This is Not Normal
A man who is widely thought to be in the running for becoming the next Prime Minister of the UK has just set out a five-year plan, which would include tearing up human rights laws and sending people to countries where they could be at risk of imprisonment, torture or death. He confirmed women and children would be among those to be locked up on arrival, as he set out plans to build huge detention centres in military camps and charter five flights a day for deportations. About 600,000 asylum seekers could be deported in the first parliament of a Reform government, Farage suggested.
He promised uniformed officers raiding Britain’s towns and cities, disappearing people off the street for rendition to countries they’ve never been to, with no recourse to legal protections, claiming that it’s what “normal countries do.”
Let’s be very clear: this is not normal. This is wildly unprecedented.
We have been arguing against the normalisation of this kind of language in Britain for years, and this is the time to resist groupthink, to resist the slide into consensus and to take apart the arguments of the fascists.
Farage’s arguments – bizarrely live-streamed by the BBC as if it was a state occasion – can be broken down to their component parts.
1. Removing human rights protections from all UK citizens
Farage’s plans to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. This is the human rights protections written into British law by British lawyers after the horrors of the second world war. Reform under Farage would also: Repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and ‘disapply’ the 1951 Refugee Convention for five years and any other “barriers that can be used by lawyers in this country to prevent deportations.”
2. Sending people to be tortured and murdered
Asked by the BBC’s Ben Wright if he minds the fact his plans risks asylum seekers being sent back to countries where they could face torture or even death, such as Afghanistan. Farage says it does bother him.
3. Uniformed deportation squads going through British towns
Taking a leaf out of Trump’s book Farage proposes deporting 600,000 asylum seekers in a five year period and he said he was fine with immigration squads raiding Britain’s towns, because it is “what normal countries do.”
4. Funding the Taliban
Farage openly agreed that his plan would almost certainly involve the British state paying Taliban jihadis to torture and murder more people. He said he would be fine with the UK Government funding the Taliban, or even Iran, in negotiating a “return agreement” to take back refugees fleeing either regime. He had no details for how much he would pay either regime.
5. Locking up women and children
Farage confirms that women and children would also be detained and deported under Reform’s plans. Answering a question from Sky News’ political correspondent Serena Barker Singh, Farage said: “Women and children, everybody on arrival will be detained.”
6. Put peace in Northern Ireland under threat
Farage acknowledged that pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights would create significant problems with the Good Friday Agreement, the fragile truce that maintains the peace in Northern Ireland.
7. Reform will build capacity to detain up to 24,000 illegal migrants at a time
Zia Yusuf, spoke briefly after Nigel Farage. He said:
“If you come to the UK illegally, you will receive a lifetime ban from ever coming back to our country, re entering after deportation will become a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison.”
“We will pair this legislative reset with a UK deportation command – that is a dedicated force to identifying, detaining and deporting illegal migrants at scale. We’ll create a cutting-edge data fusion centre that will automatically share data between the police, the home office, the NHS, the DVLA, HMRC and banks.”
The response to all of this has been appalling.
Within hours Keir Starmer put out a tweet saying: “If you come to this country illegally, you will face detention and return.” And, the National reported that: “KEIR Starmer has left the door open to signing deportation deals with the Taliban after Nigel Farage set out Reform UK’s plans for mass deportations. The Prime Minister’s spokesperson said that “we’re not going to take anything off the table” when asked about Farage’s programme to send asylum seekers to brutal regimes where they may be at risk of torture. ”
Faced with the most extreme and appalling policy proposals in living history, Starmer’s response is to shrug and capitulate, further.
Mass rendition, forced deportations, troops on the streets and huge detention camps. This is fascism and it needs resistance not capitulation.
Haroon Siddique, Aletha Adu, Jessica Elgot and Kiran Stacey, writing in the Guardian [Farage’s plan to deport thousands of asylum seekers draws scorn from legal experts ] noted: “He offered no detail on how Reform would secure deportation agreements with countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan, many of which have no return treaties with the UK and are considered unsafe by British courts. Farage could not explain how Reform’s scheme would be funded, beyond claiming costs would be a fraction of independent estimates.
Reform’s leadership said it would repeal the Human Rights Act, leave the European convention on human rights (ECHR), and disapply the 1951 refugee convention and UN convention against torture, with senior party figure Zia Yusuf declaring that “no lawyer and no judge” would be able to prevent deportation flights from leaving.
George Peretz KC, the chair of the Society of Labour Lawyers, said: “The Reform party’s policy is simply not rooted in reality. They want to institute a mass deportation programme with no real, or workable, idea of where people would be deported to.”
