Reform UK’s new home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf has said the rights of British citizens are being placed “beneath those of criminals” because of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Speaking at a press conference in Dover, Mr Yusuf listed what he said were examples of judges blocking the deportation of illegal migrants who had committed crimes. “How many more people must die at the hands of those who should never have been in our country in the first place?” he said.

“How many more victims’ families must be devastated in this way when their rights are placed beneath those of criminals? The answer is none, Vote Reform. We will leave the ECHR and end this madness.” He suggested Brits are becoming second class citizens in their own country, saying: “When Nigel Farage becomes our Prime minister, gone are the days when your rights are trampled in the service of foreign citizens. Never again will British people be second class citizens in their own country.”

Introducing Mr Yusuf before the speech in Dover, Mr Farage warned that the failure to cut both legal and illegal immigration would encourage racist extremism.

He said: “I fear that we will see a rise of a really worrying, dangerous form of extreme right ethno-nationalism.”

Setting out his eight-point plan, Mr Yusuf said a Reform government would:

• Deliver net negative immigration by ending the era of mass immigration and deporting all illegal migrants from the United Kingdom, with the party stating that it would expect to deport over 600,000 in its first term.
• Apply visa bans on countries that refuse to take back their illegal migrants, including the likes of Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan who all have large illegal migrant populations in the UK.
• Deliver Operation Restoring Justice by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights immediately, derogating from every international treaty that has been used to frustrate the deportation of those who have no right to be here, immediately commencing the rapid construction of secure detention capacity for 24,000 illegal migrants, and establishing UK Deportation Command to identify, detain and deport illegal migrants.
• Deploy stop and search to get knives off our streets by changing the law to allow Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which currently allows senior police officers to authorise stop and search to an area for 24 hours, extendable for a further 24 hours, to be extended by up to 30 days to enable the police to disrupt impending crime in hotspots.
• Protect Britain’s Christian heritage by preventing churches being turned into places of worship of other faiths by automatically listing historic churches, preventing alterations affecting their historic character, requiring their upkeep and restricting change of use. Reform UK would also create a new planning use class for churches to prevent them being converted into places of worship for other religions.

Other measurs in Reform’s plan include:

• Introduce the “Polanski Law” to make aiding and abetting illegal entry into the UK a criminal offence, regardless of intent. This will close the loophole in the current law by making it a strict liability offence for people to perform any act that assists or encourages illegal entry, punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment. This will stop the Green Party endorsed charity industrial complex from facilitating large scale illegal entry under the guise of humanitarian or charitable action. The legislation will not impede lifeboats saving those in genuine distress at sea.
• Overhaul the anti-terror PREVENT programme so it is focused on the real threats Britain faces, especially Islamist terrorism, and mandate home searches in cases of repeat referrals. Where an individual is referred by three separate corroborating authorities, they will automatically and without exception be subject to a thorough physical search of their homes.
• Proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Muslim Brotherhood to begin ridding the UK of extremist organisations.

Mr Yusuf said: “There is a national security emergency at our borders, an epidemic of knife crime on our streets, public services collapsing under the weight of mass immigration and Islamist extremism being allowed to spread.”