The Liberal Democrats have condemned Reform’s mass deportation plans for “ripping up” human rights and involving potential payments to autocratic regimes.The party’s deputy leader Daisy Cooper said:(Nigel) Farage’s plan crumbles under the most basic scrutiny.The idea that Reform UK is going to magic up some new places to detain people and deport them to, but don’t have a clue where those places would be, is taking the public for fools.Of course Nigel Farage wants to follow his idol Vladimir Putin in ripping up the human rights convention.Winston Churchill would be turning in his grave.

Doing so would only make it harder for each of us as individuals to hold the government to account and stop it trampling on our freedoms.On potential payments to the Taliban to take back Afghan migrants, Cooper added:Reform’s Taliban tribute plan would send British taxpayers’ cash to fund their oppressive regime, fuelling the persecution of Afghan women and children and betraying our brave armed forces who sacrificed so much fighting the Taliban.Clearly British values mean nothing to Farage and his band of plastic patriots.Unveiling Reform UK’s “Operation Restoring Justice” at a press conference this morning, Nigel Farage revealed a five-year plan to detain and deport all migrants who arrive in the UK illegally and suggested 600,000 people could be sent back over five years.The Reform party leader confirmed that women and children would also be detained under the plans.

He was thin on details and was unable to name a single RAF base to be converted into secure detention facilities, despite this forming a central part of his party’s deportation policy.Farage warned of a “genuine threat to public order” without action to tackle illegal migration, which he has described as a “scourge” on the country.Reform pledged to scale up detention capacity for asylum seekers to 24,000 and secure deals with countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran to return migrants to their countries.Reform said it would repeal the Human Rights Act, leave the European convention on human rights (ECHR), and disapply the 1951 refugee convention and UN convention against torture.Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said Reform UK’s plan does not stand up to scrutiny and accused Farage of “ripping up” human rights laws with his proposals.

A Reform UK government would pay the Taliban to accept the return of migrants who entered Britain illegally, senior party figure Zia Yusuf said.Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch accused Reform of “copying our homework” with its illegal immigration proposals.Badenoch said the only workable parts of Farage’s pledges had come from Conservative policy but that Reform was “not doing the thinking” required to deliver.A screening tool used to assess the support needs of domestic violence victims has “obvious problems”, Jess Phillips, minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said earlier, adding she was reviewing systems to support victims.Peers could be forced to resign if they do not contribute enough to the House of Lords, under reforms ministers hope to make.

Thanks for joining us.We are closing this blog now.You can find all our latest coverage of UK politics here.Caroline Davies is a writer for the GuardianThe main screening tool used to determine which domestic violence victims need support has “obvious problems” and should be replaced, the UK safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, has said.Phillips is reviewing systems, including the Dash (domestic abuse, stalking, harassment and “honour-based” violence) questionnaire, largely relied on by police, social services and healthcare workers across the UK since 2009 to assess risk.

Academics and others working in the sector have raised concerns about the 27-question tool, which assesses answers to decide which respondents are deemed high risk so they can be referred to specialist care.Phillips told the BBC’s File on 4 that she was reviewing the entire system supporting victims but said it would not change overnight.“My instinct is that the tool doesn’t work, but until I can replace it with something that does, we have to make the very best of the system that we have,” Phillips said.Any risk assessment tool was “only as good as the person who is using it” and people had been killed even when deemed to be at high risk, she said.You can read the full story here:Jessica Elgot is the Guardian’s deputy political editorLabour plans to remove peers who do not contribute enough to the House of Lords and to press ahead with plans for a retirement age of 80 from the upper house.

Writing for the Telegraph, the leader of the House of Lords, Angela Smith, said a select committee would consider the next stage of Lords reform after the abolition of hereditary peers.Lady Smith said that removing the last hereditary peers was “by no means the limit of the government’s Lords reform ambitions” but said the new committee would consider carefully how the next phase would work.The final stages of the bill, which will abolish the seats for the 86 remaining hereditary peers, will go through parliament this year.“The introduction of a mandatory retirement age for peers and a participation requirement are both clear among our stage-two manifesto commitments,” Smith said in her article, but said there should be a “collaborative way forward”.The committee will be made up of cross-party peers and consider ways to implement the retirement age and the measure of participation which will be required.

