So Farage has pulled another rabbit from his battered old hat – five deportation flights a day, packed with asylum seekers and bound for anywhere that’ll have them. It’s meant to sound tough, a quick fix to what he insists is Britain’s “invasion.” In reality it’s pantomime, a slogan with wings.
Here’s the bit he skips. Planes don’t just land where they like. International aviation law means you need clearance to enter airspace, and the receiving airport has to agree to process the passengers. Without that, the aircraft doesn’t even touch the runway. And even if it did, no immigration staff, no ground crew, no refuelling – just a jet sat there with the doors locked and the engines cooling. In short: an airborne pub boast.
Commercial airlines won’t go near it. They’re liable for every soul they carry. If a deportee is refused entry, the airline must fly them back at its own expense. That’s why they check visas so carefully at the gate. Now imagine the PR disaster – “British Airways, now flying tourists, business travellers and bulk-rate deportations.” No chance. Which leaves government charters – eyewateringly expensive, negotiated country by country, and at the mercy of regimes who have no incentive to cooperate. Remember the Rwanda plan? Hundreds of millions down the drain and not a single flight has left. Farage wants to multiply that by five every single day.
And there’s another snag. Even if by some miracle you got people onto planes, those same aircraft couldn’t pick up fee-paying passengers on the return leg if the deportees weren’t accepted. Aviation runs on turnaround. An empty plane grounded abroad is just a giant money pit on tarmac. Airlines won’t risk it, crews won’t fly it, and taxpayers won’t foot the bill forever.
Farage likes to borrow from Trump’s playbook, but geography isn’t on his side. The US can bus people to Mexico or run short-hop flights into Central America under long-standing bilateral deals. Even then, Trump’s big “mass deportations” never happened – Obama’s totals were higher. What Farage is proposing is Trump’s empty theatre, without the land border or the agreements to make even a fraction of it work.
And here’s the final kicker. Even if Britain left the ECHR tomorrow, it wouldn’t change a thing. Airlines would still be bound by international aviation law. Countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea still wouldn’t take people back without agreement. And the UK would still be bound by the Refugee Convention it signed up to in 1951. So all scrapping the ECHR would do is strip Britons of our own legal protections while leaving Reform’s fantasy flights grounded at Heathrow.
What we’re left with is this: Farage’s five-flights-a-day deportation plan is a stunt. It ignores law, logistics, diplomacy and economics. It’s the political equivalent of promising to tow Britain out into the Atlantic to avoid migrants in dinghies. The only things likely to be deported under this wheeze are reason, humanity, and what little credibility Britain still has abroad.
Of course, Farage's fans will lap it up, like they do the rest of his populist drivel.
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