Spring is in the air, and the parties are gearing up for the local elections by setting out policies for how to make Britain a more thriving, successful, optimistic and forward-looking nation.
Reform’s vision for a better Britain was announced over the Bank Holiday weekend by the party’s head of policy Zia Yusuf. The proposal? A string of new “detention centres” built across Britain to house “illegal migrants”.
“Reform will need to detain tens of thousands at a time,” Yusuf posted on, inevitably, X. “Migrants will not be allowed to leave these detention centres, and each will be held there a couple of weeks before being deported.”
And if the promise of a new gulag wasn’t enough, Yusuf added a kicker. “A Reform government will not put any detention facilities in any constituency with a Reform MP.
“We will prioritise Green controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to locate the detention centres.
“If you vote in a Reform council or a Reform MP, we guarantee you won’t have a detention centre near you. If you vote Green, you will.”
But the idea of punishing people who don’t vote for you immediately runs into the problem of not being entirely legal. The former Tory minister Simon Clarke, who now runs a right wing think tank, said: “It would almost certainly be deemed an abuse of ministerial power for political purposes, and as such would likely be stuck down in court before ever being implemented, wasting millions for the taxpayer without detaining anyone.”
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Yusuf has argued that a Reform government would get round this by passing the not-at-all sinister sounding “Mass Deportation Detention Act”, and that this new legislation would also list where new detention centres would be built. Writing in the Telegraph, Yusuf wrote: “We will create a new agency, UK Deportation Command, and rapidly build detention capacity for up to 24,000 illegal entrants at a time.”
People who vote Green, he wrote, “run the risk of an open borders communist dystopia, overrun by class A drugs like heroin.
“Given the endless signalling from Zack Polanski that he wants no border enforcement at all,” he continued, “I look forward to his hearty applause for this policy.”
Does Yusuf really think that building a rash of internment camps for immigrants, creating a “UK Deportation Command” and introducing a “Mass Deportation Detention Act” will be welcomed by people who want open borders?
It was obviously a none-too-subtle piece of signalling ahead of the local elections, and gives a very clear sign of who Reform now see as their biggest electoral problem.
But it also called to mind other controversial election messages of years gone by. As one online commenter remarked, “it’s a shame ‘neighbour’ doesn’t rhyme with Green.”
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