UK illegally via small boat would be detained and deported, and refused permission to stay.
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Mr Farage said he believed the party would be able to deport around 600,000 asylum seekers in the first parliament of a potential Reform UK government, at an estimated cost of £10bn over the five-year period.
Illegal migrants would be forced to return to their home countries, something the Reform leader said could be achieved by the UK by choosing not to follow certain human rights laws.
The party is planning to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that such laws have allowed foreign offenders to challenge their own deportation orders through the courts and remain in the UK.
It would also disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention and the UN Convention Against Torture, and the Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking convention.
Instead, under its own Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill, those who come to the UK on small boats will be barred from claiming asylum, and held in detention centres on spare RAF bases rather than taxpayer-funded hotels, which have been subject to a number of protests from local communities in recent months.
