A future Tory government would be open to dismantling more treaties as a means to deport people from the UK, Kemi Badenoch has said at the start of a Conservative party conference focused almost exclusively on immigration policy.
Making the first of two addresses to the gathering in Manchester, the Tory leader formally set out her proposal for the UK to quit the European convention on human rights (ECHR) as part of a wider bonfire of protections including an end to legal aid in immigration and asylum cases and the right to take migration decisions to tribunals or judicial review.
A future Conservative government would be open to the possibility of amending or quitting other international agreements, Badenoch said, opening the possibility of the UK leaving the UN’s 1951 refugee convention.
Leaving the ECHR was “a necessary step, but not enough on its own to achieve our goals”, she said. “If there are other treaties and laws we need to revise or revisit, then we will do so. And we will do so in the same calm and responsible way, working out the detail before we rush to announce.”
The plan to leave the ECHR was announced just before the conference as part of a radical and sometimes draconian package of anti-migration measures including a pledge that all asylum seekers arriving by unofficial means would be sent to their own or a third country within a week.
Another plan involves the formation of a “removals force”, billed as being modelled on Donald Trump’s semi-militarised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency, with a remit to deport 150,000 people a year.
In a speech directly after Badenoch, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said that if a foreign national in the UK expressed “racial hatred, including antisemitism”, or supported “extremism or terrorism”, they would be deported.
It was not immediately clear whether this would apply only to people convicted of a crime for such actions. The Conservative party has already promised to deport any UK-based foreign nationals convicted of all but the most minor offences.
Unveiling the plan to leave the ECHR, Badenoch said this followed a review of the issue by Lord Wolfson, the shadow attorney general, who concluded the only feasible way to gain control of borders was to quit the treaty.
“And so to me and the shadow cabinet, the resulting policy decision is also clear,” she said. “We must leave the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act. Conference, I want you to know that the next Conservative manifesto will contain our commitment to leave.”
Badenoch said there would be “particular challenges in Northern Ireland”, where the ECHR is included in the Good Friday agreement. She said she would get Alex Burghart, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, “to examine this issue”.
The address contained no policies that had not been previously announced, with Badenoch repeating her mantra that the party needed to learn from its 2024 election defeat and take time to put together a cohesive platform.
“People won’t listen to us again unless we showed them we have learned from our mistakes and changed,” she said. Badenoch went on to take a swipe at Liz Truss’s mini-budget, saying: “We will never repeat the financial irresponsibility of spending commitments without saying where the money is coming from.”
Much of her conference speech and that of Philp’s were focused on migration, with the shadow home secretary in particular using large parts of his address to list a sequence of criminal offences committed by asylum seekers. “This is sick. We must do whatever it takes to end this madness,” Philp said.
He set out details of the new removals force, saying it would have twice the budget of the current system and be able to take advantage of the removal of many rights and avenues of appeal.
“Stripping away the legal obstacles, that I have described, and doubling that budget means we can remove 150,000 people a year that have no legal right to be here. That is three-quarters of a million over the course of the next parliament. This illegal immigration scandal will end.”
Badenoch took a similarly hard right tone in places, saying the UK had “tolerated the radical Islamist ideology” and that the country could not “import and tolerate values hostile to our own”.
