Inside Reform’s plans for a fascist takeover
A British ICE, a concentration camp and the end of accountability
Initially published on Shado Mag. The recording I did will also be on Shado Mag's podcast “shado in focus,” which you can find in any podcast app, soon.
The ongoing federal occupation of Minneapolis has already led to two murders by ICE agents, that of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in the past two weeks. We have all seen videos and images of children being kidnapped, including five-year year old Liam Ramos being used as bait to get to his father before they were both sent to a “detention facility” in Texas, daycares being teargassed, schoolchildren fleeing in panic, cars broken into and the drivers disappeared. Toddlers are wetting themselves when ICE appears.
Closer to home, the state-sanctioned kidnappings are shedding new light on Reform’s own plans for the UK should they get in power, a plan they titled “Operation Restore Justice” (ORJ) [note: you can download it at the bottom of this post]. Public debater Tilly Middlehurst, who recently posted it on her Instagram page, described it as Reform’s “Project 2025,” a reference to the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation’s 2023 policy proposals that are being, in part, currently implemented by the Trump regime. At the time of writing, it is still available on Reform’s homepage as a “key policy.” Despite the ongoing horrors by ICE, we have yet to see nationwide outrage over Reform’s plans to bring those horrors to the UK.
Reform’s ORJ is nothing less than the total mobilisation of state power for the sole purpose of attacking those deemed unworthy of being in the UK. We need to be very clear about this. If you think what is happening in the US cannot happen here, you are simply not paying attention.
Here, I am going to go through the document in detail, before exploring what we can do about it.
Simply put, the plan is fascism
The document claims that the number of “people with no lawful right to remain” in the UK is over a million, and that the presence of these people is corrosive to “the rule of law, costs billions in accommodation and welfare costs, distorts low-wage labour markets, and signals to the world that Britain’s borders are open.” That each of these can be – and have been – thoroughly debunked is, of course, not the point.
Reform is telling a story, one in which an easily identifiable threat is the source of all of Britain’s problems. It is the illegals, those without papers, the refugees and asylum seekers, who are the reason why you cannot afford rent, or why you cannot get a GP appointment in time, or why your salary is shit. Not the lack of adequate social safety nets, or privatisation, or billionaires, or the fossil fuel industry.
Reform, a party almost entirely funded by millionaires, does not want you to pay too much attention to such trivial matters. Instead, look at all those foreigners with their foreign tongues and foreign ways.
Reform’s ORP proposes the following: a “five-year emergency programme intended to identify, detain and deport illegal migrants in the United Kingdom, and to deter any future build-up by demonstrating that unlawful presence now has an iron-clad consequence: swift removal. The plan combines an uncompromising legal reset with national scale enforcement through a new UK Deportation Command and a relentless foreign-policy campaign.” In other words, they plan to declare a national emergency, establish a British ICE (Deportation Command) and, in their own words, be relentless about it.
The next paragraph baselessly claims that this massive deployment of state resources, which will inevitably necessitate mass surveillance and potentially tens of thousands of British ICE agents (more on that later), would not only not cost the British taxpayer but would in fact save them a lot of money.
But how? Reform claims that “the current status quo already burns through over 7 billion per year, excluding many hidden costs such as the burden on the NHS.” This is the NHS that has been kept afloat by migrant labour since its inception, from the 1948 windrush generation up until the present day. Migrants are the reason the NHS exists, a story that is never told by those who want you kept distracted on “stop the boats” while more and more of us rely on private healthcare to compensate for the crisis in the NHS. If we stay distracted long enough, private healthcare will eventually take over the NHS, precipitating its complete dismantlement.
The central claim in any Reform statement is that ‘illegals’ cost the NHS, a claim that is often uncritically repeated in the media. At no point does anyone wonder whether we could regularise the ‘illegals,’ allow them to exit the black market to do regular work (and therefore pay taxes) including as NHS workers.
Removing all checks and balances
The bill that Farage would seek to pass as Prime Minister would include: disapplying “the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT)” which is “justified under the Vienna Convention doctrine of state of necessity.”
The rationale for this are two-fold: One, “Britain faces a national emergency in which uncontrolled illegal migration undermines public order, and two, “these treaties will otherwise be used by activist judges to frustrate deportations, even after the repeals of the HRA [Human Rights Act] and ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights.]”
