After Zia Yusuf’s announcement that Reform would create a ‘UK Deportation Command’ (UKDC), much of the media leapt to make comparisons with ICE in America. The Guardian described it as an ‘ICE-style deportation plan’, the Independent an ‘ICE-style UK border agency’, and even the Mail stated that ‘Reform is planning to create a British version of Trump’s ICE unit’. I spoke to Yusuf this morning, who was quick to dismiss these comparisons, telling me that ‘I have never wanted to create a British ICE’, and that ‘the reason why the media want to immediate call it a British ICE is that they want to take advantage of the very negative headlines around the excesses of ICE in America’. The Reform shadow home secretary argued that, ‘UK Deportation Command won’t carry weapons’, and that the party’s vision is to ‘properly’ fund and expand the existing Home Office deportation team, such that ‘for the first time the funding will be proportionate to the problem’.

Making this a reality will mean leaving the ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and, in music to my ears, ‘derogating from the 1951 Refugee Convention on a five-year emergency basis’

Making........

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