Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the debate on illegal immigration and crime was “just beginning” and warned that a new Labour government would suffer the same defeat as the Conservatives if it failed to show the “political will” needed to protect Britain's borders.
Appearing before a House of Commons committee, the Brexit chief called for tough action from Westminster, saying the number of migrants crossing the Channel illegally from France by boat is approaching 9,000 since Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to power in July.
“I promise one thing to a Labour government: this issue has dealt a huge blow to the Conservative party and has affected the general election. This issue of illegal immigration and the crime it causes is barely discussed in this country but is a huge debate in France and Germany and will do huge damage to Labour's electoral chances,” Farage predicted, referring to recent terror attacks committed by migrants on the continent.
“I am concerned that you will be forced to take a tough stance and that your leaders will be forced to reconsider their position on the European Convention on Human Rights,” he concluded.
Farage pointed to countries such as Germany, once an ideological champion of open borders, taking steps to stop illegal immigrants entering the country, and urged the new left-wing Labour party to demand that France stop using its navy to escort traffickers' small boats into British waters, given that hundreds of millions of British taxpayer dollars have been sent to Paris to respond to the crisis.
“I would ask the minister to say that, given the money we have paid to France, we will no longer accept French naval escorts. The day after 12 people were killed in the English Channel, French naval ships were guarding small boats from just a few hundred yards away,” Mr Farage said.
The populist MP said the boat migrants should be immediately sent back to France and noted that Germany appeared to be ignoring the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by starting to send illegal migrants back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
As a result, Farage suggested the Strasbourg court, which remains bound by it after the UK leaves the EU, should not continue to be given the power to determine Britain's immigration policy.
“I think political will is essential and of course Germany is showing that now. Germany will ignore the European Convention on Human Rights. So if there is the political will, we can solve this problem by withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights,” Mr Farage told the committee.
Mr Farage has long argued for Britain to leave the European Court of Human Rights to fully realise its Brexit pledge – to take back control of Britain's borders – but three Conservative governments, and now Sir Keir Starmer's government, have refused to withdraw from the court.
The post-Brexit impact of remaining under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights has a major impact on migration policy. Controversially, in the summer of 2022, the ECHR intervened at the last minute to rule that illegal boat migrants were to be prevented from being transferred from the UK to a refugee processing centre in the East African country of Rwanda.
The decision left the Conservatives' core deterrence strategy in legal limbo for almost two years, with not a single migrant removed until Labour came to power this summer and scrapped the program altogether, effectively abandoning hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money invested in the program in Rwanda to the Kigali government.