You can read the full story here:As a reminder, Reform’s leadership said this morning that it would repeal the Human Rights Act, leave the European convention on human rights (ECHR), and disapply the 1951 refugee convention and UN convention against torture.The human rights lawyer Adam Wagner KC said Reform’s plans were not only “legally extreme” but fundamentally misleading.“A lot of the rights contained in the European Convention come from British common law: the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and the right not to be tortured,” he said.You can read more reaction from legal experts reacting to Reform’s deportation proposals here.My colleague Diane Taylor has reported on the ill health many migrants arrive in the UK with after making the dangerous Channel crossing.

The focus of her piece is Manston, a former military base outside Ramsgate in Kent used as a holding centre for migrants waiting for their claims to be processed.Staff have told the Guardian that the site is a wholly inadequate place to accommodate traumatised asylum seekers.Here is an extract from her story:The staff members said some of their colleagues had little concern for the asylum seekers who find themselves there.One was suspended after waking someone up with their foot.Another was sacked after pulling a sleeping boy to his feet and making disparaging comments about him…An investigation was launched earlier this year after a racist message – “fuck off you [N-word]s, go back to where you came from” – was reportedly “blasted out” on portable radios used by Home Office contractors.

The ministry and its contractor, Mitie, condemned the language used…Staff also said a common response from hostile colleagues to new arrivals’ requests for pain medication or permission to sleep was: “Well if you don’t like it here you shouldn’t have got on the boat.”The Society of Labour Lawyers, a thinktank which provides legal advice to the Labour party and campaigns for policies to increase access to justice, has said that Reform’s mass deportation plans are not “rooted in reality”.George Peretz KC, chair of the Society of Labour Lawyers, said:The Reform party’s policy is simply not rooted in reality.They want to institute a mass deportation programme with no real, or workable, idea of where people would be deported to.Reform’s policy would require a returns policy to be negotiated with regimes such as the Taliban and Iran, and may, by their own admission, involve paying those regimes to do so.

Which is impractical and extremely concerning, as well as unlawful (as our own courts ruled in the Rwanda case).Kemi Badenoch has also said that leaving the ECHR is not a plan in itself, in response to Reform UK’s immigration plans.“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, we put out a deportation bill in May.The stuff that actually works in what he said has come from there,” she said.She said that the Conservatives will announce their plans on whether to leave the European Convention on Human Rights at the upcoming party conference.

“We will announce at our conference exactly what we’re going to do and how.“Saying you’re going to leave the ECHR is not a plan,” Badenoch said.It will have an impact on things like the Good Friday Agreement and needs to be done in a way that does not destabilise the country or economy, she said.Some 659 people arrived in the UK on Monday after crossing the English Channel, according to figures from the Home Office.The cumulative number of arrivals in 2025 now stands at a provisional total of 28,947.

This is 50% higher than at the same point last year, when the total stood at 19,294, and 47% higher than at this stage in 2023, when the total was 19,741.There were nine boats that arrived on Monday, which suggests an average of around 73 people per boat.Some 52,189 people have arrived in the UK using this route since the 2024 general election.Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch refused to confirm how she would set up a returns agreement with Taliban-run Afghanistan, if her party wins the next general election.Speaking to the PA news agency during a visit to a farm in Essex, Mrs Badenoch said:We need to make sure that anyone who comes to our country illegally is deported.

We have experience in government of finding some of these deportations difficult.That is why we had the third country deterrent, which was the Rwanda plan.Some countries will not cooperate.But from what Reform has announced today, they haven’t done the thinking, they’ve just copied our homework, but they don’t understand the reasons behind them.She continued:If people come to our country illegally, they need to be returned.

We are not in a situation where we can take people from every country in the world, just because they arrive on our shores.The prime minister disagrees with Nigel Farage that Britain is on the precipice of civil disorder over unhappiness about small boat migrants, Downing Street has said.No 10 said the government was setting out “serious” solutions to the issue, not gimmicks.The prime minister’s official spokesman said:It makes him angry frankly, because it’s unfair on ordinary working people who pay the price from the cost of hotels to our public services struggling under the strain.That’s why we’re taking the action we are, to recognise the strength of feeling about this.

