What if Reform Wins?

Dan Sambrook's memo to Nigel Farage on deportations

The recently published book What if Reform Wins: A Scenario (Bloomsbury, 2026) has Times journalist Peter Chappell imagine the fortunes of a Reform Government following Nigel Farage’s shock victory in the 2029 General Election. Part journalism, part speculative history, Chappell draws on what he knows (or what he thinks he knows) about British politics and the Reform leadership to chart their tumultuous and abortive brief interlude in office. Whilst many of his predictions (including Bristol sharing the fate of Atlantis) may seem unlikely, his forecast that the Pimlico Journal will soon be quoted regularly by Dominic Cummings and, equally significantly, gain a total of 150,000 paid subscribers (which would make it by far the largest political Substack in Britain, and possibly the world, with a £15,000,000 turnover) will undoubtedly come to pass.

What is also true is that the Pimlico Journal (or just ‘the Journal’, as Chappell calls it) has the ear of Nigel Farage and, through its anonymous(?) contributor Dan Sambrook, it is providing the ‘intellectual heft’ to Farage’s project.

Fortuitously, occasional contributor to ‘the Journal’, Dogbox19, has obtained a copy of one of Sambrook’s recent memos to Nigel Farage. Let’s take a look.

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MEMORANDUM

TO: Nigel Farage, Leader, Reform UK, Millbank Tower SW1P

FM: Dan Sambrook, Director of Research, Pimlico Media Group, 55 Tufton Street SW1

CC: Danny Kruger c/o The Great British Bake Off, Sky Productions, Isleworth TW8

1. Introduction

1.1. You will be aware of the recent book What if Reform Wins: A Scenario by Peter Chappell. This work is in large part wish-fulfilment fantasy and a product of an increasingly radicalised strain of political centrism, which seeks to excuse its own unpopularity with the public by blaming populist demagoguery, whilst deploying its own brand of catastrophism to justify the employment of increasingly authoritarian measures to sure-up its slipping grip on power.

1.2. That said, the book is not entirely consumed by centrist pathologies. Some of its predictions are serious, and are deserving of serious consideration. In particular, Chappell predicts that a Reform Government will be elected on a popular flagship policy of deporting illegal immigrants, only for the implementation of that ostensibly popular policy to prove so unpalatable to the public that it sparks widespread popular backlash, resulting in the ultimate defeat of the policy before its objects are substantially realised, all the while destabilising the Government, possibly fatally so. This scenario is assessed as plausible, for reasons which will be developed.

1.3. However, as will also be developed, the successful implementation of a policy of deporting illegal immigrants is essential both to the success of a Reform Government, but more fundamentally to securing the integrity and stability of the British State.

1.4. This leaves a Reform Government in an apparent dilemma: it must implement a policy of deporting illegal immigrants in order to survive; however, the implementation of such a policy is likely to prove so unpopular as to be fatal to a Reform Government. This note proposes an implementation strategy for a deportation policy which seeks to evade the dilemma and achieve the objectives of the policy whilst avoiding most of the political costs.

2. Why Deportations?

2.1. At the outset, we should distinguish between an easy problem, and a hard problem. Dealing with new so-called asylum seekers is a trivially easy problem to solve, and one that is unlikely to face significant backlash if implemented sensibly. The phenomena of Small Boat Channel Migrants (SBCMs) should be properly understood as a natural product of osmotic pressure: the conditions in the United Kingdom (with regard to welfare, ease of working within the grey and black economies, etc.) are sufficiently better than those within the Schengen Zone to justify migrants investing thousands of euros in an illegal small boat crossing, and running the small (but not insignificant) risk to life that such a crossing entails.

The problem could be solved almost overnight by persuading would-be SBCMs that conditions in the UK are worse than within Schengen. This could be achieved by using the Royal Navy to interdict every SBCM vessel, detaining the SBCMs off-shore briefly, before deporting them either to their country of origin, or (if they are able to successfully obscure that) to third-country processing without them ever setting foot on the UK mainland (this assumes that the relevant legal impediments have been removed, see discussion below).

Providing that the rate of interdiction and deportation tends towards 100%, and that is well understood by would-be SBCMs, then the SBCM problem will quickly dissolve as no one will trade the relative security of Schengen for the near-certainty of deportation, particularly not when the latter involves a cost of thousands of euros. Those asylum claimants who do not enter as SBCMs (i.e., those who enter on student or other visa schemes) could simply be legally barred from claiming asylum and deported.

