Nigel Farage has rolled back on his pledge to deport “absolutely anyone” arriving in the UK on small boats just 24 hours after making it at a combative press conference in Oxford that led to accusations of ugly and destructive rhetoric.
Farage announced plans to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in the first five years of a Reform government and to pay despotic regimes such as the Taliban to take them back. He also said: “Yes, women and children, everybody on arrival, will be detained.”
At a press conference near Edinburgh on Wednesday, however, when asked whether his comments on securing women’s safety in the UK rang hollow when he had committed to deporting women and girls back to countries where they faced oppression and sexual violence, Farage said that was not true.
At an event to introduce the MSP Graham Simpson as the latest defection from the Scottish Conservatives to Reform, Farage said: “We’re not even discussing women and children at this stage, there are so many illegal males in Britain.”
Asked if that meant women and children were exempt from the plans, he said: “I didn’t say exempt for ever, but at this stage it is not part of our plan for the next five years.”
Farage similarly rowed back on his proposal to renegotiate the Good Friday agreement after political parties in Northern Ireland condemned his comment as reckless and irresponsible.
He said “the Northern Ireland situation is deeply complex” and “that will not be at the forefront of what we do”.
Farage also denied having a “woman problem”. He said increasing numbers of women had joined Reform over the summer and that they were “becoming very strong forces in the party”.
Describing Reform as a “rapidly evolving political movement in Scotland”, he hailed his party’s “remarkable result” in the Hamilton byelection in June, when his candidate Ross Lambie won 26% of the vote, and said there were 200 potential candidates being vetted across the country. He predicted “pretty much a wipeout” for the Scottish Conservatives at next May’s Holyrood elections.
Simpson becomes Reform’s sole MSP sitting in the Scottish parliament, and its second MSP overall after the former Tory Michelle Ballantyne’s defection in the last parliamentary session.
He is the third MSP to have quit the Scottish Conservative party in recent months: Jamie Greene defected to the Scottish Lib Dems in April, citing his former party’s “Trump-esque” style, and Jeremy Balfour left to sit as an independent last week, blaming “reactionary politics”.
A Scottish Conservatives spokesperson said the party remained focused on “holding the SNP and Labour to account”.
Simpson said Reform represented “an opportunity to create something fresh” for voters, adding that he did not expect to be made the party’s leader in Scotland simply because he had defected. A number of Scottish Tory councillors have also defected to Reform since the last general election.
Farage told reporters that he believed attitidues to immigration were “not dissimilar” north and south of the border. A number of anti-immigration protests have taken place outside asylum seekers’ accommodation in Scotland over the summer, in Falkirk, Perth and Aberdeen, but not on the scale of those in England. Participants were often outnumbered by anti-racism counter-protests.
The Scottish Tory leader, Russell Findlay, said on Monday that recent protests outside an asylum hotel in Falkirk were understandable after an Afghan asylum seeker raped a local teenager. Sadeq Nikzad, 29, was jailed for nine years in June after attacking a 15-year-old girl in Falkirk town centre in October 2023.
Farage said his press conference on Tuesday had “sparked the beginning of a national debate” and that “even the prime minister hasn’t attacked me on the idea that we should be deporting people that come illegally”. Downing Street accused him of not being serious about his plans.
Simpson denied at Wednesday’s event that he had been obliged to apologise for his behaviour towards a junior female staffer, after a Scottish Conservative source briefed reporters that he was “a pathetic, nasty little man who won’t be missed”.
“Just last year he had to apologise to a young female member of staff for acting in a totally inappropriate, bullying and intimidating way towards her,” the source said.
Simpson said the allegation was “absolutely untrue”. “Anything internally will be dealt with internally and that’s the way I’ll leave it,” he said. “I certainly don’t have a problem with women.”
