Reform’s mass deportation policy would rip families apart and directly threaten children and young people’s safety
Lisa Matthews is Policy and Campaigns Manager at Young Roots, a London-based charity that provides young refugees and asylum seekers aged 11-25 with practical and emotional support, legal advice and skills development, including English-language support.
Last week, Nigel Farage unveiled Reform’s “Operation Restoring Justice” – a “five year
emergency programme” if the party gets into office, which includes leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act and disapplying the Refugee Convention.
They propose to carry out mass deportations of people seeking asylum by making it impossible for people who enter the country irregularly to get asylum, introducing a legal duty to remove anybody who comes irregularly, and to detain any migrants in the UK who don’t have leave to remain.
The plans are a fundamental attack on the right to safety – and we’ve seen them before. Many of the measures in the so-called “emergency programme” echo the Conservative government’s Illegal Migration Act. That piece of legislation similarly attempted to introduce what amounted to an asylum ban, undermining the very principle of protection in the UK. And both hinge on the idea that irregular entry to the UK somehow negates someone’s need for protection, ignoring the fact that there is virtually no way to enter the UK by regular means.
Nobody wants to make a dangerous journey to the UK, but people don’t have any other choice because this government has actually shut down safe routes to the UK rather than introduce any new ones. While governments or political parties talk of stopping the boats or smashing the gangs, they have failed to take the steps that would mean people would not be forced to use smugglers: safe routes.
People fleeing war and persecution do what they have to do to keep themselves and
their families safe, and none of these measures will stop that basic human instinct. It’s what we all would do if faced with the risk of death, torture, or imprisonment for our political, religious or other identities.
At Young Roots, we work with young people who have had to leave everything behind in order to be safe. While Farage has said in later interviews that Reform does not plan to deport women and children, his measures would mean ripping families apart and would directly threaten the majority of the young people we support – young men who are mostly here without their families, alone for the first time in their lives. Young men also need to be safe, and to be able to rebuild their lives and look to the future.
The young people we work with have hopes and dreams like the rest of us. As one young person told us, “What you want is a stable place to feel safe, where I can live without being scared, so I can do the basic things – study, work, live my life without stress and without being scared I will be harmed.
Policies like those proposed last week, and all the anti-immigration rhetoric that goes along with them, make young people feel extremely unsafe when they have already had their childhoods and youth taken away by fear.
We all deserve to feel safe – and we must give no ground to policies that use human beings as political pawns. What would we want for ourselves and our families if we had flee for our lives? Surely the very opposite of the inhuman and cruel plans making the headlines these days: welcome, humanity, community and safety. Let’s be vocal about that instead.
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