Nigel Farage claims Rishi Sunak 'knew foreign courts' were about to 'tear up Rwanda plan'
Nigel Farage has said that Rishi Sunak was resigned to a foreign court meddling in how Britain controls its borders, as he tore apart the Conservatives' immigration plans.
Nigel Farage has ripped into the Conservatives' plans to stop illegal immigration, as he said that neither Rishi Sunak nor Keir Starmer "want to talk about illegal immigration".
Speaking to Mike Graham on Talk TV, the Reform UK honorary president Nigel Farage said that the imminent collapse of the Prime Minister's flagship Rwanda plan was the reason behind the July 4 election.
He said: "The reason the election is on July 4 is dead simple. The big promise of flights going to Rwanda was not going to happen. They weren't going!
"There is no way that court in Strasbourg was going to allow this to happen. Sunak knew that. He knew that if the planes didn't go, one of his flagship policies would have been catastrophically torn to pieces and the Reform vote would have gone even higher in the polls."
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He added: "The Rwanda plan doesn't work - all the while we have a foreign court in Strasbourg telling us how we can control our borders."
Mr Farage also blasted Sir Keir Starmer for failing to offer any real solutions to the crisis. He said: "Starmer and the Labour Party have nothing to say. Neither side wants to talk about illegal immigration."
He told the radio programme that Labour had opened the door to mass immigration "on a scale this country had never seen", and accused the Conservatives of accelerating the process.
The Reform president said British towns and cities were becoming unrecognisable "in every way" because British values were being undermined.
On Wednesday, Reform's leader Richard Tice set out his party's six-point plan to stop the small boats crossing the English Channel.
These included leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, creating a new government department of immigration, processing illegal arrivals offshore, and taking migrants back to France.
Reform is polling at about 12 percent, with most of its support coming from former Conservative voters who backed Johnson in 2019. The party has said it will stand in 630 seats out of a possible 650 across the country.
Mr Farage's claim that the Rwanda plan was doomed from the start comes as the National Audit Office reveals the government has spent £310m on the Rwanda scheme so far.
Mr Sunak has confirmed that there will be no flight before polling day.
According to the spending watchdog, £290m of the £310m spent so far has been given to the African country.
Those costs are on top of money spent on housing more than 50,000 asylum seekers in the UK in hotels and RAF air bases, among other sites.
The Home Office began detaining asylum seekers for Rwanda flights last month, but the BBC suggested that immigration judges have already released at least 24 of them.
