Why I Called for Mass Deportations at the Reform UK Conference
My coverage of the Reform UK Conference; and why I joined Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Restoration Bulletin.
Nigel Farage’s insurgent populist party, Reform UK, hosted their first annual conference at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham on Friday the 20th & Saturday the 21st of September.
While I am not affiliated with the party in any official capacity, I was vocal about my support for their Contract With the People before the July 4th general election.
I attended the conference — both to cover it for my show, Tomlinson Talks, and to appear on stage at a fringe event hosted by Touchpoint Strategy.
Following the panel discussion, we took questions from the audience. I was asked, "What do you want Reform to do that they are not doing or pushing now?"
I answered, "Mass deportations."
Nigel Farage told my friend Steven Edginton in a GB News interview earlier that week,
No. No, I’m not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations, or anything like that. [...]
If I say I support mass deportations, that’s all anybody will talk about for the next twenty years, so it’s pointless even going there. It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds-of-thousands of people. We simply can’t do it.
But my response was met with a round of applause — as you can see below.
Both my friend and co-panellist, Charlie Downes, and I felt Reform’ softening rhetoric on mass deportations and "British values" would estrange the youth support that Farage attracted ahead of the general election.
Our criticisms come from a place of wanting to see an insurgent political party like Reform succeed. We commend Richard Tice, Lee Anderson, James McMurdock, and Rupert Lowe for their work both before and since they were elected as MPs.
But while having the vibe trying to start a Trump rally during bingo night at Butlins is great for consolidating their over-50s support, Reform must do more both rhetorically and optically to increase their vote share among 18 - 30s.
This block is ripe for the taking — as I explained in my review of the conference for Restoration, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
Due to the scale of illegal migration into the US, UK, and Europe, mass deportations have become a sensible and necessary policy. Parties such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), France’s National Rally, the Sweden Democrats, and Austria’s Freedom Party have made gains in recent national and EU elections, campaigning on mass deportations. As Farage mentions in the interview, this has caused Olaf Scholz in Germany, and the Moderate Party in Sweden, to accelerate deportations, and make overtures to concerns about immigration in order to retain the waning support of independent voters. Farage’s friend Donald Trump has made mass deportations and even “remigration” the central pledge of his 2024 presidential platform. Farage’s concern about how he will be pilloried by the media for even suggesting such a thing is unwarranted. When asked on stage at the Conference what one policy Reform should do to increase their support ahead of the next election, I said “Mass deportations” and was met with applause from the room. Not only are mass deportations already popular with Reform’s core supporters, but they’re becoming increasingly palatable with the electorate in countries more progressive than Britain. It disadvantages Farage to shy away from the policy.
I have become a regular contributor to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s bulletin, so do subscribe to get all of my and Ayaan’s work for free in your inbox.
I elaborated on this further in a Deprogrammed episode with Charlie Downes and Harrison Pitt, on The New Culture Forum.
Farage’s latest statements appear to many of Reform’s supporters to be an unannounced departure from their election pledges.
Any reluctance to deport the 1.2 million visa overstays since 1998, >135,000 illegal immigrants who have crossed the English Channel since 2018, and the >10,000 foreign criminals currently in Britain’s prisons, is to refuse to uphold the rule of law.
Reform looks to be making the mistake of conflating “professionalising” with softening their rhetoric to pursue a fictitious “centre”, rather than attempting to engage the 4.8 million young Northern working-class “sofa voters”, disenfranchised by the Hobson’s Choice of Labour or Conservatives, by providing an alternative to all other establishment parties.
If so, then they will not take power in 2029. Their momentum could be siphoned off by a resurrected Conservative Party — with leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick MP sounding stronger on the question of English identity and repatriating criminal foreign nationals than Farage himself.
Instead, as Harrison argues in his latest column for The European Conservative, they should follow in the footsteps of successful European populist parties and pander unapologetically to their client group: the indigenous host populations of Britain.
I am not calling on right-wing parties to adopt a whites-only approach or to tar all minorities with the same scornful brush. This would be both wrong and counter-productive. Apart from anything else, there are a fair few immigrants, typically first-generation, whom Eric Kaufmann describes as “ethno-cultural traditionalists”: non-native individuals who sincerely love their host countries.
