Reform and the politics of dissatisfaction

So let me get this straight, just so I understand...

Reform's latest wheeze is to 'suspend' the asylum system and all it's apparatus for the period of a parliament (if it gets elected as the next government). It would ensure all new asylum applications are rejected, with existing applications voided, and all claimants marked for deportation. There would be no grants of humanitarian protection or refugee status, while legal refugee routes and resettlement schemes would end.

It will leave the ECHR.

It will repeal the Human Rights Act 1998.

It will disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention to prevent any legal challenges.

It would ban British visas for countries such as Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan if they refuse to allow deportation to their countries.

Note the emboldened passage above: existing applications would be voided, which means c90,000 people would be taken out of the existing process and deported. Zia Yusuf - Reform's candidate for Home Secretary - said no-one would be sent back to face torture and other such dangers. So how would they know whether some of the 90,000 would face such horrors if they plan to dump and ransack the system, while redeploying the civil servants working on it? How would it be checked, and by whom?

All of this is apparently because Farage wants "...to get back to being a normal country, a country that puts national security at the top of the agenda, a country that does everything it can to protect its citizens."

Normal - really? Security - against? Protecting citizens - from whom?

Putting aside whether any of this is possible (and I doubt it), it means isolating the UK, ripping up international agreements, and risks turning the whole system into an unworkable mess that would simply go 'underground'.

But the real issue here is the relentless demonisation and vilification of a small number of immigrants, that Reform (and it's slightly further right bedfellows, Restore), have always attempted to blame for the all the problems.

Rather than actually trying to come up with workable serious, costed policies for the (apparent) litany of issues that the UK face alongside many other nations, they return to (Re)form each time by exploiting the dissatisfaction of many, and direct it to the few.

Sadly, we've seen this before.