Why Reform-Green culture war over 'concentration camps' is the last thing we need
Scottish Green co-leader Ross Greer’s decision to accuse Reform UK of seeking to set up ‘actual concentration camps’ is the latest worrying sign about the direction our politics is heading
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According to Reform UK, if it becomes the next Westminster Government, it will spend about £10 billion over five years deporting hundreds of thousands of people. Senior party figures have talked about expelling between 500,000 and 600,000 people, possibly including some who currently have “indefinite leave to remain” in the UK, which Reform plans to scrap.
Under the party’s plan, “Operation Restoring Justice”, they would set up a new “UK Deportation Command” force – likened to ICE in the US – and create a network of “Secure Immigration Detention Centres”. In order to facilitate the process, the UK would leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention and the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture.
So far, so controversial. However, Nigel Farage’s party have now ramped things up further by pledging to build the detention centres in constituencies that vote for the Scottish Greens, while those with a Reform MSP would be exempt.
The folly of ‘culture war’ politics
Whatever your opinion of the hard-left, economically illiterate Greens or Reform’s deeply worrying deportation plan, everyone should realise how dangerous this latter step would be. A government that acts to punish its political opponents is not one that is acting in the national interest. Instead, it is deliberately trying to fuel a culture war that distracts from real issues like the economy, the NHS and education. It might also set a precedent that Reform voters would live to regret.
This is where the focus of the current debate should have been. However, Scottish Green co-leader Ross Greer chose a culture war response of his own, accusing Reform of seeking to set up “actual concentration camps”. When challenged about his language, given the obvious connection to the Holocaust, he said, disingenuously, that there was “a difference between a concentration camp and what you’re alluding to, I presume, which is a death camp, an extermination camp”.
By going over the top, Greer may have secured some headlines, but he also gifted Reform a means to inflame their own supporters and obscured more serious, substantive criticisms of their plans. Regrettably, this is a coming trend in politics and one that should concern us all.
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