We don’t know if Reform will win the next election, but they certainly have a path to doing so (discussed in this post). Which means we need to take what they say seriously and treat them as a potential party of government rather than just an insurgency.
Last month Nigel Farage set out his plan to deport 600,000 people he claims are here illegally. He also wants to stop anyone arriving in the UK from claiming asylum and instead automatically remove them to their country of origin, even if that country is unsafe, like Afghanistan.
This was quickly dismissed by Labour as unworkable “back of a fag packet” stuff.
And it’s true that the “plan”, which is a mere three pages, is full of holes. There are no proper costings; some of it is logistically impossible; there are basic errors of law and inaccurate statistics.1 The full set of proposals is not achievable on the suggested timelines.
But to dismiss it on that basis would be a mistake because, while the scale and speed may be implausible, the key principles could be enacted. The British constitution gives huge leeway to the government if it has a secure majority in the Commons, and this could be used to push through extremely radical changes. No government has ever tried to fully exploit this power out of a sense of convention and belief that the British aren’t keen on too much radicalism. But right at the end of Rishi Sunak’s time in office we saw a hint of what’s possible when Parliament simply declared Rwanda to be a safe country to which people could be deported, after the Supreme Court had said it was not.
A few months ago I wrote a post on what Reform might actually be like in government and suggested three models for the radical right in power:
Chaotic authoritarianism: the approach taken by Trump, or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. It’s characterised by the administration choosing ideology over reality, and conflict with the machinery of state over accommodation. As we’re seeing in the US it’s messy and often unpopular but can still lead to very significant change through sheer brute force and a lack of interest in norms, conventions or constitutional propriety.
Focused authoritarianism: characterised by a determination to retain power with ideology being used more flexibly to that goal and with a greater willingness to accommodate the interests of a wider electoral coalition. Viktor Orbán has managed to stay as Hungarian Prime Minister for 15 years using this approach.
Technocratic populism: the model preferred by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, using right-wing “values” issues to hold together her coalition while making compromises with reality, e.g. increasing economic migration, working with the EU and backing down from economic plans when there’s a negative market reaction.
There are overlaps between all three approaches – in particular the use of illiberal “culture war” messaging, and determination to increase state control over the media and institutions like universities. But the differences are important.
Some in Reform are drawn to the more cautious Meloni model. But under pressure from the increasingly radicalised right their policy platform is shifting towards the Trump approach.
So in the rest of this post I want to run through a scenario in which a Reform government tries to implement their immigration plan, showing what that would look like in practice. They could potentially achieve much of what they want but the cost would be immense in terms of the consequences for our judicial system, our state machinery and our constitution (and, of course, for those directly affected by the policy). It would be a case study in chaotic authoritarianism with ramifications well beyond the asylum system.