Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said that the conversation about illegal migration and crime has “barely started” and warned that the new Labour Party government will suffer a similar defeat to the Tories if they fail to demonstrate the “political will” necessary to protect Britain’s borders.
Appearing before a House of Commons committee, the Brexit boss urged for tough action from Westminster as the number of boat migrants illegally crossing the Channel from France is approaching 9,000 since Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to power in July.
“I just promise the Labour government one thing, this issue caused great pain to the Conservative Party and it impacted in the general election. This issue of illegal migration and the crime that it leads to, which is a conversation that’s barely started in this country but is a conversation that in France and Germany is now very big, will do massive damage to Labour’s electoral chances,” Farage predicted referencing recent terror attacks by migrants on the continent.
You’re going to have to get tough and I’m afraid your leader is going to have to rethink his position on the ECHR,” he concluded.
Noting that previous bastions of open borders ideology such as Germany are taking steps to prevent illegals from entering the country, Mr Farage urged the new left-wing Labour demand that France no longer uses its navy to escort people smuggler dinghies into British territorial waters given the hundreds of millions in UK taxpayer money sent to Paris to deal with the crisis.
“I would ask Minister that given the money we’ve given to the French we no longer accept escorts from the French Navy, the day after 12 people died in the Channel… there was a French naval vessel escorting a dingy from a couple of hundred yards off,” Farage said.
Arguing that boat migrants should be sent immediately back to France, the populist parliamentarian pointed out that Germany has seemingly begun to ignore the European Court on Human Rights (ECHR) by starting to send illegals back to Taliban-run Afghanistan.
Therefore, Farage suggested London should not continue to allow the Strasbourg-based court — which despite Brexit the UK is still bound by — to determine Britain’s immigration policies.
“I think is vital, we need political will, and the Germans, of course, are now showing it, the Germans will ignore the ECHR… so with political will, with leaving the ECHR, we can solve this,” Farage said in the committee.
Mr Farage has long advocated for leaving the European court to fully realise the promises of Brexit, namely taking back control of Britain’s borders. However, three Conservative governments and now Sir Keir Starmer’s have refused to withdraw from the ECHR.
The post-Brexit impact of remaining under the jurisdiction of the court has had a significant impact on immigration policy. Controversially, in the summer of 2022, the ECHR stepped in with a last minute ruling to prevent a flight from Britain to remove illegal boat migrants to asylum processing centres in the East African nation of Rwanda.
The decision sent the Tory party’s central deterrence strategy into legal limbo for nearly two years, without a single migrant being removed before Labour took power this summer and scrapped the plan altogether, effectively abandoning hundreds of millions in taxpayer cash spent investing in the scheme in Rwanda to the government in Kigali.
