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The hard-right Reform UK party unveiled plans on Monday if it wins power for “the largest military operation” in the Channel “since World War II” to stop migrants crossing on small boats.
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The proposal, which experts and other political parties promptly rubbished, comes days after thousands of migrants entered Spain’s North African exclave of Ceuta from neighbouring Morocco, reigniting Europe’s debate over irregular migration.
Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party said it would detail proposals to deploy Britain’s navy to return the vessels to France, a policy proposed and swiftly abandoned by the Conservative government in 2020.
In a repeat of the reception then, military experts and opposition parties argued the plans were unworkable and Britain did not even have the right military resources to implement them.
The proposals come as Farage and Reform, which had led national polls for around 18 months but has seen that lead disappear in recent weeks, have faced a series of scandals and official probes into their finances.
In the latest, parliament’s standards commissioner said on Monday he had opened an investigation last week into an alleged “failure to declare” a financial interest by the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice.
The commissioner was already probing Farage for a separate alleged breach of parliamentary rules, but that was suspended when the Reform head resigned as an MP to trigger a by-election next week that he is contesting.
Meanwhile, the next general election in the UK is not due until 2029.
Like other far-right parties across Europe, Reform lawmakers have seized on the mass influx of migrants into Spain’s Ceuta last week to insist it shows the perils of irregular migration.
“Reform UK will respond by launching the largest military operation in the English Channel since World War Two,” Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesman, said ahead of the plan being published Monday. He visited Ceuta over the weekend.
“Nigel Farage will order his Majesty’s Royal Navy to ensure that not a single unauthorised vessel crossing the English Channel makes it to the shores of the United Kingdom,” he said.
“Those who attempt it will be intercepted by our Armed Forces and returned to France.”
Quizzed on the proposals in interviews Monday, Yusuf insisted they were workable.
“If the French object to it, then as I said, we go back to the negotiating table about the money that Britain’s paying France for this and we get into a diplomatic argument,” he told Sky News.
Britain and France signed a new three-year deal in April to stop irregular migrants making the risky Channel journeys, with London paying Paris up to €766 million in return for boosted law enforcement of the issue.
Former Royal Navy commander Tom Sharpe told the AFP news agency that Reform’s plans were “not really where the solution lies.”
“There’s a lot the Navy can do but the idea of…ferrying people back to France, against the French’s will, to me just doesn’t add up.”
Irregular migration is a hot-button issue in the UK. Up to 31 July, 14,281 illegal migrants had arrived in the UK on small boats since the start of 2026, a fall of more than 42% over the same period last year.
But a daily record was set on 29 July when 752 people arrived in a single day.
Additional sources • AFP