The pressure that it puts on public services and that’s why we’re taking serious practical action to address this issue, not just returning back to the old gimmicks, the old solutions that failed to deal with this.Keir Starmer’s spokesman was asked whether he agreed with Reform UK’s leader who told an event in Oxford that he believed the country was at risk of civil disorder.He said:No, and I think what the prime minister is focused on is dealing with the concerns that people have.People have understandably have felt like their living standards have stagnated over the last 15 years, and that’s why growing the economy and raising living standards is the government’s number one priority.The UK coastguard has confirmed its involvement in the rescue of “a number” of small boat crossings from the English Channel on Tuesday.

Green Party MP Ellie Chowns has said Nigel Farage’s “inflammatory” rhetoric is designed to whip up public anger and said the proposals he outlined today are “unworkable”.Chowns said:More inflammatory rhetoric from Farage at a sensitive time in many communities.This dangerous toxic bluster is clearly aimed at whipping up anger, hatred and even disorder.The way he talks about asylum seekers – our fellow global citizens – is reprehensible.The policy proposals themselves are unworkable.

They rely on ripping up swathes of international law and would likely face many legal obstacles in the UK courts that could use British common law to block such cruelty.Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan and Syria feature in the top ten countries for asylum seekers in the UK – all places where people face oppression, conflict, extreme poverty or famine.Asylum claims from people arriving from these countries have high approval rates – almost 100% in the case of Sudan and Syria.Yet former Reform UK Chair Zia Yusuf has suggested that a Reform government would pay brutal regimes like the Taliban to accept the return of migrants – including unaccompanied children.They must know what is likely to happen to these people when they are returned – they will likely be abused, tortured or executed.

This is not who we are as a nation.The vast majority of the British public are willing to show compassion towards those fleeing the terrible situations they leave behind.Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative party leader, has posted on X saying that Reform’s “immigration plan looks v familiar”.She wrote: “We set out our Deportation Bill months ago.He’s copied our homework but missed the lesson.

At Conference, we’ll show you not just the answers, but our working.That’s how we’ll build trust with the public and get real results.”Badenoch faces a pivotal few months as she prepares to deliver her first party conference speech as Tory leader.She is trying to fend off a potential leadership challenge from her shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, who has shifted to the right of Badenoch on some issues, including calling to leave the ECHR.The Conservative party sits in third place in the polls on 17%.

Reform is consistently leading the polls.As extreme rhetoric around illegal immigration has become normalised, Badenoch suggested the setting up of “camps” earlier this month when speaking about possible alternatives to using hotels to house asylum seekers.Her comments were picked up on by the media but after a few days not much more was made of her suggestion.The Liberal Democrats have condemned Reform’s mass deportation plans for “ripping up” human rights and involving potential payments to autocratic regimes.The party’s deputy leader Daisy Cooper said:(Nigel) Farage’s plan crumbles under the most basic scrutiny.

The idea that Reform UK is going to magic up some new places to detain people and deport them to, but don’t have a clue where those places would be, is taking the public for fools.Of course Nigel Farage wants to follow his idol Vladimir Putin in ripping up the human rights convention.Winston Churchill would be turning in his grave.Doing so would only make it harder for each of us as individuals to hold the government to account and stop it trampling on our freedoms.On potential payments to the Taliban to take back Afghan migrants, Cooper added:Reform’s Taliban tribute plan would send British taxpayers’ cash to fund their oppressive regime, fuelling the persecution of Afghan women and children and betraying our brave armed forces who sacrificed so much fighting the Taliban.

Clearly British values mean nothing to Farage and his band of plastic patriots.A record 28,076 migrants have crossed the Channel to Britain in small boats this year, a 46% rise on the same period in 2024, government data showed on Monday.Many of these people were likely fleeing war, famine or persecution, or seeking better economic opportunities/joining family members in the UK.Kolbassia Haoussou, director of survivor leadership and influencing at the charity Freedom from Torture, has reacted to Reform saying it would disapply the 1951 Refugee Contention and the UN Convention Against Torture.Haoussou said:This is not who we are as a country.

Here in the UK, public support for upholding the torture ban has grown significantly in recent years.People know that turning a blind eye is just not an option.Men, women and children are coming to the UK looking for safety.They are fleeing the unimaginable horrors of torture in places like Afghanistan, Sudan and Iran.And they desperately need our protection