The UK’s right-wing Reform Party leader Nigel Farage has received a blizzard of criticism after promising to deport 600,000 asylum seekers. 

Farage revealed the plan for Trump-style mass deportations of asylum seekers, including children, to counter what he claimed was rising anger among Britons towards the rising number of arrivals of small boats carrying migrants. 

Speaking at a press event in London, he said his party would remove 600,000 asylum seekers under the first parliament of a Reform government, if they win power. 

Farage also 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. 

The plan would require the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights – a mover opposed by aa majority of Britons. 

Reform has said it would also ban anyone who arrives illegally from being able to claim asylum and allow asylum seekers to be detained until deportation.

Responding to Farage’s announcement a spokesman for the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the PM “understands and shares the frustration people feel about levels of illegal migration.” 

Labour Party minister Matthew Pennycook said the plans were like “something put together on the back of a fag (cigarette) packet”. 

The plan was condemned by the UK’s Refugee Council, which said “toxic narratives” were fuelling fear and division and real public concerns “are being exploited for political gain”. 

Lawyers and campaigners have also criticised plans to quit the ECHR, with the proposals being dubbed both “legally extreme” and “a gift to repressive regimes”. 

Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, said if Reform’s policies were implemented it would be the most radical attempt by any European country in recent decades to deal with illegal immigration, as it would entail a willingness to return asylum seekers “to countries where they are at risk of torture”. 

Liberal Democrat spokesperson Daisy Cooper said: “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,” she said. 

Reform’s announcement comes as the Labour government attempts to take control of the migration narrative, as small boat arrivals hit record highs, and the UK has seen a string of violent protests in response to the housing of migrants in hotels. 

In 2024, Britain received a record 108,100 asylum applicants, almost 20 per cent more than a year earlier. 

Individuals from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Bangladesh made up the largest number of applicants for asylum last year. 

Despite holding just four of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, Farage ‘s party has gained momentum by seizing on public frustration over successive governments’ inability to bring down the number of migrants coming by boat. National polls have suggested that support for Reform equals or surpasses that of the ruling Labour Party and the Conservatives. 

The party hopes to displace the Conservatives as the country’s main party on the right by the next national election, due by 2029.