But crucially, ethno-cultural traditionalists of foreign extraction love their host nation because they associate what is good about the country with its historic people, not with a David Cameron-style laundry-list of ill-defined abstract values. Such minorities want to preserve the British people, or indeed the Irish people, in the same way that I would want to preserve the Japanese people if my heart ever moved me to live in Tokyo. What I am saying, then, is that conservatives, be they populist or mainstream, should not be seeking to seduce minorities at the expense of the interests of their more reliable voter base. The American Left never goes out of its way to court evangelicals or gun-owners. This is because, for all their faults, they are cunning political strategists who realise that these are solidly Republican constituencies.
Thankfully, there is someone who understands this, who spoke on the main stage at the Conference…
"I have no interest in bickering within the ecosystem... There's no time for petty disputes and rivalries"
Another familiar Substack face I spoke to while at the conference was my friend and fellow former University of Kent alumnus, Professor Matt Goodwin.
Beside Reform’s teal battle-bus, we discussed the necessity to repel the “invasion” of >135,000 illegal migrants who have crossed the English Channel since 2018 using mass deportations and third-party deterrents; and how Reform should accept the hand of friendship extended to them by the intelligent, exuberant Online Right.
Some on that same Online Right have expressed scepticism about Matt’s intentions — given he wrote a report for Chatham House in 2011 titled ‘Right Response: Understanding and Countering Populist Extremism in Europe.’
I asked Matt about this on a previous Deprogrammed episode. Not only has Matt been on a sincere personal and political journey, changing his mind about Brexit, immigration, and demographic and cultural change; but the report also aimed to counteract street protests and non-viable parties (with very real neo-Nazi elements) which would have been unfit to govern, and therefore set the aims of immigration restrictionists and ethnocultural traditionalists back further.
For those still wary of the ever-present threat of containment, as I said in my coverage of the Conference for Restoration, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
Goodwin is providing Reform with a positive vision which is particular to Britain, and a policy platform which is popular with the convinced and undecided alike. If Reform is wise, it will abandon its retreat from restrictive immigration policies and strong national identity. Reform should adopt the principle “If Douglas Murray is saying something stronger, then we aren’t doing our jobs properly”. Only then will Reform be in a fit state to provide a solution to all the problems that Keir Starmer has already promised “will get worse”.
You can watch my chat with Matt, and the full Reform UK Conference coverage on Tomlinson Talks at LotusEaters.com.
The Costs and Crimes of Migration Continue…
For my first contribution to Restoration, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali , Ayaan and I co-authored an essay on the Haitian immigration controversy in Springfield, Ohio.
Donald Trump’s much-memed comments that the 15,000 - 20,000 Haitians settled in the American city of 59,000 are “eating the dogs [...] eating the cats [...] eating the pets of the people that live there” drew attention to the plight of many towns and cities in states across America suffering from the costs and crimes of Kamala Harris’ open Southern Border policy.
To provide some perspective for our American friends and readers, Ayaan and I compared the situation in America to the UK and Europe.
While America leads the way with net illegal border crossings, at 10 million under Biden and Harris, it trails Europe and the UK in manifested consequences. The home of America’s founders provides a model for its future, if this trend continues.
Let’s compare Ohio to England and Wales — the parts of the UK subjected to the highest concentration of immigration. Ohio is 40,847.9 square miles; England and Wales, >58,000. The Ohio population has been a relatively stable 11 million since 2000. Since 2001, the UK population has grown from 59 million to 67.6 million — with 60% due to direct contributions of net migration. 1.2 million legal immigrants are admitted every year. Net migration added 3.7 million people to the population from 2011 to 2021. Between New Labour’s election and 2023, net migration ran at a hundred times that seen between 1973 and 1997. More have arrived since then than between 1066 and the Second World War. Between 1998, when Prime Minister Tony Blair abolished exit checks, and 2017, there were estimated to be 1.2 million illegal migrants in Britain. Since 2018, another >135,000 have broken in via small boat across the English Channel.
