Farage’s deportation fantasy is a threat to democracy.

Nigel Farage has moved from dog-whistle to blueprint. Reform UK’s leader now says he would abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain, force people who already have it to reapply for a tougher five-year visa, strip access to benefits and NHS care without insurance, and stop family reunion unless you earn a high salary. He calls this a fix for the 'Boriswave'. What it really is: a plan to uproot hundreds of thousands of neighbours who built their lives here legally.

Reform’s head of 'government efficiency', Zia Yusuf, has been explicit about the intended outcome. The policy is designed so that many people lose settled status and leave, some 'voluntarily' after losing rights, the rest by enforcement under 'Operation Restoring Justice'. This is Trump's mass deportation politics in everything but name.

What ILR is, and why retrospective abolition crosses a line

Indefinite Leave to Remain is not a loophole. It is the legal settlement offered after years of residence, taxes, and clean records. In law it can be revoked, but only on narrow grounds, for example if it was obtained by deception or the person is liable to deportation. That is the guardrail Parliament set. Turning ILR into a rolling, punitive probation period would rip up that settlement for people who did nothing wrong except follow the rules we wrote.

For millions of EU citizens and their families who came under the UK–EU Withdrawal Agreement, the bar is even higher. Their residence rights are treaty rights. They cannot just be switched off by a new Home Secretary. The Agreement protects permanent residence acquired after five years and limits when it can be withdrawn. Any government that tried to nullify those rights would be breaching an international treaty and inviting a serious fight with the EU. Although it would of course not be the first time Farage has fought with the EU to the detriment of the UK.

The numbers do not add up

Even if you put law and treaties to one side, the capacity is not there. In 2024 the Home Office achieved around 34,000 returns of all kinds, including voluntary departures. Enforced returns were just over 8,000. Detention capacity is roughly 2,200 beds. You do not get from those figures to the hundreds of thousands that Reform telegraphs, not without vast camps, huge budgets, and a British version of the cruelty we condemn across the Atlantic.

Farage waves big price tags and bigger 'savings' to justify the shock. The £234 billion figure touted around is rooted in contested think tank arithmetic. Meanwhile, independent economists have repeatedly found that migrants contribute on net, especially those who work in the sectors that are short of hands. Even a basic scan of who keeps the country going tells the story. About one in five NHS staff in England are non-UK nationals. Adult social care is similarly reliant on overseas recruits. Pull that thread and wards close, and waiting lists grow even more rapidly.

The last time a Home Office set out to squeeze lawful residents through paperwork traps, people who had lived here for decades were arrested, sacked, denied treatment, or removed. Windrush was a national disgrace. Courts have already smacked down attempts to water down Windrush reforms. The government still struggles with data and basic humanity. Now imagine that machine trying to reassess, monitor, and possibly remove hundreds of thousands who currently have lawful status. You would recreate the scandal at scale.

This is not about 'cheap labour'. It is about democratic norms

A state that retroactively strips settled status from long-term residents and conditions your right to family life on your payslip is one rewriting the contract between citizen, resident, and government.

The right has long argued that parliament is sovereign, so anything is legal if the votes are there. That was always too glib. Our system depends on good faith constraints, on treaties we keep, on courts we respect, and on basic expectations that if you meet the rules today you will not be punished tomorrow for obeying them. Mass retrospective punishment corrodes trust. It also sets a precedent that will not stop at migrants.

The logic used by the right to argue that parliament can make anything legal with a vote echos the logic used by Donald Trump in the USA. Trump claims he can legislate anything through executive orders, a mechanism that has historically been meant for changing the policy of government departments.

There is a better argument to make

If your concern is wages and public services, the honest route is not to upend the status of nurses, carers, and the families who keep whole sectors standing. It is to raise minimums, enforce labour standards, invest in training, and finally fund social care so it is not patched together on desperation. It is to fix visa abuse where it exists, and prosecute the gangs who profit from it, not the workers they exploit. It is to police the small boats trade through cooperation and safe routes, not stunts.

Farage can announce anything. The work begins where the slogans stop. Exiting the ECHR, tearing up the Withdrawal Agreement, forcing treaty partners into retaliation, drafting a vast bill that will face months in the Lords, building detention capacity, chartering planes, hiring thousands of caseworkers, and then winning every judicial review that follows, along with facing public backlash when the inevitable cruel treatment to create capacity is exposed. None of that looks like the friction-free purge he is advertising. The IfG calls it what it is: a programme that would require a constitutional and diplomatic upheaval before the first removal van leaves the driveway.

The line to hold

Britain can set tough rules on who comes, stays, and becomes a citizen. It cannot stay Britain if it retroactively tears up the rights it promised to people who followed those rules. That is why this fight matters beyond migration. It is about whether law means anything when a fashionable strongman turns the crowd.

Farage wants to call time on permanent settlement. Voters should call time on politics that trashes the rule of law to find a headline.

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