This is the opening to my essay on the consequences of a policy of mass deportations, published in the Observer on 31 August 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer.

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Who said this? “I’m not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations or anything like that… It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people. We simply can’t do it.”

Keir Starmer? Some loony-left lawyer? Actually, it was that well-known bleeding-heart liberal Nigel Farage in an interview last year with GB News’s Steve Edginton. While Farage insisted that “If people come illegally, they should not be allowed to stay,” he rejected mass deportations as an answer, calling it “literally impossible” to carry out and insisting: “It’s pointless even going there.”

Less than a year later, the leader of Reform UK has decided that going there is not so pointless after all. Farage dominated much of the news agenda last week by promising to deport 600,000 illegal immigrants during the first five years of a prospective Reform government. He pledged also to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and to “disapply” the 1951 Refugee Convention and the UN Convention against Torture.

Farage’s U-turn is partly an exercise in political opportunism, a desire to seize a chance to set the agenda. It is also an illustration of the way that, just as Farage puts pressure on mainstream politicians to adopt a harder stance on immigration, he too is under pressure from those to his right to adopt more extreme policies.

Read the full version of the essay in the Observer.