It is 70 years since Donald McLachlan’s Daily Telegraph leader urged prime minister Sir Anthony Eden to demonstrate ‘the smack of firm government’, and there has always been an element of the British electorate which thrills at the idea. This is a constituency Nigel Farage knows well and has long courted, the same one that looked at the chaos of the mid-1970s and wondered whether activist groups calling for a ‘strong leader’ might have a point.
Reform UK has returned to this mood music once again as it sets out new policies on illegal migration. Its home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, has been laying out the basic features of what is posturingly dubbed ‘Operation Fortress’:
Britain is being invaded. Tory and Labour governments responded with a free ferry service and free hotels. Reform UK will respond by launching the largest military operation in the English Channel since world war two.
There are many potential flaws in Reform’s Britain-at-bay, fight-them-on-the-beaches plan
Ready to pass emergency legislation if necessary, a future Reform government will create a joint command drawn from the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, the Army and the Royal Air Force to intercept unauthorised vessels in the Channel, detain the occupants and return them to France or Belgium on Royal Navy warships. Yusuf concedes there may be a ‘diplomatic argument’ but is unfazed by the fact that, under the United Nations Convention on the Laws of the Sea, France and Belgium would have to consent to the plan. He asserts – on an as-yet-obscure legal basis – that those countries have a ‘commitment under international law’ to process migrants.
