Reform Would Suspend the Asylum System for a Full Parliament
Reform UK says that in government it would reject all new asylum applications, void existing ones and mark claimants for deportation, scrapping the asylum tribunal and deporting more than 90,000 outstanding appeals. It would leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention.
Nigel Farage frames it as emergency powers: the country faces “a national security emergency” and “we cannot accept more asylum seekers while we still have no idea how many people are in the country illegally and the threat they pose”. The machinery described is as striking as the policy. Home Office asylum staff would be “reprioritised to reviewing and overturning previous refugee grants”; visa bans and tariffs would pressure countries that refuse returns, named as Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan, escalating to airspace bans. Three different totals now attach to Reform’s deportation plans — 90,000 appeals, around 400,000 made liable by April’s review pledge, and 600,000 over five years from an earlier small-boats promise — and they come from three separate announcements rather than adding up. Labour’s chair Bridget Phillipson called it “a clear sign of desperation and weakness” and “an assault on our common values”. The Conservatives’ Chris Philp said the proposals “largely copy” his party’s. The Liberal Democrats’ Max Wilkinson said both “were the architects of the failed asylum system and now they will exploit it”. Watch whether any of it survives contact with the courts it proposes to bypass.