In other words, it would not be enough for a Reform government to abandon HRA and ECHR as “activist judges” – the term used to describe judges who will not unconditionally obey Farage – would still be able to object based on the UK’s commitments to the aforementioned treaties. You read that right. By labelling “uncontrolled illegal immigration” as a “national emergency,” the UK government under Farage would seek to “disapply” – pro-refugee, anti-torture and anti-human trafficking treaties. In their stead, the UK would have a “Mass Deportation Bill” and a “British Bill of Rights,” devoid of any international obligations and responsibilities beyond those that Farage deems convenient.
What about this Vienna Convention they cite? Well, no one really knows. You see, Reform argues that “uncontrolled illegal migration” being a “national emergency” is what justifies this “state of necessity.” There’s one small problem though, the concept of “necessity” is not even used in the Vienna Convention.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that no one knows what Reform even means by that. The document was published in August 2025 and we still don’t know. We could, of course, all choose to pretend that there must be a secret reason that have evaded lawyers and anyone with the capacity to use a search engine, or we could reach the self-evident conclusion that Reform would make stuff up to justify greatly expanding state power to crackdown on “uncontrolled illegal migration.”
Reform wants to “create detention power without Hardial Singh constraints.” This is a reference to a 1983 Supreme Court decision setting “out the conditions that the Secretary of State (the Home Secretary) must meet in order lawfully to detain a migrant.” In summary, you can’t detain unless you intend to deport the person, you can only detain the person for a “reasonable” period, and if you can’t deport within the period you should not detain.
Anyone who follows the UK’s detention practices knows that the state has long had its own, convenient, definitions of what counts as “reasonable.” What Reform describes as “constraints” under the Hardial Singh principles cannot even be described as so, as the UK already detains migrants for years on end with no real justification. Even that low bar is too high for Reform though, which is why they want to get rid of it. By doing so, “activist lawyers” – it’s like “activist judges” but it describes instead lawyers who do not unconditionally obey Farage – would not be able to “secure their client’s bail.”
The idea is to get rid of all human rights-related constraints, no matter how rare they are even applied in the first place.
A British ICE, mass surveillance, and a concentration camp
Reform wants to create “an enforcement unit called UK Deportation Command, including an illegal Migrant Identification Centre – harnessing cutting edge data fusion.” To make this possible, Reform will make it possible for data to be “automatically” shared between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC [Revenue and Customs], DVLA [Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency], banks and police.”
What this means is simple: Your personal data will be made available to everyone, which necessitates mass surveillance on an industrial scale. Your GP not caring about your legal status will become impossible, and any police encounter will be an opportunity to harvest even more data. If you think we already live in a world where privacy is obsolete, it will get even worse, and we already live in a country where the ‘center-left’ Labour government is partnering with the most cartoonishly evil corporation, Palantir, paying them hundreds of millions of GBP worth of our tax money, and giving them our NHS data. What would a Farage government do with even more power?
Read: Revealed: Palantir deals with UK state total at least £670m – including £15m contract with nuclear weapons agency | The Nerve News
We now come to Reform’s proposal to create a “Secure Immigration Removal Centres” within 18 months, which refers to “modular accommodation built in remote parts of the country” which would include “robust perimeters and internal movement controls” to “prevent escapes” and “no more bail.”
This “would allow for up to 24,000 illegal migrants to be deported per month.” In non-Orwellian terms, these would be concentration camps, supposedly temporary, with the ability to detain and deport up to 24,000 people per month.
Just sit with this for a moment, and think of what is required to make these numbers work at this frequency: little to no rights, mass surveillance and data harvesting, and a massive increase in the state’s ability to kidnap, detain and deport nearly 300,000 people a year who are kept in camps in remote parts of the country, far from the inconvenience of lawyers and journalists.
If Children of Men or Years and Years come to mind, you’re not alone. Expect toddlers kidnapped with their parents. Expect torture and ill-treatment and all sorts of abuses. Reform would give itself 18 months to build those concentration camps, by which time they would have gotten rid of all those inconvenient treaties dealing with torture, human trafficking, and any iota of human rights.