2.2. It is assessed that the implementation of such a policy will not be met with significant public disapproval (on the contrary, it is assessed the public will support it) because those who seek to enter the country and claim asylum (as SBCMs or otherwise) after the election of a Reform Government and the declaration of this policy will be considered to have received a fair warning, and will only have themselves to blame for ignoring that warning.

2.3. The hard problem is the SBCMs and other illegal immigrants who are already here. The reason that this problem is hard is that the implementation of the only sensible solution (deportation) is likely to be radically unpopular in the implementation phase (as will be developed later). But accepting for now the ‘hardness’ of this problem, we must ask whether it is a problem that is worth solving at all. The answer is that not only is it a problem that is worth solving, a failure to solve it may be fatal not just to a Reform Government, but to the British State itself and to the civil peace.

2.4. It is hard to estimate the total size of the illegal migrant population in Britain. It is likely that SBCMs alone number circa 200,000. Most estimates of the total number of illegal immigrants (often termed ‘undocumented migrants’) in Britain put the figure at slightly below one million. Some have it approaching two million. Suffice it to say that it is a significant, but not large number, and is much smaller than the public tends to imagine. However, as recent events have shown, this relatively small cohort of mainly young men from poor countries is responsible for a staggeringly disproportionate amount of social dysfunction, chiefly stranger rape and sexual assault (including of children), terrorism, serious violent and organised crime, petty crime, low-level anti-social behaviour, and intimidatory loitering. Indeed, it is precisely their extraordinarily disproportionate contribution to social dysfunction that accounts for the public’s tendency to overestimate the numbers of illegal immigrants residing in Britain.

2.5. Too often discussions of this kind are eager to move onto the second-order effects of illegal immigration; however, we should briefly dwell on the first-order effects. The rape of young women and girls, the killing or injury of British citizens, the demoralising effects of street theft and drug dealing, and the degradation of the town or cityscape should not be waved away, and any Government is under a moral obligation and a practical imperative to provide against them.

2.6. As to the second-order effects, the Southport Riots served to demonstrate the tenuous grasp the security institutions of the British State have over the civil peace; indeed, the migrant hotel protests which have occurred since the Southport Riots have enabled the development of anti-immigration protest networks that could make further general rioting even more dangerous. Whilst nothing is inevitable, it is entirely possible to imagine a string of migrant rapes or sexual assaults giving rise to multiple standing protests across the country capable of stretching police resources, only for a mass-casualty attack by a migrant to spark a violent conflagration that then cannot be contained.

Even without a general breakdown in the civil peace, it seems increasingly likely that sections of the general population with start to conflate the illegal migrant population with British citizens of non-European origin more generally, resulting in the development of an ugly politics of racial confrontation largely unknown in British history. Whilst paling in comparison to the potential for civil strife, neither should the very large cost of maintaining this illegal migrant population be discounted, particularly in the economic environment a Reform Government is likely to face, and indeed this factor feeds popular resentment in and of itself.

2.7. As a matter of practical politics, a Reform Government will have been elected on a platform of deporting illegal immigrants. If it fails to do this, it will immediately find itself defined by the rubric of betrayal that came to define the Conservative Party following the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of immigration. A Reform Government being seen to fail to solve the problem of illegal migrants will likely increase the likelihood of civil strife, as the public will increasingly cease to see democratic politics as a viable mechanism for achieving its preferences, and through failing to solve this problem Reform could act as unwilling midwives to the birth of a true mass-politics of the far-right that the country has not seen since the 1930s.

2.8. Amelioratory half-measures short of deportation are unlikely to succeed. The present Government’s attempt to disperse SBCMs from so-called ‘asylum hotels’ has only succeeded in spreading the problem across the country, thereby increasing its general salience. Placing migrants in HMOs has proved unpopular with the public who see people who illegally entered the country being rewarded with houses that they themselves struggle to afford to buy.; some people even find themselves outbid on houses by a council paying tens of thousands of pounds over the asking price in cash for this purpose.

Regularising the position of these migrants will not help either. It is unlikely the public would accept it, and it would result in chain migration from dependents that will further incense the public. If chain migration was successfully prevented, then this would leave a large population of young men without prospects of marriage within their own communities and who are largely alienated from the British mainstream by fact of their culture, language, and level of education. This will, in effect, assemble a tinderbox for yet more sexual and terroristic offending.

2.9. As such, it is an imperative that a Reform Government solves this problem through deportation.

3. Willing the Ends, Protesting the Means

3.1. For the reasons just set out, the public demands a solution to the problem posed by illegal migrants currently residing in the country. Ironically, the public is likely to despise the spectacle of its implementation.

