Badenoch vows 150,000 a year mass deportation plan

Kemi Badenoch has been warned that she has a death wish for the Conservative Party with her new hard-right policies of mass deportations and potential withdrawal from an international treaty on human rights.

- DAVID MADDOX IN MANCHESTER

The warning from former Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve came as Ms Badenoch made the move to the right in a bid to reverse her party’s decline in the face of the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

As the Conservative Party conference in Manchester opened yesterday, the party’s leader confirmed that she would withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) if she won the next general election.

The policy came with an added pledge of deporting 150,000 foreign criminals and illegal immigrants a year with no clear detail on where they would be sent.

This followed the announcement last week that they would also repeal the Climate Change Act and scrap net zero policies.

Mr Grieve said: “I think it is a death wish for the Conservatives to essentially make them the same as Reform and making them indistinguishable.”

He said the idea that leaving the ECHR would end the migration crisis as “complete fantasy” claiming that the convention has “only a marginal effect” compared to other agreements like the Refugee Convention. “It just makes the Conservatives look incoherent,” he said.

The moves aped those already made by Reform UK as the Tories attempted to outflank him on the populist right under Ms Badenoch’s leadership. With her party stranded on 16 per cent, less than half Reform's 34 per cent, Ms Badenoch tried to rally her party with a speech on day one of the conference.