09.10.2025

ICE has turned some American cities into occupied zones

Rightwing bidding war

Kemi Badenoch promises a UK version of America’s ICE, part of a desperate attempt to stem Tory support haemorrhaging to Reform. Not only does this threaten mass deportations, whole areas would be subject to a reign of terror, says Eddie Ford

We have just had the Conservative Party conference in Manchester. Of course, it is not really a conference - more a rally, where the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, and members of the shadow cabinet parade in front of TV cameras and speak to a hand-picked audience that is essentially there to clap, not to question or take part in debate.

It does have to be said that the audience was noticeably smaller than last year, with the conference appearing very lacklustre - hardly surprising, given the truly abysmal poll ratings. For example, the members’ ‘debate’ on ‘free speech’ was attended by only 55 people. Well, there was also the embarrassment of misspelling the country’s name “Britian” on a chocolate bar given out in a goodie bag to the ‘delegates’.¹

Interestingly, before the conference, Badenoch attempted to counter the threat of Reform UK with the promise of a British version of Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency - a theme which she continued in her opening speech in Manchester on October 5, her first as party leader. Badenoch’s proposed “Removals Force” will be tasked with deporting 150,000 people a year and given £1.6 billion, not to mention “sweeping new powers”, if the Tories somehow manage to win the next election. This would include the ability to use facial recognition technology without warning to help identify those eligible for removal, even though Badenoch has denounced plans for digital identity cards on civil liberties grounds - which seems like an impossible square to circle, but consistency is not something you expect from a Tory Party leader.

Under the plans, Badenoch continued, the taskforce would be expected to “work closely” with the police, and officers would be required to conduct immigration checks on everyone they stop or arrest. Apparently, we are told, the ICE model has proved to be a “successful approach” in removing migrants who have illegally entered the USA - deporting nearly 200,000 people in the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency (at a total cost of a cool $170 billion). Therefore, at least in her imagination, it is something to be emulated as part of her perverted bidding war with Nigel Farage.

Deportations

The Reform leader has promised to deport up to 600,000 people in its first parliamentary term if his party wins the next election, so Badenoch can now better that by an extra 50,000. She would have us believe that it is about saving money on hotels, and all the rest of it. This is an obvious lie, of course. The Labour government, under intense political pressure from its right, has said it will get rid of housing migrants in hotels by the end of this parliament. But veracity does not matter. Rather, it is about performative cruelty - Kemi Badenoch wanting to be seen as even nastier than Reform and Nigel Farage.

More to the point, where the hell they do they put these 150,000 or more people? Now, the US appears to be handing migrants back to Iran, according to a foreign ministry official, Hossein Noushabadi - who stated that most of those being flown back to Iran had entered the US illegally.² It is a grotesque example of rare cooperation between two countries that are formally enemies.

Well, maybe a British government under Kemi Badenoch, or even Sir Keir Starmer, will come to a similar agreement. But what about people who originated in other ‘trouble spots’, like Syria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somaliland. Libya, Afghanistan … Where will they put these people? In the real world, they cannot move 150,000 to Uganda … or to France, on the grounds that they came over in a small boat from that country.

Of course, Badenoch said that a future Tory government would leave the European Convention on Human Rights as “a necessary step” (putting Britain in the same league as Russia and Belarus). Other international treaties would also have to be consigned to the bonfire; eg, the UN convention on refugees. Domestically, it is the same. Legal aid in immigration and asylum cases would be withdrawn, and the right to take migration decisions to tribunals or judicial review ended.

But, even then, there are still the 150,000 arrested by the Removals Force every year. If they are not to disappear into the black economy, they will have to be confined behind high walls and barbed wire and put under guard. Well, the prison estate is already crowded to the rafters. No less to the point, prison and special camps are hellishly expensive. For example, confining someone to prison costs more than sending a child to Eton.

Simultaneously, in her October 8 ‘keynote’ speech that closed the Manchester conference, Badenoch promised, through her new economic “golden rule”, to reduce government borrowing by £47 billion. Fancifully this will be done through cutting the number of civil servants and slashing benefits payments for the sick and disabled.

