‘Pathetic’: Labour Govt Plays Tough With Deportation Footage, But Critics Say Removals Woefully Low

The UK’s left-wing government, which is losing voters to the populist-sovereigntist Reform UK party, has launched a counteroffensive of tough talk on border control. Yet boasts of rising deportations ring hollow when the bar is so low.

The British government released censored footage on Monday of individuals being escorted onto a charter aircraft before it takes off, alongside a tough-talking statement by the Home Secretary boasting of “record levels” of immigration enforcement.

The move, trailed days in advance as the government’s press officers warmed the media up to the idea of its coming blitz on public perceptions of how it is performing on the all-important border control issue, comes as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party continues to draw in defectors from the legacy parties, centrist-right Tory and centrist-left Labour alike.

Pre-empting the telegraphed moves, Reform leader Nigel Farage dismissed the record of the now seven-month-old UK government on border control, stating the figures involved are unimpressive. He said at a rally in Wiltshire on Sunday:

The Labour Party will be going on the attack tomorrow, they will be showing us how successful they are at deporting people who came here illegally. That’s their big plan.

What they won’t tell you is that over half who are going are going voluntarily, that many are getting £3,000 to go — oh yes! — and I want to ask a question of Yvette Cooper who will be doing this tomorrow, so let’s do it now.

How many of those young men who have crossed the English Channel in small dinghies since you got into government have been deported on those planes? I think we all know the answer, don’t we. So we’re not going to buy into any of this at all. And I maintain that a ten million increase in the population of our country over the course of the last 20 years has devalued the living standards of everybody in this country.

Reform UK party colleague Rupert Lowe also underlined the degree to which a few thousand deportations were simply insignificant compared to the level of arrivals. He responded to a statement from British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who played his part in the government’s media push by saying: “Too many people are able to come to the UK and work illegally. We are putting an end to it.”

Lowe stated as a rejoinder: “There have been just 4,390 enforced returns from your Government (5/7/2024 – 4/1/2025). With just 66 deportation charter flights ALL year in 2024. These are pathetic stats, with one million plus illegal migrants in the country. There should be a flight leaving EVERY hour.”

Nevertheless, the statements from the government were heralded in a series of obliging articles in friendly media outlets like the BBC by their chief political correspondent and The Times by their home affairs editor. New government statistics published today highlighted by such articles include the Home Office statement, “Throughout January alone, Immigration Enforcement teams descended on 828 premises, including nail bars, convenience stores, restaurants and car washes, marking a 48% rise compared to the previous January. Arrests also surged to 609, demonstrating a 73% increase from just 352 the previous year.”

A phrase repeatedly deployed was that January was “record-breaking”. British academic Matt Goodwin, who once studied the right as a phenomenon to be dissected as a disinterested outsider, but who at some point apparently decided that actually they may have been right all along, and who has since become a cheerleader for Reform UK, stated: “Labour want you to believe a big ‘crackdown’ on illegal migration —600 arrests!— is underway.

“Reminder: There are 1.2 million illegals in the UK. Labour has also decriminalised illegal migration. We have no deterrent. And no serious plan for fixing our broken borders… By the year 2032, 14% of the whole UK population will be people who arrived in the 10 years leading up to it, practically all from India, Nigeria, Pakistan and China.”

As previously reported:

Labour’s boast that it is deporting at five-year-highs, while absolutely technically correct, is judged by such a woefully low bar it is essentially meaningless. While the previous Conservative government betrayed its own voters and election-time promises by throwing open the nation’s borders and welcoming millions of new arrivals, there was a double betrayal in the sense that there was functionally no deportation regime, either.

Of the 45,000 illegal boat migrants who crossed the English Channel to force their way into the United Kingdom in 2022, for instance, just 215 were deported, or 0.47 per cent. More broadly in 2023, the number of enforced removals of foreign nationals was judged to have fallen by over half compared to 2019, the final full year before the Coronavirus pandemic, further buttressing the impression the last government was simply uninterested in enforcing border rules at all.

The encroaching influence of Reform UK has been — polling suggests — devastating for the Conservative Party, who may have lost a quarter of all their voters from the last general election to the party. Yet this is not purely a phenomenon of the old right-wing party, with a growing number of Labour voters — maybe as many as three-quarters-of-a-million, one poll suggests — defecting to Farage’s faction.

How — and even if — to defeat this trend is becoming a subject of some importance in the Labour movement, with different cliques emerging and demanding to be heard.

Because Labour faces losing more voters rightwards to Farage than they do leftwards to the Greens — so that polling shows — the instinct has clearly been to try and cook Farage’s goose by talking tough on borders. Yet the compassionate, pro-open-borders left is clearly furious and happy to air its dirty laundry in public.

The Refugee Council eviscerated the government in The Guardian for stooping to something as low as “making Deportation TV”, while Amnesty International blasted: “For anyone wishing to see that every person’s human dignity is properly respected and that we have a fair and efficient immigration and asylum system in the UK, public communication strategies such as this only make the situation worse.”

If Farage can engineer a Labour civil war on border control, he’ll be a step closer to that election victory his party now constantly talks up.