Reform's latest unhinged and hopefully illegal policy: 'if you vote Green we'll put a massive immigrant prison near you'

It’s impossible for a mere part-time blogger to cover each one of Reform’s increasingly abhorrent and unhinged policy announcements, but this one seemed like it deserved special attention.

From Zia Yusuf, one of the more powerful of Reform UK’s millionaire elites:

In order to deport all illegal migrants in Britain, Reform will need to detain tens of thousands at a time.

Migrants will not be able to leave these detention centres, and each will be held there a couple of weeks before being deported.

So here’s our promise:

A Reform government will not put any migrant detention facilities in any constituency with a Reform MP.

Nor will we put them where Reform controls the council.

And of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to locate the detention centres.

The only positive thing here is that the comment smacks of abject populist desperation, rather than strength to me. Of weakness and cowardice of a type that leads to some kind of weird bribery. Scared little men.

They’re probably worried due to their thankfully decreasing polling numbers as more and more people become aware of their prejudiced incompetence - still far too high for our country to be safe though- and total humiliation in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election.

Let’s hope such a clearly unethical policy it would also be subject to both public condemnation and legal challenge.

I am the furthest thing from a legal scholar, so this is probably extremely ill-informed, but couple of avenues immediately come to mind:

Irrationality, aka the Wednesbury Unreasonableness test:

The irrationality test requires demonstrating that a decision is:

• So outrageous in its defiance of logic or accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question could have arrived at it
• Beyond the range of reasonable responses available to the decision-maker
• Not merely wrong, unwise, or different from what the court would have decided
• Irrational in the sense that it lacks any logical connection to the evidence and purpose

Or the Porter v Magill decision:

The House of Lords accepted that councillorsare elected. However, their powers can only be used for the purposes for which they are conferred, and not for the electoral advantage of a political party. Also the new (and final) test of bias was introduced:

Would the fair-minded and informed observer conclude that there was a real possibility of bias?

This decision was made in response to the infamous ‘homes for votes’ scandal, which seems like an equally corrupt and desperate act as Reform’s fantasy here.

The Conservative majority of Westminster Council adopted a policy to sell council housesin parts of the City where it was believed that home owners were more likely to vote Conservative.

It became known as “the homes for votes scandal”, involving Shirley Porter. As the leader of Westminster City Council, she helped formulate a policy which appeared to be designed to sell off the council housing at a lower price for the purpose of electoral advantage in marginal wards.