There is a particular kind of political confidence that is indistinguishable, to the untrained eye, from clinical detachment from reality. It is the confidence of a man who, having just won a hand at poker, concludes that the laws of probability no longer apply to him. It announces itself loudly, dresses in a flag, and mistakes the echo of its own voice for the applause of nations. Ladies and gentlemen, Reform UK Ltd has had a good week at the local elections, and the results are as instructive as they are alarming, not merely because Nigel Farage’s vehicle of nationalist ambition has won council seats, but because winning appears to have emboldened the party to say the quiet parts of its manifesto even louder, with the serene self-assurance of people who have never had to read a treaty.

Let us engage, then, with the policy platform, if one can dignify it with that noun, in the spirit of charitable rigour it so spectacularly fails to deserve.

Stop the Boats: The Plan, Such As It Is
Reform UK’s position on Channel crossings is, at its core, a masterpiece of post-legal thinking. The manifesto proposes intercepting boats carrying migrants from mainland Europe, primarily from France, and returning them. Immediately. Without assessment. Without processing. Without the tiresome procedural inconvenience of determining whether any individual aboard might be a refugee fleeing persecution, torture, or death; whether any child aboard has rights; whether any human aboard is, indeed, human in the legally cognisable sense that the post-war international order has spent eighty years insisting they are.

This is not, it must be said, a new idea. It is, however, a newly brazen one. The prior government, that carousel of Conservative administrations that spent fourteen years failing to stop boats while promising to, at least had the decency to dress its cruelties in legal arguments, however threadbare. They attempted the Rwanda scheme. They lost in court. Repeatedly. They appealed. They lost again. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, that most unhurried and unshowboating of judicial bodies, looked at the Rwanda policy and said, with characteristic judicial restraint, that it was unlawful. Reform’s response to this legal difficulty is not to engage with it. It is to dissolve it.

If the law is inconvenient, remove the law. Brilliant, in its way. Audacious, certainly. Historically, this approach has not ended well for the nations that have tried it, but perhaps Reform has identified a historical exception that the rest of us have overlooked.

The ECHR: Forty-Seven Nations, One Resignation Letter

The mechanism by which Reform proposes to launder its extrajudicial returns policy into something resembling legality is, of course, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. And with it, presumably, the repeal of the Human Rights Act, or whatever successor legislation currently domesticates Convention rights into British law, depending on which week you are reading this.

Now, the ECHR is not, it bears constant repetition, an EU instrument. This is not a technicality beloved only by lawyers and pedants. It is a foundational fact that the Brexit framing of “taking back control from Europe” has, with impressive persistence, managed to obscure. The Convention was drafted in the late 1940s, with substantial British intellectual and legal contribution, as a direct response to what happens when states decide that the rights of individuals are a bureaucratic inconvenience rather than a civilisational floor. Winston Churchill was rather enthusiastic about it, a fact that the Churchillian-cosplaying wing of British nationalism has elected to forget with the same determination it forgets everything Churchill actually said that complicates their narrative.

Withdrawal from the ECHR would make the United Kingdom company in a very select group. Belarus is not a signatory. Russia was expelled in 2022. The company Reform proposes for Britain on the international human rights stage is, shall we say, not the varsity team of liberal democracy.

But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the electorate that handed Reform its council seats has concluded that liberal democracy is overrated, and that what Britain needs is the muscular freedom to do whatever it likes to people in boats, unencumbered by the fastidious objections of forty-six other European nations who signed the same document. The Strasbourg Court, in this framing, is not a guardian of rights but a foreign interference, despite being the product of a treaty Britain helped write, a court that Britain helped design, applying principles that British lawyers helped articulate. But details are, as ever, for people who have not just won a council election.

The French Problem, or: Surely They Will Simply Fold

Here is where the policy achieves something approaching genuine conceptual originality. Reform’s logic, as best as one can reconstruct it, runs as follows: boats of migrants in the Channel are launched from French shores. Britain will intercept them. Britain will then, and the manifesto is somewhat coy on the operational specifics, return them. To France. Or into French territorial waters. Without French agreement. Because France will simply accept this.

One pauses, here, to appreciate the geopolitical imagination at work.
France is a sovereign state. It is, in point of fact, a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and a founding member of the European Union, which is to say, the trade bloc with which Britain conducts a substantial portion of its commerce and to whose goodwill it is not entirely indifferent, post-Brexit arrangements notwithstanding. The idea that France, governed, as it is, by politicians who have their own domestic audiences and their own sovereign dignity to maintain, will passively receive boats that Britain has unilaterally dumped in its territorial waters, shrug, and say “Ah, oui, bien sûr, les Anglais,” is not a foreign policy. It is a fantasy. And not even a particularly imaginative one.

The legal position is no more hospitable. Entering another state’s territorial waters to deposit migrants without consent is not a returns policy. It is, at minimum, a violation of international maritime law. At maximum, depending on the circumstances, it is something considerably more serious. The Law of the Sea Convention, another document that Britain has signed and which rather inconveniently continues to exist, has views about this. The French courts would have views. The European Court of Human Rights, which Britain would by this point presumably be in the process of leaving, would have views before the door had fully closed behind it.

But Reform’s manifesto does not appear to have been drafted by people who lose sleep over the Law of the Sea Convention.

The International Waters Option: Stranding People Indefinitely, But Legally?

The alternative floated, leaving the boats on international waters, achieves the remarkable feat of being simultaneously more legally ambiguous and more morally coherent as an act of deliberate cruelty. International waters are, by definition, outside any state’s territorial jurisdiction. They are also outside any state’s obligation to provide rescue, shelter, food, or medical care, save for the rather insistent provisions of international maritime law that require the rescue of persons in distress at sea, and which apply regardless of who those persons are or why they are in the water.

The 1974 SOLAS Convention. The 1979 SAR Convention. Customary international law. The principle of non-refoulement under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which applies to persons in international waters. These are not obscure legal instruments available only to the very bookish. They are the architecture of the international maritime order that a trading island nation with one of the world’s most significant port economies has every reason to maintain.
Leaving boats in international waters is not a policy. It is the abandonment of persons, who may include children, pregnant women, torture survivors, and people fleeing the very kinds of regimes that Britain’s Foreign Office periodically condemns in press releases, to die slowly in the North Sea. The question of whether this would be legal is, perhaps, the wrong question. The question of what it says about the nation doing it is the more pertinent one.

The Empire of One: Britain and the World As It Is Imagined

What unites all of these proposals, the unilateral returns, the withdrawal from the ECHR, the dumping in French waters, the international waters abandonment, is a single animating assumption that is never quite stated but runs beneath all of it like an underground river: that Britain is the kind of country that can do what it likes, and that other countries will make room.
This is, to put it gently, a post-imperial hangover that has not yet received the therapeutic intervention it requires.
The world, as it exists, is not organised around British exceptionalism. France will not fold. The international courts will not close. The Refugee Convention will not un-sign itself. The forty-six remaining ECHR states will not restructure European human rights architecture around Britain’s departure. The boats will not stop because a council election in England went well for a party whose leader has cultivated, across several decades, an extraordinary talent for being on television.

Reform UK Ltd, and the corporate suffix is, in this context, doing considerable work, has won local seats. That is, democratically, significant, and it would be unserious to pretend otherwise. Local government is real government. The mandate is real, within its limits.

But a mandate to run councils is not a mandate to rewrite international law. A majority at the ballot box does not repeal treaties. And the confidence that comes from winning, the particular intoxicating confidence that tempts politicians to believe that reality will now conform to their preferences, has, historically, been one of the more expensive forms of political hubris.

Britannia, the old story goes, rules the waves. Reform’s manifesto appears to have concluded that this extends to ruling the legal framework within which the waves are navigated, the rights of the people upon them, and the sovereign decisions of the nations whose coastlines they adjoin.
The world, as ever, did not get the memo.