When Nigel Farage’s party called for the Royal Navy to push migrants crossing the Channel back onto the French coast, it didn’t seem much interested in getting French consent. A Reform UK briefing accused France of ignoring its obligation to stop crossings, and said it was incumbent on Britain to act, regardless of French attitudes. Faced with a Royal Navy intervention, Reform explained, the French would be powerless to stop them: “We do not believe for one moment that the French Navy or Gendarmerie would open fire on Royal Marines.”
While military conflict was, thankfully, off the table, the proposal prompted a war of words between Reform and Emmanuel Macron’s government. France’s Interior Ministry bluntly condemned the idea, labelling it a violation of French sovereignty and international law. Reform MP Sarah Pochin decided against calming the waters, retorting that it was a shame the French hadn’t shown similar resolve defending their sovereignty in June 1940.
This was an odd confrontation, an opposition party in Britain clashing with a French government already on its last legs. Macron’s presidency will end next May, meaning there’s little chance current French ministers will ever have to deal with a Reform-led Britain. Yet, Reform’s proposal met with near-silence from the different contenders for the 2027 presidential election, who might ever actually have to deal with Farage in Downing Street. Current poll leader Marine Le Pen, like her main rivals, avoided public comment on the proposal.
In justifying its plan, Reform did suggest that the 2027 French election might produce a new leadership more amenable to its idea. Its briefing noted that Le Pen’s National Rally party “has indicated” – notably at a meeting between Farage and the party’s young president Jordan Bardella last December – “that it would cooperate with attempts to return illegal migrants”. In France, though, some were perplexed: why would a nationalist government in Paris ever agree to Britain dumping migrants on France’s coast?
National Rally’s response to Reform’s plan – low-profile, but basically indulgent – suggests that the Faragiste policy fits better with the Le Pen camp’s agenda than it might seem.
A comment piece in centre-right weekly l’Express noted the double standards at work. Last week, after tens of thousands of people briefly crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, the National Rally had cast Spain as a disloyal neighbour. While Macron’s government expressed “solidarity” with Spain, and publicly noted that Ceuta is not part of Schengen free-travel arrangements, Le Pen insisted that this was time to limit Schengen rights to EU nationals and harden France’s national borders. Her party colleague Bardella accused Spain’s socialist-led government of a “passive complicity” toward “migrant invasion”. Yet, this same comment piece noted, faced with Reform’s plan to use the Royal Navy to return migrants to France, Le Pen’s party said almost nothing.
French media outlets enervated by the crossings in Ceuta were likewise apathetic about the Reform proposal. Outlets owned by hard-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré like CNews and Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) were quiet on what it meant for France. The only apparent public comment from any National Rally official came in Politico. This anonymous Le Pen ally understood what Reform wanted: “Everyone says and does what they like, what they think is good for their country,” yet such a plan required a “bilateral deal”. There was no reason to worry: “When we’re in charge, we hope we’ll ensure the other borders are defended, so France will no longer be a passageway to England.” But the same source wondered, “Why [bring them back] to France if they aren’t French?”
The lack of response might be read as a sign of National Rally’s embarrassment, not least with Bardella billed to speak at Reform’s conference next month. Isn’t Farage’s plan to shift the burden for policing migration from Britain to France? Other parts of the story suggest it’s not such a zero-sum game.
One reason for the Le Pen camp’s quiet was that the idea wasn’t so new, or at odds with its own suggestions. Take the attitude of Marc de Fleurian, the National Rally MP for Calais. In summer 2025, he argued that the British and French navies should collaborate to render the cross-Channel route inoperable. He wanted a formalised approach where the two navies would “push back from the British side and pull back from the French side.” This would mean returning crossers to France: but De Fleurian suggested that this could be combined with measures to step up the detention apparatus in northern France and deport more people.
The political overlap between a future Le Pen and Farage government would not resolve all of the complex legal issues involved. Still, this isn’t just a tug of war between a future Faragiste Britain and European law, imagined as a static set of liberal safeguards. For if Le Pen wins power, images of conflict in the Channel can also provide leverage to weaken existing French and European protections of refugees’ rights. The European Convention on Human Rights, and its provision against the “collective expulsion of aliens”, are often imagined as a general barrier to “pushbacks”. However, supporters of such moves can also cite other recent cases where European Court of Human Rights judges ruled “returns” legal, notably to combat “smuggling” – a slippery term in this context.
Political leaders around Europe have in recent years put pressure on the ECHR, to make rulings that give greater freedom of action to national governments. Both within the European Union and in the Council of Europe, which gave rise to the ECHR (with 46 member states, including the UK), leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen have led the way in what they call opening a “political debate” on court rulings. A Le Pen-led France would add weight to the already-existing majority of Council of Europe members pressuring the ECHR to give governments more room for manoeuvre and weaken individual migrants’ legal protections.
A Le Pen government would be dealing with a changed reality in European politics. During the 2015 surge in migration numbers and the 2016 Brexit vote, right-wingers in the EU often battled over who should take charge of refugees. This was sometimes a clash of rival isolationisms. Right-wingers in Mediterranean member-states complained that their countries had to handle disproportionate numbers of asylum seekers; whereas in central Europe, Viktor Orbán rejected calls for EU countries to share numbers more equally. Yet, in more recent years, the EU has partly overcome this internal rift by hardening its external borders, massively expanding border agency Frontex and granting member-states more rights to choose which countries are “safe” to deport people to.
The idea of the Royal Navy taking refugees from the Channel to Calais answers a great Brexiteer dream: making migrants Europe’s problem, not ours. Still, it should not be assumed that this will simply force France to accommodate more undocumented migrants. For all its apparent isolationism, Reform is also fuelling the voices in Europe pushing for a harsher disciplining of migrants and a withdrawal of existing legal safeguards. If Le Pen is ever president, promises of the Royal Navy hunting down people in rubber dinghies may provide her an opportunity to reshape Europe, not just a headache.
[Further reading: Madam President, Marine Le Pen?]
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