3.2. The British public does not have a consistent or coherent view on immigration. This is not to make the rather banal point that the diversity of views among individual British people creates an incoherence in the aggregate — although of course it does — but rather that even individual British people hold views simultaneously which are in conflict and are mutually incompatible. In particular, whilst British people tend to have a dislike of illegal (and indeed legal) migration in general, their attitudes shift if they are called upon to consider a particular case. British people are in general kind and welcoming and have a pronounced sympathy for underdogs. The British also have a tendency towards universalising their culture and values and viewing human beings as vessels which may be filled with them. As such, much British grumbling about immigration is usually made in terms of immigrants not learning the language or not trying to integrate.

These criticisms of immigrants proceed from an implied (and clearly incorrect) assumption that it is possible for significant numbers of immigrants from, say, Afghanistan or Eritrea, to integrate and assimilate into the British cultural mainstream to a meaningful extent. As such, a British person when confronted with the sight of a young man weeping as he is forced up the ramps of a deportation flight, is liable to have a change of heart and relent, providing that the young man in question mucks in and tries to fit in. Very soon, the problem becomes one of ping-pong tables in youth centres, and the Government’s failure to promote ‘integration’. But as we know, when posed in terms of integration, the problem is insoluble.

3.3. We can see this tendency in recent British history. Even ostensibly right-wing newspapers like The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph were indignant over the so-called ‘hostile environment’ policy of the Home Office, which resulted in the deportation of members of the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’. The British public remain sentimental about the interpreters who helped the Armed Forces in Afghanistan and seem to be oblivious to the fact that there were only 2,000 such interpreters in total over a twenty-year period, and yet incomers through the various official routes (and so excluding illegals) now approaches 50,000.

3.4. Whilst most illegal immigrants in Britain are economic migrants (or more accurately, sex and welfare tourists) there will be at least some migrants who fled from conflicts, or who are subject to other tragic circumstances. Chappell’s book imagines the first deportee to be a Catholic grandmother from Goa with British grandchildren, who mixes up her visa after attending a funeral abroad, falling foul of the new immigration rules. Whilst Chappell lays it on too thick, the well-funded and highly developed network of asylum charities and NGOs will identify and broadcast the most sympathetic cases with alacrity to pull on the heartstrings of the British public and undermine popular consent for the Government’s policy.

3.5. The abortive steps taken by the Trump Administration towards deportations is also instructive. A dedicated cadre of personally courageous anti-deportation activists were able to significantly undermine popular consent for deportations by putting their lives on the line to interfere with ICE officers exercising their lawful duties, provoking confrontations which resulted in the agents of the State taking actions which appeared to be brutal and callous. The stakes are somewhat lower in unarmed Britain, and so the deaths (and therefore martyrdom) of protestors is less likely; however, as we have seen with Palestine Action and Extinction Rebellion protests, the organised activist left will deploy old women and young girls to be at the forefront of highly confrontational protests under the cynical calculation that this will produce the ‘optics’ most conducive to the erosion of public perceptions of the legitimacy of state action. As pressure builds, senior officials within Police Forces and the Home Office will start to have cold feet and will seek to obstruct the implementation of the policy. Sympathetic demonstrations by ethnic minority communities in the large cities with tighten the strain of state capacity.

3.6. An activist left mobilised to disrupt and impede a policy of deportations could in fact create conditions of maximal danger for a Reform Government, and for the country itself. As previously discussed, the most dangerous scenario faced by a Reform Government is a conflagration large enough to exceed the State’s capacity to contain it, resulting in general civil strife. If the resources of the State are strained so as to confront widespread civil disobedience and protesting by the left against deportations, buttressed by demonstrations from sympathetic ethnic minority communities in the big cities, and then an outrage is committed by a migrant resulting in a mobilisation by the anti-migrant right, it is possible to imagine the State reduced to the position of impotent by-stander to a violent civil conflict between the left and the right.

4. Deportations Without Unrest

4.1. If deportations are to be performed without provoking the sort of backlash and civil strife they are designed to avoid, it will be essential that they are performed with maximal initial secrecy and be completed as quickly as possible once commenced. This will entail extensive planning and preparation, and the shaping phase will be crucial. The steps proposed are as follows.

4.2. First, it is obviously the case that all legal impediments to state action regarding illegal migrants must be removed to avoid the possibility of judicial review and legal restraint. These legal changes (including repealing the Human Rights Act 1998, withdrawing from the ECHR and Refugee Convention, etc.) have been summarised elsewhere.

