The UK anti-migrant right is sounding increasingly American. This week, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson and self-styled shadow home secretary, Zia Yusuf, laid out his party’s plan for a vastly increased immigration detention and “mass deportation” operation in the UK, modelled on the US’s approach under Donald Trump.
The latest announcements were a response to the newly established, hard-right, Elon Musk-endorsed party Restore Britain, which is led by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe. Meanwhile, the Labour government is failing to capitalise on the opportunity this presents to stand up for migrants’ rights and safety.
Central to the vision outlined by Yusuf this week is a five-year emergency programme called Operation Restoring Justice. According to this, Reform would in effect abandon the principle of protecting refugees from torture and persecution through not just leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, but suspending a broad swathe of legal frameworks including the Refugee Convention, the Convention against Torture and the convention on the elimination of trafficking. With these swept away, the party proposes a large expansion of the privatised detention estate and the creation of “UK Deportation Command” to track people down, much like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in the US. This significantly broadens the population deemed to be in the country unlawfully by including almost all asylum seekers, and puts millions more at risk of losing their legal right to be here by removing their indefinite leave to remain. This increased population of unauthorised residents would then be subject to blanket detention and a proposed five-times-per-day chartered deportation flight regime.
Reform claims the cost of all this would be more than offset by savings, which is preposterous – one look at what the same agenda has cost in America shows a ten-fold increase in spending, before we even start looking at indirect costs, such as the 4,400 successful suits against unlawful detention brought against Ice since the president returned to office. Detention and deportation is extremely expensive in the UK too – much more so than ordinary accommodation and integration efforts. Both Trump’s approach to immigration and our privatised detention estate in the UK are funnelling billions into the pockets of the companies that run them. The cost of lives ruined, and indeed ended, by Ice-style brutality is incalculable.
Though Reform claims to be responding to a British public that has lost patience over immigration (and there certainly is widespread dissatisfaction on this issue), the party appears to be deviating here from the mainstream in the UK.
Reform seems more interested in Americanisation, such as the growing importance of Christian nationalism to its communications and policy programme (such as Yusuf’s announcement that a Reform government would stop churches being converting into temples of other faiths). This appears to be a direct response, not to any clamour among the public for renewed Christianity, but to Restore Britain. The new party already has an extensive policy output, including much more detailed plans for mass deportations. It is trying to squeeze Reform from the right (at its launch event Lowe said “millions will have to go”.) Tommy Robinson’s street movement has also been positioning itself along explicitly Christian nationalist terms, which is yet another sign of American influence – or interference – in UK right-wing politics.
Danny Kruger, the ex-Conservative MP and now Reform’s head of preparing for government, spelled it out in an interview this week when he said, “Let’s not pretend otherwise: there is a clear affinity of world-view between the Maga movement and Reform.” This may be a statement of the obvious, or it could be strategic positioning in the hope of attracting more American support.
The UK public isn’t so keen on Maga, however. Just 11 per cent of Brits hold a positive view of Ice, according to recent YouGov polling, and 81 per cent have a negative view of Trump himself. Meanwhile, less than half of us described ourselves as Christians in the last census – well below rates in the US. Furthermore, the economy and cost of living has, once again, overtaken immigration as the number-one issue of concern to British voters, undermining a key plank of the right’s culture-war agenda.
All this could represent a real opportunity for the ruling Labour Party to distinguish itself from the Americanised hard-right of our politics and become the voice of mainstream Britain. But this may be difficult for the party, not least because it has adopted a subservient posture with the American president. It is also not helpful that Labour has been mixed up with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal through Peter Mandelson.
The party also risks looking hypocritical when it describes the Reform deportation agenda as “un-British” while toting its own highest ever – and presumably very British – deportation figures as a great achievement. Labour rejects Reform’s plan to abolish indefinite leave to remain, but wants to extend the qualifying period for it from five to ten years, creating the same precarity for migrants as Reform’s “Operation Restoring Justice” programme. Moreover, the government continues to sign large contracts with private firms to expand immigration detention capacity.
Joe Biden’s willingness to resort to policies that severely undermined refugee rights paved the way for many of the measures of Trump’s second term. His administration alienated its progressive flank by making concessions to an ethno-nationalist anti-immigrant agenda it could never satisfy. Labour appears to be making the same mistakes.
[Further reading: Reform’s risky right turn]
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