Large-scale raids
We’re almost done. Reform will implement a “six-month assisted voluntary return window” preceding “large-scale raids” and offer “illegal migrants” a “financial incentive to self-deport.” Our tax money will be spent to pay people who could instead pay taxes. They would have six months to self-deport and if they don’t, well, British ICE will knock on doors, kidnap our neighbours and destroy families. It’s worth it though because remember, “uncontrolled illegal immigration” is a “national emergency” and, therefore, Reform will “show unflinching resolve to ensure that deportations are prioritised.” Kidnapping our neighbours will be their priority. Not the climate crisis – they won’t deal with it, their fossil fuel donors have made sure of that – or the NHS crisis or the cost of living crisis.
And you haven’t kept track of the language used, here are some of the words used in the report: “unflinching,” “relentless,” “iron-clad”, “reset.” Again, this is just fascist vocabulary, one which both Tories and Labour have already used. Farage wants to make it significantly worse.
One more thing – where would these people be deported to? “Farage will ensure the Foreign Office makes its highest priority the securing of return agreements with all relevant countries to take back their illegal migrants” using a “carrot and stick approach.” The former, “aid will be offered” and the latter “cessation of visa approvals and potentially sanctions.”
The most desperate asylum seekers come from countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea. Neither passport gets you into the UK in the first place. Securing return agreements would mean negotiating with the Taliban to force back people who fled the Taliban, negotiating with the one-party dictatorship that is the PFDJ to force back people who fled Eritrea, and negotiating with the Ayatollah regime to force back people who fled Iran, and so on. Kurds who fled Turkey or Iran, Uighurs who fled China, Rohingya who fled Myanmar – not having the right papers in the UK would effectively be the only fact that matters.
All of this is in the name of becoming “once again” a “sovereign nation with total control over its borders,” which is what Farage promised would occur if the UK cuts itself out of the EU with Brexit. I guess we’re not sovereign enough yet.
How do we resist?
In his recent radio show on LBC, James O’Brien asked “what would you do if it happened here? What would you do if Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage had their ICE agents marching through British streets murdering nurses?”
The good news here is that we have a good role model in how Minneapolitans have been responding to the American Gestapo: with mass, community-based, rage-filled defiance.
Friends and acquaintances I know who either live in Minneapolis or have been reporting there all report being amazed at how Minneapolitans are managing to organise an effective resistance to ICE while remaining entirely decentralised. Tens of thousands have undergone training to become so-called “ICE watchers.” ICE vehicles cannot drive through a single neighbourhood without a dozen cars following them and honking non-stop to alarm the neighbourhood that ICE is here. Parents are forming human chains in front of schools and daycares to protect their own children, especially racialised children who are being directly targeted by ICE – at the time of writing, Liam Ramos was the fourth child from his school district kidnapped by ICE agents – and the clergy are writing their wills and be prepared to put their body on the line to protect the vulnerable as they prepare for “a new era of martyrdom.”
I admit, the responses have moved me to tears more than once. I’m a racialised Arab man living in the UK and the threat of Reform looms large. The current Labour government is actively paving the way for a Reform takeover with its obsessive demonisation of asylum seekers and refugees, each week finding new ways to be cruel to people who have done nothing wrong.
All signs point to what I, as a historian who studies authoritarianism and the far right, would describe as a fascist takeover. It’s so blatantly apparent that I have to constantly remind myself that this is so, despite the British media being, for the most part, either indifferent to or actively cheering it on.
What makes it scarier is a simple question that remains unanswered: will the country’s white majority be willing to fight to stop their neighbours being kidnapped? The stakes are very high. In my case, it would mean nothing short of being forced to leave the UK before it gets ‘too bad’ because, as a non-citizen of Arab descent, I am all too aware of how little my life matters to this racist establishment.
So what about hope? There is no point, in my view, to simply sound the alarm bells, but I can’t help it. It still feels that enough people in the UK want fascism or, perhaps more importantly, that those who do not want fascism are not (yet) willing to do something about it. That’s the problem. A fascist takeover takes time. It’s a slow process at first, and then it speeds up. The difficulty is convincing enough people not to wait until it speeds up, to fight now while it’s still relatively easier to do.