But Badenoch’s plans are not about saving money. That is clearly not the case. No, as with America’s ICE agency, the Removals Force will unleash a reign of terror in British towns and cities. Anyone with a brown or black face, anyone speaking with a foreign accent, anyone they do not like, will be subject to stop and search … and possible arrest. Not only will illegal migrants live in fear. Legal migrants too will worry about going to work, shopping, walking down the road.

Manchester was dominated by the immigration question, in a year that is easily on course to break records for the most arrivals in small boats - which every mainstream party has pledged to stop, like King Canute before the rising tide.

Challengers

Frankly, this writer never took seriously the idea swirling around that Sir Keir Starmer’s demise was imminent, or that Andy Burnham was about to challenge him for the leadership - he is not even an MP! But Kemi Badenoch is a rather different matter. The Tories have after all replaced so many leaders over recent years that it is almost becoming a habit. Unhappily for Badenoch, a New YouGov poll shows that half of Tory members want her replaced, while 64% want a pact with Reform, and 46% support a full merger.³

One of Reform’s leading figures, Gawain Towler, has in fact suggested a merger with the Tories … if they are led by Robert Jenrick. He pictures a post-electoral Tory apocalypse, where the rump of this once great party becomes something like the Liberal Unionists in the 1890s - Jenrick being a sort of Joe Chamberlain, bringing his raggle-taggle army over with him. His Liberal Unionists were a separate party which formed an alliance with the Conservatives in the 1890s before eventually merging completely in 1912.

Jenrick - Kemi’s rival last year in the leadership election - proved to be a bit of a star at Manchester, getting accused of “toxic nationalism” after he doubled down on his complaint about “not seeing another white face” in Birmingham’s Handsworth district - before going on to say it was not the kind of country he wanted to live in due to a lack of integration.

Clearly, Jenrick judges people by little more than their skin pigmentation. True, the slippery Mel Stride broke ranks to a certain extent by saying the remarks were “not words that I would have used”, while Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, was more direct and classified it as “racism”. Such remarks, of course, only act to further endear Jenrick to the Tory membership ... and his future Reform UK coalition partners (not that we ourselves are predicting any such outcome).

There is, however, not only the example of the ‘strange death’ of the Liberal Party: there are more recent developments in Canada. Its Conservative Party, formed in 2003, managed to gain support amongst young people because it campaigned on housing. From this Jenrick concludes that the Tories “got it wrong in the past”: thus “the new Conservative Party” should be one in “which we are helping those people onto the housing ladder to have a stake in society”. Naturally, his use of the term, “new Conservative”, has excited speculation that he might renew the right if he was to become leader by renaming the party, just as Tony Blair constantly talked about ‘New Labour’ to persuade voters it was “changing” - ie, moving to the right.

But Jenrick is not the only figure on the right who could replace Kemi Badenoch - shadow home office minister Katie Lam is also being touted as a possible contender.⁴ She is 34 and from a state school, which presumably is a plus nowadays, but, showing what a bright thing she is, Lam went to Cambridge, then Goldman Sachs and straight to Downing Street. Admittedly, she was deputy chief of staff to Boris Johnson - nowadays so reviled by right-leaning Tories for the ‘Boris wave’ that saw a significant increase in immigration under his leadership. Either way, she talked about how much she hates migrants, so that is definitely a one-up for Katie.

Far right

Clearly politics are galloping to the right … and the far right. Advance UK was formed by Ben Habib, the former deputy leader of Reform and also former Brexit Party MEP.⁵ What is notable about Advance is that Elon Musk is throwing his weight, and presumably money, behind it, because Nigel Farage is “weak sauce who will do nothing”, and Habib himself claimed that Musk had urged him to set up the party. On September 6 2025 Advance claimed to have recruited 30,000 before registering with the electoral commission (but there are good reasons to doubt such a figure).

Either way, Advance advocates a “Christian constitution” for the UK, but also rejection of “supra-national institutions” such as the UN. At Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in September, Advance was listed as one of the sponsors … and he himself appears to have signed up. Whether Advance UK will be a serious electoral rival for Reform UK, or a ‘take to the streets’ auxiliary, remains to be seen. Either way, it has more than the whiff of fascism about it.

We should take the same open-ended approach to the prospect of Nigel Farage becoming the next prime minister, as today’s polls would have it. On balance, however, I would bet on both the Labour Party and the Tory Party surviving, as they are historically based class parties, and hence unlikely to disappear, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, the tectonic plates are moving.