The problem is that Farage, and his supporters don’t actually care where people would be deported to, nor that this is illegal. In Ece Temelkuran’s account of Turkey’s descent: ‘How to Lose a Country, the seven steps from democracy to dictatorship’ she lists ‘Dismantle Judicial and Political Mechanisms’ as a key step. This is certainly at play here, where Farage lays out proposals which are clearly extra-judicial and highly critical of the legal system.
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There are less than 250,000 asylum seekers in the UK who have not yet had a decision made or are appealing against the original decision on their asylum claim.
Those already granted asylum are now living in the UK legally so where is Farage going to find the other 350,000 from that he says he will deport?
Well apart from the rancid nature of the whole proposals, the idea that this would be ringfenced and not have wider consequences for people of colour, minorities, an authoritarian ethno-state and the desecration of all of our rights is wild.
It certainly makes you wonder what happens when all the asylum seekers are deported and there is no one to blame for the state of the uk, who do they then turn their attentions to?
First they came, etc!
The search for people to blame and victimise will explode exponentially. The brownshirts will constantly be on the lookout for more people to bully.
We, Scotland and all her peoples, need the SNP and other parties who wish independence to highlight the dangers of remaining in the uk, right wing authoritarianism, Brexit, never ending austerity and the declared aim of Farage to get rid of the Scottish Parliament.
We can’t count on labour who are chasing after Farage and as Badenoch said today, Reform have copied the tories homework! british parties can not help Scotland, british parties are the core problem!
The opportunity and momentum should lie with the independence cause to promote an egalitarian Scotland whilst rejecting blood and soil English / british nationalism, but we need the SNP to come on board and champion it at the highest level of Scottish Government and Scottish society.
C’mon John Swinney, you are key to getting Scotland mobilised!!!
Ask not what John Swinney can do for you but what you can do for John Swinney!
It is for every single person who supports Independence to take rrepinsibility and support the SNP – the only way to deliver change.
Join the SNP , shape the SNP , campaign for the SNP , donate to the SNP.
The only , and easiest ,way to take control of your future.
I strongly agree, The SNP is the vehicle all who support independence need to coalesce.
At times, i.e. now, The SNP needs prodding, collectively we need to impress upon John Swinney and the leadership, that urgent, significant and precise action now is needed to steer political and social discourse in Scotland towards independence!
Correct.
I wish this was true, but surely by now you know the SNP are incapable of leading us to independence. They don’t know how to do it and they don’t have the fire or the imagination to further the cause. A section 30 request is the best they can manage – in fairness they no longer pretend to have any other plan. The problem we have is they are the best vehicle but the driver is crap, the battery is dead and through poor maintenance the breaks have seized. Time for a new car.
WT – I don’t entirely disagree with your critique of current SNP performance- that is why they are 30+% in polls at present. I am in my mid 60’s and am not sure I will see independence in my lifetime. I am absolutely sure that trying to invent a new independence political party will mean further division and delay and I definitely won’t see an independent Scotland.
If SNP are failing at present and support for independence is still around 50% what is surely needed is for other parts of independence movement to step forward and advance case and for SNP to realign itself with wider independence movement.
How can any right thinking person agree with Farage and his crew of followers? Let’s deport him to the USA and watch him deal with the destruction of law there.
Farage’s vehicles have always been single issue – UKIP, Brexit Party and though Reform has tried to show itself as more rounded, here we go with their single issue – immigration and especially the ‘small boats’. Unfortunately when he gets his teeth into a topic like this which he knows plays very well with a certain type of voter, he is very effective. He can pretty much bat away anything else as his base don the same blinkers as him. I can only hope that come election time it won’t be enough and the massive deal he is making of it, shown as way over the top. But it would be very naive not to think he could get in on this ticket as he knows it is the only way to number 10 for him and will pull all the stops out just like he did with Brexit. We should be very worried – they have a 10-pount lead as it is and you can imagine the building media hysteria about it all, which will only fuel the paranoia and hate even more.
Of course if he does get in it will be chaos, not least because as a party of government, Reform look as ill-equipped as it gets, making the fag end of the last Tory regime look highly competent. And then we have to look at how much of a majority Reform might get – this could be absolutely crucial to these callous, Orban-like policies. Of course, they look unworkable but what will they suggest next – a massive fence along the south coast of England?
Like Trump , Farage appeals to a disturbingly large cohort of voters who are drawn to his simplistic solutions to complicated issues .