I elaborated on some of the newly revealed costs of this illegal immigration into Britain on Tomlinson Talks.
Labour's new immigration policy will grant 70% of illegal migrants on the waiting list asylum.
According to Conservative MP Nick Timothy, in a Parliamentary debate on September 10th, this will increase the cost of housing asylum seekers by £17.8 billion per year.
These stats will be carefully hidden from the public by folding them into the welfare budget by granting all asylum applicants and recipients the right to claim full state benefits from the moment they arrive.
The Labour government are conducting an exploitative wealth transfer from hard-working, law-abiding native Brits to criminal foreign dependents.
No wonder they seek to hide these statistics from the public: because there would be uproar akin to what we saw after the Southport massacre last summer if they knew.
More figures were released this week in The Telegraph, showing that, of the 53,000 Albanian nationals living in the UK, 1,200 — 1 in 50 — are in prison.
The imprisonment rate of foreign nationals is 27% higher than for British citizens. Freedom of information requests by the Centre for Migration Control revealed the arrest rate for foreign nationals was 34% higher than for British citizens in 2023.
But we don't have details on exactly which foreign nationals are most likely to commit exactly which type of crime. We would have that data, except the Home Office refuses to publish it.
Steven Edginton has reported how senior civil servant Matthew Rycroft and minister Jess Phillips MP have refused to answer questions from Home Office employees about releasing data on which nations' migrants commit which crimes.
Last year, when Robert Jenrick called on the Home Office to create "league tables" of which nations' migrants commit crimes, civil servants threatened legal action.
An amendment to the Sentencing Bill, requiring the government to present an annual report to Parliament detailing the nationality, visa, and asylum status of convicted offenders was abandoned due to Sunak calling the general election.
The Telegraph had to compile this data from Ministry of Justice statistics, stating there are 10,435 foreign nationals in jails in England and Wales compared with 76,866 British nationals, and cross-referencing with 2021 ONS data. Precise statistics have been hidden from public view by the Home Office and successive governments, all the while they preside over unprecedented levels of immigration and demographic change.
A government spokesman told the Telegraph:
“This Government is committed to delivering justice for victims and safer streets for our communities. Foreign nationals who commit crime should be in no doubt that the law will be enforced and, where appropriate, we will pursue their deportation.”
This is because Albania is the country we have a returns agreement with already, and because Albanians are White Europeans. Therefore, it’s safe for Labour to act like they're taking action by deporting Albanian criminals. But when we suggest they release data on, say, the number of sex crimes committed by Pakistani nationals, for example, then expect accusations of racism.
If more granular data were produced, then the government and civil service would have to admit that they know which nations produce more violent criminals, and that, despite this, they import them in their millions anyway. So they'll talk tough about Albania, while doing nothing to reduce the thousands of foreign murders and s*x criminals they import into Britain.
This is exactly what happened after then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid ordered an inquiry into the Grooming Gangs: stats were buried by claims that the overall number of offences against children were committed by White perpetrators, while per capita "Asian" men are three times more likely than White British to be convincted of child s*x offences.
("Asian", too, obscures exactly who the culprits are, where they come from, and why they did it. It’s not the Japanese or Sikhs committing these heinous crimes.)
A GB News investigation found that 1 in every 2,200 Muslim males, and 1 in 1,700 Pakistanis, have been prosecuted for child s*x offences between 1997 and 2017.
I covered one of these cases recently — which only Charlie Peters attended, for GB News — on the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters.
Seven men were convicted of child sex offences in Rotherham, as a nine-week trial concluded Thursday the 12th of September.
Mohammed Amar, 42, convicted of two counts of indecent assault. Sentenced to 16 years imprisonment, with two years on extended licence.
Yasser Ajaibe, 39, convicted of one count of indecent assault. Sentenced to 6 years imprisonment, 12 months on extended licence.
Ramin Bari, 37, convicted of four counts of rape on two separate occasions at a hotel. Sentenced to 9 years imprisonment.
Mohammed Zameer Sadiq, 49, convicted of one count of rape and one count of sexual intercourse with a girl under 13. Sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, 12 months on extended licence.