In more ways than one, UK society is even less prepared to fight fascism than Americans were. This despite the fact that it was the UK, not the US, that was bombed by the Nazis at home. This country’s anti-fascist legacy, from the Battle of Cable Street onwards, seems forgotten, with the discourse often focusing instead on the latest vulnerable group to scapegoat, whether they be trans, or a ‘foreigner’ or, God forbid, both.
So yes, there are plenty of reasons to lose hope, but this would be wrong. After all, what better example of hope as a discipline than what Minneapolitans have been doing day in and day out? Not only is this white-majority city risking everything for its racialised neighbours, but a disproportionate amount of protesters – a vast majority, by all accounts – are white. That’s because people of colour are, understandably, too afraid to take part in the actions against a Gestapo that is actively targeting anyone who does not look white enough (which does not mean that peoples of colour have not been on the frontlines, just that they usually have to be more careful).
ICE can and – I am convinced of this – will be defeated. One thing to keep in mind is that those who perceive themselves to have absolute power are terrible at long-term thinking. Trump is bulldozing through in the belief that he can get away with it indefinitely. He is making a lot of enemies in the process, radicalising entire demographics of people who may have never been radicalised had Trump and his goons tried to be more subtle.
So I can tell you that even if Reform wins, they will not last forever. That is self-evidently true. Nothing lasts forever. I can remind you that the thousand year reich lasted only 12 years and that Hitler failed to achieve his goal of world domination. The problem is not whether fascism lasts forever but rather how much death and suffering it leaves in its wake. We don’t yet know how many people have died under ICE detention – at least hundreds are still “missing” to this day, with the number of dead almost certainly going to rise.
Are we in the UK going to wait and see what would happen with Reform in power? They are telling us what they want to do. We just need to believe them. We should believe them when they say that over a million people in the UK have no right to stay here. We should believe them when they say that they will use emergency measures for five years and ignore all human rights and civil liberties concerns. We should believe them when they speak of purifying the land through a “national reset.” We should believe them when they tell us that they want to establish a British ICE. We should believe them when they tell us that they want to build concentration camps and ensure their efficiency through mass surveillance.
Many Americans, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, have shown that “not in our name” and “never again” are only meaningful when accompanied with concrete actions. We in the UK have the benefit of living in a world that already includes ICE, and it is up to us to make sure that Trumpist horrors are not brought here.
What can you do?
Join / help build an anti-raids group as part of the Anti-Raids Network (ARN). Read the Migrants’ Rights Network's Anti-Raids Resources.
Get to know your neighbours. As Minneapolis has been showing us, getting to know your neighbours is one of the most effective ways to keep each other safe. Unless there’s a safety-related reason for not doing so, I recommend getting at least to a first name basis. Dropping a postcard during the holidays or baking something small and cute and offering it to them goes a long way too.
Read the Reform document in detail (download it below if you want to avoid clicking on their website) and spread the word. Make sure to associate Reform to Project 2025, ICE and Trump. We need to get rid of their “outsiders to the status quo” status and associate them to a brutal and fascist project that is already playing out catastrophically in the US. Reform wants to paint itself as he most British party, and we can instead make sure they are permanently tied to Trump.
From an electoral standpoint, we need to think of the best tactic to keep Reform out of power, permanently. Tactical voting might be needed. I’m not an expert on this, but I think a reasonable way forward would be to maximise the influence of the Green party of England and Wales (and their progressive equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland and Wales) while working on pressuring Labour to abandon Starmerite cowardice and appeasement of the Far Right. I don’t pretend to know how, but other people probably do, and we can’t afford to wait and find out what a prime minister Nigel Farage would do.
Learn from Minneapolis. Read:
From Minneapolis: I’ve Never Seen Unity Like This (Margaret Killjoy)
“Dispatch, Please Advise!” (Red-Winged Blackbird collective)
Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities (Crimethinc)
Minneapolis Responds to the Murder of Alex Pretti (Crimethinc)
I’m a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here’s how ICE observers are helping (Nicole Bedera)
ICE vs. Everyone (Erin West)
Welcome to the American Winter (Robert F. Worth)
The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE (Michael Gregory)
Lies and Lawlessness (Timothy Snyder)
State Terror Has Arrived (Masha Gessen) and The Battle for Minneapolis (Emily Witt).
The Reform document:
