Reform UK like to claim they want to tackle the small boats crisis and take control of immigration into the UK, but really, we all know that if that happened, they would lose their raison d’être.
Of course, Reform and its MPs likely no this as well. Why can we assume this? Because they keep voting against any legislation brought forward by the government to try to tackle the issue.
The latest example of this came this week, when Tory-turned-Reform MP Suella Braverman voted against Labour’s new law to stop the boats.
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In a speech in the House of Commons on Tuesday, Braverman argued the law was ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’, and went down the classic Reform attack line of claiming the only way to properly tackle small boat crossing is to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
Braverman claimed Labour had ‘failed to smash the gangs and stop the boats,’ despite figures showing that small boat crossings are down significantly this year, a fact that even GB News can’t ignore any longer.
The Fareham and Waterlooville MP also got some laughs her way from the opposite benches when she hit out at the last Conservative government for failing to tackle the issue, a government that she was of course a key part of.
Braverman and her Reform colleagues can crow about the ECHR all they want, but many can see the real reason they always vote against measures to stop the boats – it’s because there would be no point in Reform if they did.
Summing things up pretty well, one person wrote that for Braverman and her party “the ‘migrant crisis’ isn’t a problem to solve, it’s the permanent emergency they need to justify tearing up human rights protections so power faces no checks.”
“The boats are just the battering ram. Your rights are the target,” they added.
Another said that if Reform actually backed measures to fix the small boats issue, they would have “nothing to incite over.”