Tahir Yasin, 38, convicted of eight counts of rape. Sentenced to 13 years imprisonment.
Mohammed Siyab, 49, convicted of two counts of rape, one count of sexual intercourse with a girl under 13 and one count of trafficking. Sentenced to 25 years imprisonment, with 12 months on licence.
Abid Saddiq, 43, convicted of three counts of rape and one of indecent assault, was sentenced to 24 years imprisonment with a further extended 12 months licence.
Charlie Peters reported that
‘Some [of Saqiq’s] family members were seen shaking their heads and crying as the sentence was delivered.’
Siyab, who heard his sentence through an Urdu interpreter, waved to his family as he was taken down. One of his daughters shouted “I love you dad” as he was led out of the dock.’
The dark secret of the Grooming Gangs imported into English towns and cities is that many of the perpetrators’ families knew something was amiss, and not only failed to report it, but still stood by their cousins, husbands, brothers, and fathers after knowing they had committed industrial-scale child r*pe.
There is no assimilating such a barbaric culture. The perpetrators and all implicated in these monstrous crimes must be sent back to their nations of origin.
However, when one of the victims requested this be done in her witness statement, Peters reports she was censored.
GB News has seen the original copy of the speech that she intended to deliver, which has several sections crossed out due to restrictions ordered by the judge, who is granted sight of the statement before it is read out in court.
The censored conclusion reads: “I’d like to request that after sentencing and upon Rudy and Showabe's release, that they should be deported back to Pakistan as this is where they originated from and came here to exploit children. Thank you.” […]
The survivor told GB News that Britain is failing to deport foreign rape gang abusers.
“If someone’s not born here and they’re here to exploit children, after the sentences they should be deported.
“There’s nothing to say that they’ll stop exploiting children. We can deport them and let their own country deal with them.
“The Foreign Office should absolutely give Pakistan full punishment if they refuse to accept grooming gang rapists.”
She added: “Those men need to be deported or Pakistan should have its visas restricted.”
Just as with the murder of Thomas Roberts, and the continued rising costs of accommodating illegal migrants, the government, civil service, and ideologically-captured judiciary work in concert to hide the truth from the public, because they are all complicit in importing these avoidable crimes to our shores.
As I covered in another segment last week, this will get much worse thanks to the new “antiracism” policies promised by the Metropolitan Police.
Despite foreign nationals committing crimes at higher rates than the native British, the Met Police have promised to
Continue our work to protect migrant communities by working closely with key stakeholders to obtain and review available data, so we can take an evidence based approach, and design interventions including joint training with migrant hotels to spot exploitation.
They also aim to
Trial a new approach to deployment and briefing which seeks to recognise and address drivers of disparity in policing areas with a higher proportion of ethnic minorities.
Presumably to reduce ethnic disparities in arrest and conviction rates — which would require they police violent offences like stabbings at an even more permissive rate than is done already . (Considering Black perpetrators comprise ‘only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.’)
Despite all of this doubling down on a Diversity agenda which is literally getting people killed, Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley says,
We fully recognise that for many our plan will not go far enough, fast enough. We are committed to becoming an anti-racist, pro-inclusive organisation, and we recognise the need to involve our communities throughout.
There’s no sign that this will stop in Britain anytime soon.
Mine and Ayaan’s essay also detailed the numerous murders committed by illegal migrants, Haitian and Latin American alike, under the Biden/Harris Administration.
n Ohio and other states, illegal migrants have been issued driving licences — with concerns they could use these to fraudulently vote in November’s election. Springfield residents are reporting “eight to 10 accidents a day”, after Haitian migrants were issued driving licences. A mother of three was hit by a Haitian Amazon delivery driver making an illegal turn last week, and was thankfully unharmed. Grandmother Kathy Heaton was struck and killed by a Haitian migrant driving with expired plates on December 1st 2023. Her killer was not charged. Eleven year-old Aiden Clark was killed, and twelve students injured, when a Haitian driving without a US licence caused a school bus to roll over.
