Nigel Farage has rowed back on his pledge to deport “absolutely anyone” arriving in the UK on small boats, just 24 hours after making the commitment at a press conference in Oxford. At an event in Edinburgh on Wednesday, the Reform UK leader said women and children were not part of his party’s deportation plans for the next five years, though he did not rule out their inclusion indefinitely.
Farage had previously announced plans to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers within the first five years of a Reform government, including women and children, and to pay despotic regimes such as the Taliban to take them back. However, when pressed at the Edinburgh event, he said: “We’re not even discussing women and children at this stage, there are so many illegal males in Britain.” He added that they were not exempt forever but were not part of the immediate plan.
The Reform leader also walked back on his proposal to renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement, describing the Northern Ireland situation as “deeply complex” and saying it would not be a priority. He denied having a “woman problem”, claiming that increasing numbers of women had joined Reform and were becoming “very strong forces in the party”.
The Edinburgh event marked the defection of Graham Simpson from the Scottish Conservatives to Reform, making him the party’s sole MSP in the Scottish Parliament. Farage predicted a “pretty much a wipeout” for the Scottish Tories at next May’s Holyrood elections, and hailed Reform as a “rapidly evolving political movement in Scotland”. Simpson said Reform represented “an opportunity to create something fresh”.
However, a Scottish Conservative source criticised Simpson, describing him as “a pathetic, nasty little man who won’t be missed”, and alleging he had been obliged to apologise for bullying a female staffer. Simpson denied the claim. Farage defended his press conference, saying it had “sparked the beginning of a national debate”, while Downing Street accused him of not being serious about his proposals.
