Nigel Farage has insisted he can stop small boat migrant crossings within a fortnight if he becomes Prime Minister. The Reform UK leader made the claim in an exclusive interview with the Daily Express on the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum.
Two-Week Pledge Revived
Mr Farage is confident of delivering on the promise if he enters No 10. The two-week pledge was one of the standout announcements of his keynote speech at the Reform UK conference last year. He has since indicated that he would stop the boats within two weeks of passing laws that would allow him to deport migrants quickly.
Speaking exclusively to the Express, Mr Farage claimed it's “dead simple” to cut crossings to zero. Asked if he could do it in two weeks of taking office, he said: “Oh yeah. Tony Abbott did it, the Australian Prime Minister in 2012. If you remove the pull factors, they won't pay the traffickers, it's dead simple.”
Australia's Precedent
Under former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's offshore detention policy, asylum-seeker vessels were controversially turned back to Indonesia and would-be refugees sent to Papua New Guinea and Nauru in the Pacific for processing and resettlement. In June 2014, Mr Abbott said Australia had marked six months since the last asylum-seeker boat arrival in December 2013 - a few months after he took office.
Reform UK's Mass Deportation Plan
Reform UK has also suggested it would be prepared to deport 600,000 migrants over five years if it won power at the next general election. Mr Farage has previously said his party would bar anyone who came to the UK on a small boat from claiming asylum.
Key to the plan is the passage of a new law called the Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill. Reform UK says the bill would create a legal duty for the home secretary to remove illegal migrants, and ban anyone who had been deported from re-entering the UK for life. The bill would also “disapply” international treaties like the Refugee Convention, a 1951 treaty that prevents signatory countries like the UK from returning refugees to countries where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.
Mr Farage's remarks came during a special episode of the Daily Expresso, recorded in his Clacton constituency to mark the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum.
