With three weeks to go until the local elections, Reform are back campaigning on their favourite subject: migration. Having talked up deportations in the run-up to last year’s contests, the party is hoping to rerun the same playbook to achieve similar success. At a press conference this morning, Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf unveiled a new 21-page document which claimed that the so-called ‘Boriswave’ – referring to the 1.6 million migrants who arrived between 2020 and 2024 – would cost £622 billion in real terms. This, they claimed, means £20,000 per UK family.
Reform plans to abolish the status known as indefinite leave to remain (ILR), which allows those who have lived here for more than five years to receive benefits and apply for citizenship. Their argument is that a commitment to abolishing ILR needs to be made now, before the initial arrivals of the ‘Boriswave’ start to qualify as permanent UK citizens. ‘If over a couple of million people get indefinite leave to remain over the course of the next 18 months’, said Farage ‘we will be putting around our necks an economic millstone that, frankly, will be catastrophic.’
Such an announcement is nothing new: the party has long-campaigned to abolish ILR and it was a staple feature of last summer’s arms race with the Tories on migration. But in their bid to put some ‘clear blue water’ between their party and the Conservatives, Reform has alighted on a new announcement: a public inquiry to establish who was responsible for the 1.6 million arrivals. Much like the ongoing Covid farce, any such exercise would likely be extremely costly, time-consuming and blame both individuals (such as Boris Johnson’s cabinet ministers) and events (the pandemic for halting global travel and destroying the economy).
Much like the ongoing Covid farce, any such exercise would likely be extremely costly, time-consuming and blame both individuals and events.
It nevertheless has the effect of refocusing public attention on what Tory frontbenchers admit is perhaps their worst collective mistake in office. The 2019 Johnson coalition of voters in the north and south were united by a shared scepticism of mass migration. To not notice numbers soar to record levels was, as one former aide admits, ‘unforgivable’. Reform hopes that, for all of Kemi Badenoch’s subsequent shifts on migration, voters have long memories of that so-called ‘betrayal’. The party is ruthlessly focused on maintaining their poll lead in the hope of supplanting the Conservatives as the party of the right. A new poll by JL Partners of 3,000 voters shows Reform remaining ten points clear of the Tories in voting intentions, boasting 28 per cent to the latter’s 18 per cent.
More interesting then the inquiry is Reform’s suggestion of sanctions against individual ministers responsible for the ‘Boriswave’. In today’s Express, party sources are quoted as saying the inquiry would consider ‘whether their gross negligence in office amounted to criminal conduct.’ Threats of legal action for policy decisions are something of a hostage to fortune. If Reform is genuinely serious about forming the next government and pursuing an ambitious agenda of deportations, then senior figures ought to appreciate the risk of establishing a legal precedent that could then be used against them.
