Children would also be subject to Reform UK’s plan for mass deportations from Britain, Nigel Farage has said.
It came as the Clacton MP launched the party’s “operation restoring justice”, which Reform is billing as a five-year emergency programme to detain and deport illegal migrants and deter future arrivals that they would enact if elected to government.
Some 600,000 asylum seekers could be deported in the first parliament of a Reform UK government, Mr Farage claimed.
Asked whether this would include women and unaccompanied children, the Reform leader said: “Yes, women and children, everybody on arrival will be detained.
“And I’ve accepted already that how we deal with children is a much more complicated and difficult issue.
“But you know what the people protesting outside the Bell Hotel and at 30 migrant hotels on Saturday around the country weren’t doing it because of the few children coming.
“They were doing it because over three quarters of those that come are young undocumented males who come from cultures that are entirely different from ours, who are very unlikely to assimilate into our community, who pose a risk to women and girls, and some of them, I’m afraid, pose a risk to national security. So it’s pretty clear, I think, what our priorities are.”
His comments were met with condemnation from charities who accused Mr Farage of “dehumanising people who have fled war and persecution”. The LibDems said Reform planned to “rip up human rights laws” and a Labour minister described the plans as “unworkable gimmicks”.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said Mr Farage had “copied our homework but missed the lesson.”
The Reform party pledged to scale up detention capacity for asylum seekers to 24,000 and secure deals with countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran to return migrants to their countries.
Reform UK claims the plan will cost £10 billion to implement but save £7 billion currently spent on illegal migration during the first five years.
The party would leave the European Convention on Human Rights and replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, which would apply only to British citizens and those who have a legal right to live in the UK.
They would also bring forward legislation to make everyone who arrives illegally ineligible for asylum and allow asylum seekers to be detained until deportation. Under the previous Conservative government, laws were already introduced through the Illegal Migration Act barring people from having their asylum claims assessed in the UK if their claims were deemed “inadmissible”.
After the election, Labour accused the Tories of creating an asylum backlog like “Hotel California” because it had stopped processing thousands of asylum cases. The result was a ballooning asylum backlog and thousands of migrants stuck in limbo in tax-payer funded hotels, home secretary Yvette Cooper said.
Mr Farage said the only way to stop small boat arrivals is by “detaining and deporting absolutely anyone that comes via that route”. He claimed that “the boats will stop coming within days” if this happened.
But minister Matthew Pennycook criticised the plans as “unworkable gimmicks”, dismissing Reform’s ideas as something that had been “put together on the back of a fag packet”.
Speaking to Sky News, he added: “This government has secured returns agreements, including groundbreaking pilot agreement with France. We’re seeking to secure others, but, frankly, the idea that Nigel Farage and the circus that is Reform can come in and secure those agreements, I think is for the birds”.
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said Mr Farage’s plan “crumbles under the most basic scrutiny”.
“The idea that Reform UK is going to magic up some new places to detain people and deport them to, but don’t have a clue where those places would be, is taking the public for fools”.
She claimed that “Winston Churchill would be turning in his grave” over the plan to rip up the human rights convention.
Carenza Arnold, head of campaigns at Women for Refugee Women, said Mr Farage’s comments about deporting women and children was “deeply harmful” and “dangerously misleading”.
“Every day, we work with women who have fled gender-based violence, including rape, domestic violence and forced marriage, who are seeking safety in the UK. To threaten detention and deportation for these women and children is to deny their humanity and undermines the UK’s proud tradition of offering protection to those in need,” she said.
Steve Smith, CEO for Care4Calais, accused Mr Farage of using asylum seekers as “scapegoats” and offering “only division”, adding: “The majority of people don’t want to scrap protections against torture, modern slavery and persecution. They don’t want to see women and children placed in detention centres, denied their rights to safety.”
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “Toxic narratives are fuelling fear and division across our country and real public concerns are being exploited for political gain. This rhetoric doesn’t make our streets safer – it simply dehumanises people who have fled war and persecution, many of whom are themselves survivors of violence”.
He added that detaining women and children “is not only deeply concerning, it’s completely unworkable”.
Mr Solomon continued: “We rightly have long-standing safeguarding protections for children in this country, and suspending these frameworks would have serious legal, diplomatic, and moral consequences. Even if we set all of this aside and spent billions on detention, there’s no practical way to return people to countries where there are no agreements in place.”
