Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has accused church leaders of being “rather out of touch” with ordinary believers when it comes to immigration.
In what was billed as a major speech earlier this week, Farage said that a Reform government would take significant steps to deport illegal immigrants, including removing Britain from the controversial European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Prime Minister Nigel Farage may once have been a fanciful idea, but opinion polling has consistently put Reform ahead of all other parties since late April. Even prior to this, Reform had been consistently polling second, meaning that even if Reform does not win the next general election, there is a very real possibility that Farage will be leader of the official opposition.
Farage and party chairman Zia Yusuf indicated that they would aim to deport 600,000 illegal immigrants during the course of the next parliament, should Reform form the next government.
Farage’s comments about church leaders came after the speech, when he was asked if enforcing immigration law was at odds with the Christian values upon which Britain was built.
Farage responded, “I think over the last decades, quite a few of [the Christian leaders] have been rather out of touch, perhaps with their own flock, given the types of people appointed to be the Archbishop of Canterbury; that’s probably the biggest understatement of the day.”
He added, “We believe that what we’re offering is right and proper, and we believe for a political party that was founded around the slogan of family, community, country, that we are doing right by all of those things with these plans we put forward today.”
Earlier this month the BBC apologised after airing a Thought for the Day segment in which a Christian charity founder accused Conservative MP Robert Jenrick of xenophobia for his views on illegal immigration.
Jenrick had said he did not want his children “to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally and about whom we know next to nothing”.
Speaking on Thought for the Day, Krish Kandiah, founder of refugee support charity The Sanctuary Foundation, said of Jenrick’s comments, "These words echo a fear many have absorbed. Fear of the stranger. The technical name for this is xenophobia."
The BBC later apologised and edited out the comments.
