In its first big policy announcement since Nigel Farage took over as leader on June 3rd, Reform UK has said it would reduce net legal migration to zero.
The pledge radically sets Reform apart from the Conservatives and Labour, which have both spent decades proving they cannot be trusted when it comes to controlling Britain’s borders. It also comes just days after polling for the Centre for Migration Control (CfMC) suggested that around half of Britons want to see a freeze on all “non-essential” immigration.
Robert Bates, who is research director for the CfMC migration think tank, said that Reform is “right to identify that drastic measures are needed to reverse this dire position.” He told The European Conservative:
A consensus has loomed over British politics for the last two decades. Politicians of all stripes have clung to a naive belief that net migration needs to be running at the hundreds of thousands for the British economy to grow.
In reality, the UK has let in over 2.4 million people in the last two years, putting great strain on our public services, our housing market, and leading to an increasingly fractious society.
The measures which need to be taken are clear, and include scrapping the health and social care visa, abandoning the Tories’ ludicrous ambition of letting in hundreds of thousands of international students each year, and clamping down on those businesses which hand out visas to foreign workers rather than investing in the British workforce.
Questioned on the practicalities of bringing net migration to net zero, Farage told GB News that this would still see around 600,000 migrants entering Britain each year—a figure that is close to the number of people who emigrated from Britain in 2023.
When journalist and broadcaster Camilla Tominey suggested that the idea was “ludicrous,” a “pipedream,” Farage responded:
If we need more than 600,000 people a year, we’re doomed. Doomed. We’re finished. There will be no public services. Nothing will be left. The fabric of society will be gone.
Farage was greeted in his prospective parliamentary seat of Clacton by an enormous and excitable crowd—an event that was somewhat overshadowed by a young yob throwing a milkshake over the Reform leader. This very tangible protest, however, had the adverse effect of prompting both the Conservative home secretary and Labour shadow home secretary to tweet in defence of Farage, who himself responded with a customary quip.
Just hours later, Labour leader Keir Starmer repeatedly failed to guarantee whether net migration would even fall (never mind hit zero) under his likely incoming government. He instead said that figures “need to come down, we have got a plan to bring them down but you can’t wish them down.”
Bates told this publication that “for too long the British public have been ignored on this issue. It is about time that they were heard.”
