Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage will push for the mass deportation of asylum seekers in a new Illegal Migration Bill expected on Aug. 26.
In an interview with The Times published on Saturday, the far-right politician, whose party currently leads consistently in the polls, said migrants coming to Britain by small boats should be arrested on arrival, detained in Royal Air Force bases, denied the right to asylum, and deported within 30 days.
“The aim of this legislation is mass deportations,” Farage told The Times, pointing to “a massive crisis in Britain” that is “not only posing a national security threat but it’s leading to public anger that frankly is not very far away from disorder.”
The bill will include the signing of deals with countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea, two of the top five countries from which most people arriving in small boats are from, according to data from the Home Office.
Reform UK is open to revisiting the Conservative party’s plan of deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda — despite the fact that the High Court ruled the plan was unlawful in 2023 — and argues Albania could be another destination option.
A long-standing critic of the European Convention on Human Rights, Farage says the proposed bill will take the U.K. out of the ECHR, an idea also backed by some conservative leaders. Pulling out of the ECHR would threaten the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement, which includes participation in the ECHR as a safeguard.
Farage said he also wants to scrap the U.K.’s own Human Rights Act and wants derogation from a number of other treaties that protect human rights like the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the Refugee Convention.
Home Office data puts the total number of asylum applications at 111,000 in the year ending June 2025, half of whom arrived via “irregular routes.” That’s fewer than the number of asylum seekers in Germany, Spain, Italy and France. The asylum grant rate was 48 percent during that period.
Some 43,000 people arrived in small boats in the same period, according to the data.
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