Let's stop pretending that Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain Party and Nigel Farage's Reform UK are running different agendas. It is already clear that they co-exist to simultaneously fuel the rightward shift towards fascism in the UK.<\/p>\n
A week after Lowe's promise to deport hundreds of thousands of people a year, Reform is now promising to deport 288,000 a year (a curiously precise number) with five flights a day planned to deport people from this country to destinations unnamed and with no certainty that they would be granted the right to land.<\/p>\n
As The Guardian<\/a>\u00a0notes this morning:<\/p>\n Reform UK would create an ICE-style agency dedicated to deporting hundreds of thousands of people, as well as terminating the status of those with indefinite leave to remain (ILR), the party will say.<\/p>\n It would also ban the conversion of churches into mosques and fund a radical expansion of stop and search, the party\u2019s new home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, will also say in a speech on Monday. The deradicalisation programme Prevent would also have its mandate redrawn to focus on Islamist extremism.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So:<\/p>\n So what are the mainstream parties saying in response? According to The Guardian:<\/p>\n Labour said the plans were divisive and showed that Reform was planning \u201cto deport people who have followed the rules, worked hard and built their lives here \u2013 our friends, neighbours and colleagues\u201d.<\/p>\n The Labour party\u2019s chair, Anna Turley, said the policies were \u201ca direct attack on settled families and fundamentally un-British\u201d. She added: \u201cBritain is a proud, tolerant and diverse nation, which stands in opposition to the kind of divisive politics stoked by Reform.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This makes me very angry.<\/p>\n These plans aren't best described as \"divisive\". Nor are they about \"following the rules\". And neither do we just need to say we \"stand in opposition to divisive policies\". This is all just pathetically \"nice\". It's almost as if a Labour Party that appointed Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary is, in reality, happy for this to happen. That's because if it were serious in its opposition to Refor,m it would be saying that Reform is planning state terrorism against large parts of the UK population, and it is planning authoritarianism, and it is doing so in a way that will cost lives and livelihoods whilst the well-being of millions will be destroyed by the politics of hate that Farage is proposing.<\/p>\n This is not the time for pussy-footing as if Farage is a Tory.<\/p>\n This is the time for calling out fascism and the stark ugliness of what is being proposed here when what is planned is the destruction of well-being of people, communities, ways of life and, quite candidly, this country as it has always been - which is a small island state that has always offered a welcome to people coming and going, adding value when they decide to stay and make this their home, in all the rich diversity that we have to offer. Literally, what Farage is planning is to tear us apart. When will Labour, as the government, say that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n
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