A Nigel Farage government will shut down the nation’s asylum system altogether, as the Reform UK leader pleaded for Britain to return to normality, with functioning borders and a government that puts its own people first.
In the latest big-ticket launch, apparently triggered by a growing sense that Britain may be heading towards a snap election in which mandate-less Prime Minister Andy Burnham means to shoot Farage’s fox, Reform UK have announced a planned return to historic norms of the country functioning normally and in its own interests. While this may seem radical, given how far Britain has deviated from this historic and global norm, Farage insisted it was nothing out of the ordinary and represented a simple, sensible border policy most countries have long had.
Speaking in front of a giant inflatable boat — a 1:1 scale replica of a real migrant boat that recently landed 230 illegals on British shores — Mr Farage said years of government policy giving the country de facto open borders had created a national security crisis, where the enormous costs of migrant arrivals are forced on the taxpayers, and the criminal implications are forced on the nation’s women and girls.
HYTHE, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 12: Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, speaks in front of a replica dinghy used by migrants to cross the English Channel, during a press conference on October 12, 2026 in Hythe, England. Reform UK are proposing a five year ban on migrants being granted asylum, and to shut down Britain’s asylum system for a full parliamentary term if elected. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
The Brexit pioneer said: “We know the statistics, we know the greater likelihood of people from Afghanistan to commit sexual assault than people born in Britain. These are cultural issues”.
Because the situation has deteriorated so appallingly, to the point where the government no longer knows who is in the country, it is now necessary to shut down the asylum system altogether, and get control of the borders so to take stock. Stating a Reform government would suspend the asylum system for up to five years if elected, Mr Farage said he would “end the asylum scam”:
… the public want action, not just a continual series of false promises, or the absolutely extraordinary current government line ‘the numbers are coming down so that’s OK, then. It’s only 20,000 this year, so that’s OK then‘. If I’d said you a decade ago 20,000 people in the first nine months would be processed through the Port of Dover, having come by dinghy, you literally wouldn’t have believed me.
Do you see the point I’m making? All we’re asking here is for normality, all we’re asking is for normal service to be resumed. So yes, we will end the asylum system for up to five years. And why will we do that? Because we’re in the most terrible mess as a country. We literally have no idea who is here… right at the heart of that are Non Government Organisations [NGOs], multiple charities, and publicly traded companies all of whom are the direct beneficiaries of illegal migration. Many of them making vast amounts of money out of the system.
While the migrant boats crisis is perhaps the most visible single indicator of government failure on border control, as noted by groups including Migration Watch, boat arrivals only account for less than one-in-ten of net arrivals each year. The whole migration issue undermines faith in government, Farage said, saying both Labour and Tory governments in recent decades had “betrayed” the hopes of the British people to lock in border control, and that the simple fairness question was turning people away from the legitimacy of the state.
Mr Farage went on:
We just want this to be a normal country. That’s all. Nothing radical or crazy, we want to get back to being a normal country. A country that puts national security at the top of the agenda. A country that does everything it can to protect its own citizens… there is a growing feeling in this country, a growing sense of anger… there’s a growing sense and feeling not just of fairness, not just that it’s wrong, but that frankly we treat people who come here illegally better than we treat our own people.
Between the government and its allies in the press, mass migration has always been a story Westminster would rather wasn’t being spoken about at all, and Farage pointed back to when he first started talking about the migrant boats and was roundly condemned for it, including being told it wasn’t a real issue and that he was wrong to try and turn it into one. Yet Farage’s early intervention appears to have been vindicated years later, with border control remaining one of the top-polling policy areas of concern for British voters and pushing Reform UK up the polls, as it did the Brexit referendum over a decade ago.
Farage said he recalled the I remember the “howls of indignation” when he first started talking about the boats, including claims “that somehow I’d lost touch with reality, that I was desperately seeking a new political life now that Brexit was done, and of course much, much abuse”. He added:
Well, now that 200,000 have come I can say ‘I was right’. I was well ahead of the rest of the pack… I was the first person to go and film one of the migrant hotels, and this wasn’t the first time that I’d talked about this subject. Indeed in 2015 as the first boats started across the Mediterranean I stood up in the European Parliament and said if the European Union launches a refugee policy that says basically anyone who crosses that sea can stay, millions will come.
Farage’s deputy, Zia Yusuf, also spoke on Monday morning, pointing to the fiscal cost of Britain’s asylum crisis at a time when endless other areas of government funding are left begging for cash. He noted that the £32 billion asylum bill could fund 40 “state-of-the-art hospitals”, 70,000 new police officers for five years, or even massively re-equip the armed forces.
Yusuf claimed the asylum bill could pay for “two Queen Elizabeth aircraft carriers, two Type 26 anti-submarine frigates, four Astute Class attack submarines, nine Poseidon submarine hunters, 70 F-35B Lightning Fighter Jets, and 150 Challenger 3 Battle Tanks”, which would represent a meaningful boost to the British armed forces for decades to come.
But more fundamentally, he said, border control was a simple question of survival. Yusuf said: “If we fail to do that, if we fail to uphold the law, if we fail to say that Britain’s borders mean something, [then] we will not have a country at all”.
