In his first speech as a member of the House of Commons, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called for a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Court of Human Rights, which continues to have say over the UK’s immigration policies despite Brexit.
Leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is the only way in which the United Kingdom will be able to put a stop to the illegal boat migrant crisis in the English Channel, Nigel Farage said in his maiden speech in parliament after being elected earlier this month to the Commons as the representative for Clacton.
“We will only stop this if we start deporting people that come illegally. Then they won’t pay the smugglers. But we will only do that by leaving the ECHR.
“But I have got a fun suggestion that I think would liven up politics, engage the public and see a massively increased turnout. Why don’t we have a referendum on whether we continue to be members of the ECHR?”
Farage, who led the campaign to leave the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum, has long been an opponent of the Strasbourg-based court. Despite successfully steering the country out of the EU, the UK’s membership in the ECHR was unaffected as it is technically a separate institution, despite sharing the same flag, anthem, and even campus in France as the EU.
The perils of Britain’s continued membership in the ECHR — a result of the refusal of three Conservative prime ministers to leave the court — were put on public display in the summer of 2022 when the European court controversially intervened to block a migrant removal flight to Rwanda, throwing the Boris Johnson-era scheme into legal limbo for years.
However, with the generally pro-European and anti-Brexit Labour Party of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer now in power, it is unlikely that the UK will leave the ECHR over the next five years, with Starmer already informing his European counterparts that he has no plans to leave the institution.
Noting the pro-European sentiment in the Labour-run House of Commons in which he now finds himself, Mr Farage, a former member of the European Parliament, said on Tuesday: “What I perhaps didn’t expect was to come here and to find I’m more outnumbered with my Reform team, more outnumbered here than we were in the European Parliament.
“Because there are more supporters of Brexit in the European Parliament than I sense there are in this Parliament of 2024.This is very much a Remainers’ Parliament, I suspect in many cases it’s really a rejoiners’ Parliament.”
The Reform leader also addressed the dire need for legal immigration reform, which under the previous Conservative governments ballooned to allowing in over a million foreigners per year, despite their previous promises to the public to cut numbers to the tens of thousands.
This open-door system, which first began under former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr Farage argued, has come to the “delight and joy of big companies and especially giant multinationals who have always wanted as much cheap labor as they can get and hell with the consequences for working-class families and people.”
“I believe that the population explosion is having the biggest impact on the quality of life of ordinary folk than any other issue,” Farage said.
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