There’s a moment we’ve all had — stood in a kebab shop queue at 4am, clutching chips, half-hypnotised by the glow of a rotating doner. It looks glorious. Golden. Dripping with promise. Then you bite in, and realise it’s mostly salt, gristle, and regret. That’s exactly how Reform UK’s local election launch on Friday felt. Flashy, confident, served with swagger. But bite down and it’s all gristle.

These lads are experts at the angry headline, the pub-pleasing zinger. But when it comes to actual policy — legally workable, economically coherent, diplomatically sane — they’re lost at sea, shouting at the waves. One of Farage’s rallying cries on Friday was Reform’s desire to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECHR. Four letters they spit out like sour milk. The crowd loves it. “British courts for British people!” And yet, it’s the political equivalent of putting a brick on the accelerator and aiming straight at a wall marked Northern Ireland.

If we leave the ECHR, we don’t just tweak a few laws or snub some judges in Strasbourg.

We detonate the Good Friday Agreement. That’s not my opinion — it’s a legal fact. The peace in Northern Ireland didn’t happen by accident.

It was stitched together with compromise, and international guarantees. The ECHR is baked into that agreement, as part of the shared legal fabric between the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

If we just get up and walk away from it, as Reform would have us do, then that fabric unravels. What then? A border on the island? British troops back on the streets of Belfast? Do ReformUK have an answer? Of course not. Because this isn’t an actual plan.

It’s a punchline. Designed for applause, not action. The same goes for their pledge to “send all foreign criminals home.”

It’s like slapping a new coat of paint on a condemned building — might look decent enough from a distance, but underneath it’s cracked, unworkable, and destined to collapse the moment anyone inspects it properly.

Let’s deal with reality: deporting foreign offenders isn’t like returning a library book. It takes agreements. Negotiation. Treaties. Many of the countries we’d need to send people to don’t have an agreement with us, and they don’t want one. No agreement, no deportation.

But here’s where it gets messy. Say we do what Reform suggests — bin the niceties, chuck them on a plane, done. Other countries will do the same to us.

The agreements that let us prosecute British citizens who commit serious crimes abroad — like rape, abuse, or sexual violence — depend on international frameworks like the Istanbul Convention, ratified by 47 countries through the Council of Europe.

It’s the gold standard for protecting women, and shockingly, Farage failed to support it as an MEP. Reform now wants to tear up exactly this kind of multilateral cooperation.

What does that mean in practice? With the removal of these shared European wide conventions and agreements, what happens in Reforms Britain when a British man jailed in Turkiye for sexual assault is deported home? Criminals walking free into our communities isn’t sovereignty, it’s surrender.

This isn’t about being soft on crime. It’s about being smart about crime. Of course serious criminals should be deported where possible, and no one’s arguing with that. But what Reform UK is offering is all theatre, no thinking.

They’ve got no political literacy — just slogans, anger, and a refusal to read the small print.

And don’t be fooled by the delivery. Yes, it sounds bold. It sounds tough. But toughness isn’t yelling the loudest or kicking the table over. Real toughness is doing the work. Knowing the law. Understanding the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.

ReformUK wants to be the party of plain talk and common sense. But there’s nothing “common sense” about pulling out of the ECHR and lighting a match under Northern Ireland.

There’s nothing patriotic about deportation plans that would make Britain less safe, not more.

And let’s not forget who we’re dealing with. One of Reform UK’s four MPs, James McMurdock, has been convicted and served a custodial sentence for assaulting his former girlfriend, reportedly by repeatedly kicking her in 2006. That’s more than a red flag.

These are the same people banging the drum about law and order, demanding tougher sentences for offenders. It tells you everything you need to know about their judgement, their values, and the kind of people they think deserve power.

They know how to play the room, sure. They know how to press the outrage button. But that’s not leadership, it’s performance. The country’s tired and fed up with gimmicks. We’ve had enough of political karaoke from people who’ve never had to clean up after the gig.

Reform UK is all volume and no vision. And if we let them shout their way into government, we’ll wake up to find the foundations of our country kicked out from underneath us, peace, law, international standing all trashed for a few headlines.

And who’s left to pick up the pieces? We are. The same people who always do. So let’s be clear: these aren’t solutions. They’re shortcuts to chaos, and Britain deserves better than that.