Is Reform UK a reasonable mainstream party? Perhaps we can stop pretending so after this week.

Maybe we can finally start having a conversation about what damage its ideology would do were it ever to hold sway in government, not only to the wretched souls targeted by it, and to the politics of the country, but to the very meaning of what it is to be British for every single one of us.

Nigel Farage’s strategy of the last year, to appear more mainstream in order to broaden his appeal, seems to have been abandoned. Reform now talks openly – proudly, even – about mass deportations without taking into account the validity of asylum claims. The British National Party dreamt of it 25 years ago; now Nigel Farage promises to enact it.

We may all be frogs on the boil, bathed for years in an increasingly extreme rhetoric around immigration, but it has been surreal to witness Nigel Farage celebrate the idea of people who have fled for their lives from Afghanistan being sent back under a returns agreement without even assessing the risk that would pose to them. Afghanistan is a country where people can be stoned to death for adultery and torture is an ever-present risk for critics of the regime. No scruples Nigel Farage, apparently.

Read more Rebecca McQuillan

The Reform leader was in West Lothian yesterday to unveil Tory defector Graham Simpson MSP. He received questions from a Scottish press corps who seemed strangely unconvinced by either........

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