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Nigel Farage said Reform UK’s deportation plan would not include women and children within its first five years, exposing divisions within the party over its controversial migration policy.
“We are not even discussing women and children at this stage, there are so many illegal males in Britain,” Farage told a press conference near Edinburgh as he announced the defection of a Conservative MSP to Reform UK on Wednesday.
Asked whether women and children would be exempt, he said: “I didn’t say exempt forever, but at this stage it is not part of our plan for the next five years.”
The comments by Reform UK’s leader mark a retreat from previous statements by the rightwing populist party after it launched its plans for a “legal reset” on migration.
On Tuesday, Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s chair, told the BBC that “phase 1” of the party’s plans to remove more than 650,000 people it estimates are in the UK illegally would involve adults, with unaccompanied children being removed “towards the latter half of that five years.”
Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, told LBC radio earlier on Wednesday that he would consider a deportation deal including women and children with the Taliban, the Islamist movement that governs Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, Farage himself said: “Women and children, everybody on arrival will be detained.” He added that “I’ve accepted already that how we deal with children is a much more complicated and difficult issue.”
The retreat comes as Reform UK gained its first representative in the Scottish parliament under Farage’s leadership with the defection of Conservative MSP Graham Simpson on Wednesday.
Simpson, who was elected to Holyrood in 2016, said he had decided to join the party after weeks of soul-searching.
An MSP for Central Scotland, the former journalist said he planned to help Reform UK set its manifesto policies ahead of Scottish parliamentary elections in May 2026.
Farage said Simpson would bring much-needed experience to Reform UK as it seeks to shake up Scottish politics. The party has won increasing support in council by-elections, as well as attracting defections from several councillors in recent months.
“Next May, the Scottish Conservatives will cease to be a political force in Scotland — and we will see the same result in Wales, parts of northern England and elsewhere,” Farage said on Wednesday.
Simpson is the third Scottish Conservative MSP to resign from the party in the past four months.
Polls indicate that the ruling Scottish National party remains on track to win a third decade in power at Holyrood next May as a rise in support for Reform UK splits the unionist vote, potentially taking votes from Labour and the Tories.
Farage said Reform UK would capitalise on the growing debate about immigration in Scotland, describing Glasgow as “the asylum capital of the UK”, where almost 4,000 illegal migrants are housed.
He said an increase in recorded crime in Glasgow had coincided with the arrival of thousands of undocumented males from cultures where women are treated as “second-class citizens”, claiming that Afghans were 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape than British-born people. “It’s cultural, not racial,” he said.
Farage also reiterated Reform UK’s support for increased domestic oil and gas production in the North Sea, his opposition to the “self-inflicted wound” of net zero policies that provide state aid for the renewables industry and backed fracking to extract natural gas.
“Countries that frack get rich, countries that don’t frack get poor,” he said. “We have the most expensive energy industrial prices in the world.”
At the press conference, Simpson denied claims made by a Tory party source that he had to apologise to a young female member of staff for acting in a “totally inappropriate, bullying and intimidating way towards her”.
“Absolutely untrue,” he said. “I certainly don’t have a problem with women.”
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