4.3. Second, organised opposition to a deportation policy must be disrupted. The constellation of asylum charities and NGOs as well as general interest human rights groups receive their principal funding from three sources:

(a) the British State;

(b) foreign philanthropic funding bodies, and

(c) domestic (largely Quaker) trusts.

In respect of the first, a Reform Government could instantly turn off the sluice. In respect of the second, the present Government has made much of the foreign funding of British politics, particularly in relation to donations to Reform. Reform should therefore opportunistically adopt this rhetoric in order to pass a law curtailing foreign funding for civil society organisations, similar to Singapore’s Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act 2021. When doing so it should speak incessantly and disingenuously about the menace of Russian and Chinese money and should never mention that the real intended target is American civil society funding bodies.

In respect of the third, there is historic precedent for the winding up of ancient trusts and foundations whose original purposes have fallen away. A particular example would be City of London Parochial Charities Act 1883. This legislation implemented the recommendations of a Royal Commission into the charitable endowments of parish churches in the City of London, which had seen a precipitous decline in congregations as the City became a business district and consequently depopulated. The perpetual charitable endowments were expropriated by statute and consolidated under a single statutory body called the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities, intended to promote Christianity within London’s growing slums and suburbs where churches were scarcer. This body survives as the Trust for London and operates as a slush fund for disbursing cash to left-wing causes. A Reform Government should appoint a worthy to (rapidly) prepare a report on perpetual trusts, with the pre-agreed conclusion being that the likes of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation should be wound up, with their funds liquidated and given over to a statutory body controlled by Reform loyalists to be used for apolitical purposes.

4.4. Concurrently, a Reform Government should make sure that it knows where illegal immigrants are. In respect of ‘hotel migrants’ that should be straight forward. In respect of those dispersed to HMOs, this may be more difficult. In respect of those who are within the community-at-large it must step-up Home Office enforcement measures to identify them, and serve removal orders on them. It should start to plan where people are to be deported to. In respect of countries with which we do not enjoy diplomatic relations, or where there is a genuine prospect of returnees being killed, the Government should make secret arrangements for third-country holding. The costs and difficulties associated with the so-called ‘Rwanda Plan’ will be avoided because they largely arose through attempted compliance with legal impediments which will have been removed. Third-country holding can be very loose, as the Government would be unconcerned about deportees voluntarily repatriating, or attempting to re-enter Europe.

4.5. The Government would also need to build up in secret temporary detention holding capacity near or preferably within airfields. It should involve the RAF in secret planning and task it to perform deportation flights using RAF aircraft, supplemented by chartered aircraft.

4.6. In order to safeguard the essential element of secrecy those involved in the planning should be subject to the Official Secrets Act, and it should be made clear to all involved that any breach of security will be vigorously investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. If the press get wind of what is planned, D-Notices should be issued, and threats of Leveson-style Press Regulation should be made.

4.7. Once all preparatory work is completed, the policy should be implemented rapidly and inconspicuously on a Friday night, preferably on a bank holiday weekend. No announcements in the press or Parliament should be made, and the Government’s ‘Grid’ should be utilised to ensure the press is distracted with other issues. Migrants should be told they are being moved to new accommodation and should be bussed to temporary holding facilities where their phones should be confiscated. Flights should commence immediately, and continue constantly. The aim should be that the operation should be substantially completed before anyone knows that it is happening.

4.8. The Government may want to recruit a body of men specifically for the implementation of this policy. Given the precarious state of public order, the Government may in any event be considering the recruitment of a national civil order police, similar to continental Gendarmeries. The practical implementation of this deportation policy could be the first mission for this newly-established force.

4.9. It is, of course, impossible for the Government to ensure secrecy forever, and the story will probably break during the operation. That said, providing the Government has maintained secrecy up to the commencement of the operation, the left will have insufficient notice to organise effective disruption. Once the operation is complete it is inevitable that the press will send journalists to interview deportees in their home countries, and they will take care to select the most sympathetic cases. It is possible that some deportees may face persecution in their home countries. The Government must be prepared to face a significant amount of criticism of its actions, and it should be prepared to robustly defend itself on the airwaves when the time comes. It is probably inevitable that this will damage a Reform Government’s popularity; however, the alternative — as has been set out — is far worse. Providing this policy is implemented as early as possible in the Parliament, a Reform Government will have time to repair the damage done before it fights the 2034 election.

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This article was written by Dan Sambrook, an ‘anonymous’ Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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