Again as with Trump , he glosses over or completely ignores protestations of racism /homophobia/Islamophobia /etc … and the agenda-driven mostly right-wing MSM let him get away with his slogans and dissembling .
He is a very dangerous man .
Many thought Trump was a buffoon with money yet today the USA is seriously in danger going down a very authoritarian road with the”buffoon ” exerting his power into areas that no president before has ever contemplated .
Given the chance Farage and his puppet-masters would have the UK/England follow suit .
Long past time to desert this sinking ship/prison !
How familiar it now seems. I read somewhere, that while at school Farage would wander around with his mates singing the ‘Horst Wessel’ song.
The camps to contain the 2400 seem to me like concentration camps. They start of as open prisons then decay to concentration camps. If people cannot be deported it will only be a matter of time till the gas ovens and crematoria are built.
Farage is leading the rise of racism in Britain. He is a purveyor of lies and a stirrer of hate. In the Thirties, even Mosley did not get as far as Farage. This needs to be stopped now. The BBC must stop giving him the platform to disseminate these ideas. And of course we need to get an independent Scottish republic established Bill
True, but the problem we have is that there is no alternative view to Farage. Starmer, Badenoch both play the ‘evil’ migrant game – they have walked into his territory, and he’s better at it than them. To use football metaphor, they are playing his game. At Hamilton we had John Lambie (Jags will know this too) he always emphasised the importance of playing our own game. We need to start playing our own. If Starmer wants to defeat Farage (IF) then he has to offer an alternative that is as desirable as migrant bating to the same type of voter. He can’t out Farage Farage but he could throw a spanner in.
Awareness and ‘ education ‘.. in the style of the Workers Educational Association of the Socialist Sunday Schools .. up to date with podcasts and social media and good old public meetings, community councils, any groups, pubs, football, recreation.. challenging the propaganda people have swallowed.Communities based politics.. wider radical Ecosocialist self determination for Scotland type movements..Trade Unions , parties , radical non parliamentarians ( James Kelman good on this)… by whatever ways.And don’t stop talking about genocide..Palestine and others .. and inform folks on the reasons our Irish forebears had to leave … sadly many didn’t make it or faced the horrendous’No Blacks,No Irish,No dogs racism … We have work to do !!!
Impressive piece of grandstanding by Farage on the cause de jour, but he would need a majority of MPs in order to repeal the immigration and asylum act, which sounds unlikely.
If anyone is interested, here are the figures on the return of people from the UK who do not have valid visas and aren’t awaiting a yes/no decision on an asylum claim: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-march-2025/how-many-people-are-returned-from-the-uk (Albanians featuring prominently in most categories for some reason).
But this is normal for the British Empire, which is still very much in existence, even if many British people are ignorant of its history.
My suggestion, if you want the Scottish Independence movement to coalesce around an anti-imperialist viewpoint (as I do), is to tackle these British myths and silences that the far-right depend on, and start with Scottish complicity (which will make the case much more strongly since it cannot be written off as anti-English bias).
Frequently I run across such stories. Just today I found a reference to Gordon Highlanders being sent to break a strike by asbestos workers in British-controlled Swaziland in 1963, with the implication that MI5 were advising on torture techniques and terrorising the local population.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/police-overzealous-in-censoring-mi5-report-on-northern-ireland/
If Bella was to make a concerted effort to tell these stories, while some of these Scottish soldiers are still alive, it would show that the British were some of the worst migrants known, and strike at either the cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy or racist sadisms of imperial flag-wavers, and perhaps expose the psychological underpinnings of #karmaphobia the fear that one day the wheel will turn and what we did unto others will rebound on ourselves.
If we want independence then we have to destroy the machinery of government. A country ruled in part by custom and traditions needs to have those articles broken. No more not clapping when told not to. PMQs should be turned into a circus. Black Rod should get a bit of a duffing up. The mace should be stolen, bent or smashed. Anything that smacks of respecting the institution of parliament should be avoided as respect means acceptance of our servile second rate status.
Disrupt not destroy
By 9 SNP MPs?
I can see that when there were 57, it might have made a bit of spectacle but with 9? Empty tokenism hardly covers it
No – whether one or 50 plus. It matters not. Disruption is as much a signal as it is an action
Niemand this is not about tokenism. It is about making it difficult for them to govern. Why should civil disobedience always be left to the pubic? Several times on here we hear talk about civil disobedience in the sphere of many different subjects such as climate, independence, the middle east – but only by the public, people who risk getting a criminal record. It’s our representatives who should be leading disobedience otherwise they are obedient. Is that the way to get independence? By being obedient?