Others crossing the Southern Border have committed brutal murders. Mother-of-five Rachel Morin was allegedly raped and murdered in Maryland by illegal El Salvadoran migrant Victor Martinez Hernandez in 2023. University of Georgia student Laken Riley was allegedly murdered by illegal Venezuelan migrant Jose Ibarra in February. Twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was allegedly strangled to death and left in a creek by two illegal Venezuelan migrants in June. Last weekend, an illegal migrant from the Dominican Republic was arrested for the murders of a family of four in upstate New York — including a four- and two-year-old. Despite articles running cover for Kamala Harris’s negligent stewardship of the Southern border, insisting illegal migrants commit less crime than US nationals, it is important to remember that every single one of these atrocities was avoidable. If these criminals had not been let into the country, every one of these innocent victims would be alive and with their families.
I discussed the lunacy of the US, UK, and Europe’s “mindless” immigration policies with Ayaan on Tomlinson Talks.
We discussed the integration and assimilation barriers presented by the increasing presence of Islam in the West; but also, as seen with the Haitian migrants, how other factors can cause new arrivals to recreate the conditions of a failed state in their host nation.
This unwanted influx of foreign dependents causes the native, working-class populations of cities like Springfield to incur the costs of scarer housing, in-demand infrastructure, rising crime, and a sense of unease between cultural strangers. All of this is a cauldron in which undesirable ethnic conflict will brew and boil over.
Americans who would seek to preserve the peace, prosperity, and potential to fulfil the American Dream of the United States should vote accordingly on November 5th.
That’s if the Democrats let Donald Trump make it to Election Night alive…
The final essay I wrote for Restoration, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in September was an explanation as to how Democrats like Kamala Harris can countenance the cognitive dissonance required to call Donald Trump, the duly elected President and most popular incumbent in American history, a “Threat to Democracy”.
This follows a second assassination attempt by the deranged failure of a freedom-fighter, Ryan Wesley Routh.
Routh’s delusions were stoked by Democrats’ depictions of Donald Trump as “a threat to democracy”. Routh saw Ukraine as a proxy for the threat dictators in the twentieth-century mold may pose to democracy. He posted on X in April that “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose”, in support of President Biden. Biden himself said “There is one existential threat: it’s Donald Trump” at a February fundraiser. On July 12th, Biden said “I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation”.
The Democrats know full well that their scaremongering about Trump posing an “existential threat” to America is inciting the most febrile minds in their base to take vigilante action against the rise of a prospective second Hitler.
They know, and yet they do it anyway. Why?
As I explain in this piece,
What we must understand is that “democracy” to Democrats means something very different than one man, one vote. As Emily Finley explains in The Ideology of Democratism, those who exalt democracy as a shared ideal are “enchanted with an imaginative vision of democracy that at times is almost indistinguishable from religious belief”. The way Democrats speak of democracy when criticizing Donald Trump is akin to worshipping it as a good until itself; rather than preferring it as a process by which political representatives are selected with maximum accountability. […]
Democracy, then, to Democrats, means: the system by which man’s free and equal nature is revealed to him, and expressed in identical fashion. As such, voting in a democracy is thought to be an exercise of everyone making the same choice over and over. […]
If not exposed to mis- and dis-information peddled by “divisive” populists like Trump, Democrats presume everyone will come to the same progressive conclusion. They believe themselves to be in possession of the means of making policies in everyone's rational self-interest, based on a presumption of universal human sameness. Populism is the art of returning contentious issues back to the realm of public discussion. Populists are therefore slowing down the rate at which policies which benefit everyone will be enacted. They are casting a kind of spell over the voting public, making them believe they are different and divided. For democracy to prevail, populists must be censored, banned, and persecuted.
To understand the competition philosophies at play in this American Presidential election, you can read my essay for Restoration, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Now that I’m back from a much-needed holiday, you can expect more of these newsletters, and appearances on podcasts and in print outlets, in the coming week!
Thanks to all those who have recently subscribed — both for free, to receive these posts, and who have paid for a subscription, to support my work.
Isn't the full version of Nigel's statement something more like "It is currently politically impossible to *say* that you are in favour of mass deportations and be elected to office."
Reform don't have any revolutionary energy.
More like Conform.