Nigel Farage has pledged to shut down Britain’s asylum system for five years if he is elected prime minister. The Reform leader said he wanted the UK to get “back to being a normal country” as he announced that all new asylum applications would be rejected and those already filed would be voided if his party won the general election.
At a press conference in Kent on Monday Mr Farage, alongside Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf, also pledged to pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 and disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention to prevent legal challenges to its plans. Visa bans would be enforced for countries that refuse to allow deportation flights to land, under the proposals.
Asylum System Shutdown
Britain’s asylum system would be shut down for a full parliamentary term, which is usually five years. It would mean that all new applications for asylum, as well as those already going through the system, would be rejected and voided. All claimants would be marked for deportation, Mr Farage said.
“We literally have no idea who is here, and we frankly can't afford to take the risk,” Mr Farage said. “It's not as if we've been ungenerous over the course of the last decade, indeed, since the Brexit vote, half a million people have been given asylum here. That is higher than virtually any other country in the world. But we have to end this asylum scam, and we have to end this racket.”
Refugee Schemes Scrapped
During the shutdown, the UK would not grant humanitarian protection or refugee status to anyone, while legal refugee routes and resettlement schemes would end. However, Mr Farage suggested that Ukrainians in Britain under sponsorship programmes would not be affected. The asylum tribunal system would be scrapped, meaning the roughly 90,000 people currently with appeal cases would be deported.
Visa Bans and Political Response
Reform earlier this year said it would ban British visas for countries such as Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan if they refused to allow deportation flights to land. Nations without a significant number of legal nationals in Britain could face tariffs on goods and services for non-compliance. Mr Farage said the country “cannot accept more asylum seekers while we still have no idea how many people are in the country illegally and the threat they pose.”
There will be no special treatment for women and children fleeing war-torn nations, Mr Farage confirmed. A resettlement scheme that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood recently said would reopen, with around a quarter of those admitted to the UK expected to be Palestinians and women and girls from Afghanistan, would be scrapped. Mr Farage said the programmes “may well sound compassionate” but they “open the door to family reunions, to husbands coming, to partners coming, to elderly parents coming, and before you know it, you've got lots of young men coming as well”.
Labour called Reform’s plans “a clear sign of desperation and weakness”, while shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the proposals “largely copy” Conservative ideas. Party chairwoman Bridget Phillipson said: “Nigel Farage is casting around for more and more extreme policies as he tries to deal with scandals, police investigations and a growing challenge from Restore — this is a carbon copy of their policy.”
Mr Philp said: “Banning asylum claims by illegal immigrants, abolishing the immigration tribunal and ending Labour’s resettlement routes are all existing Conservative policy. Our detailed Borders plan also sees us coming out of the ECHR and ensures all illegal immigrants are removed within a week of arrival – and closes the modern slavery claim and judicial review loopholes, both of which Reform seems to have missed.”
