Nigel Farage has announced that a Reform UK government would immediately deport 90,000 asylum seekers and reject all new asylum claims for five years. The Guardian introduces these proposals with the warning that “Children and mothers would not be exempt”. Even the mothers and children! The paper invites us to begin our objections where the deportations extend beyond men, as though their expulsion were already settled and we had only to negotiate exemptions.
Farage explains his objection to admitting Palestinian and Afghan women and children: they might be followed by husbands and partners, and “before you know it you have plenty of young men coming as well.” There is the calamity! A husband might reach his wife. A father might reach his children. The people whose separation supplies such excellent material for humanitarian appeals might demand to live together. Farage has named no crime these men have committed; their arrival is sufficient to complete his argument.
We refuse the division on which this argument depends. A man fleeing persecution doesn’t have to produce a wife or child to establish his claim to safety. Nor does a woman have to become a mother before her expulsion merits an objection.
And how does the government answer Farage? A Home Office source explains that he’s mistaken: people arriving under the resettlement scheme won’t have family reunion rights. An excellent reassurance! The women may be admitted without admitting their husbands; the children may be protected without allowing the family to live together. The newspaper records the correction and passes on. Farage has worried unnecessarily: the government has already withheld the right he fears these families might exercise.
Labour’s answer receives the same courteous treatment. Bridget Phillipson promises that her party can “control immigration and get numbers down with serious action, not by abandoning the asylum system altogether”. The objective slips through without a word of criticism. “Get numbers down”—why? What makes a smaller number of immigrants an achievement? Phillipson doesn’t have to say. She need only accuse Farage of extremism and offer greater administrative competence, and the Guardian has its respectable answer to the reactionary.
What a convenient contest for the possessing classes: which party can drive the immigration figures lower! Let the worker measure political success by the number of other workers kept out, and the landlord can continue collecting the rent, the employer setting the terms of employment, the capitalist owning the means of production. Labour asks to be judged on the immigration figures. The ownership of Britain’s wealth is spared such close examination.
The paper itself supplies the material for a very different argument. Reform proposes to put immigration checks into food safety, housing and licensing inspections; to identify people through electricity and water consumption, aerial images and neighbours’ complaints; to reopen the cases of people granted asylum since 2024. Follow this programme into an ordinary home. The electricity used to cook a meal becomes information for enforcement. A neighbour’s complaint can bring the household under scrutiny. The permission to remain, obtained after an asylum claim has been accepted, can be taken away when a home secretary declares the country of origin safe.
Now put a worker subject to this machinery into a dispute with an employer. Wages are withheld, conditions are dangerous, accommodation is unsafe: every attempt to seek help may bring another inspection, another official, another examination of the right to remain. Give the employer and landlord the advantage of that fear, divide the workers into those who may complain and those who dare not, and then invite the British worker to celebrate the result as protection against foreign labour. Capital could hardly ask for a more useful division.
Reform also proposes to coerce other countries into accepting deportees, threatening those that refuse with tariffs, visa bans or airspace restrictions. Countries refusing to accept deportees are to face tariffs, visa bans or airspace restrictions. Britain will decide who must leave, decide where they must go, and punish another country for refusing the consignment. The right to refuse, so sacred when claimed by Britain, disappears when another country exercises it. Yusuf can announce the deportation of “north of 1 million people” and dispose of the danger of death or torture with a reference to “third-country options”. A third country has been named as a category; apparently that settles the fate of the person to be sent there.
Ukrainians are to keep their legal resettlement routes. Very well: preserve them, and explain why the safety properly granted to the Ukrainian becomes an intolerable concession when claimed by the Afghan or Palestinian. We demand the extension of that protection; Reform makes it a privilege of the approved nationality.
Against all this, the report foregrounds the objection that the proposals are “unworkable”. Suppose the state acquired enough personnel, enough detention space, enough agreements with receiving countries to make them work. Would the deportations then become acceptable? The refugees need defenders prepared to oppose their expulsion even when the machinery works perfectly. Their safety can’t depend on whether it flatters Britain’s “proud tradition”.
By the end, we are discussing whether Farage can arrest the growth of Restore Britain and whether his policy appeals to Reform voters, only 14 percent of whom want Britain to stop welcoming people fleeing persecution and war. Farage’s electoral calculation receives its analysis; Labour’s objective of getting the numbers down receives none.
Socialists must refuse the first concession on which this discussion proceeds. The young man fleeing persecution is entitled to refuge; the family denied reunion has a claim on our solidarity; the worker living under threat of expulsion belongs in our movement. Let Labour boast that it can get the numbers down. We intend to organise with the people it asks us to count as a problem.
