Zia Yusuf’s Operation Fortress Has More Holes Than A Swiss Cheese
VIEWS FROM MY CAB
Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf launched its Operation Fortress document last week, setting out their plan to prevent illegal migration across the English Channel by putting the Royal Navy in charge and using the armed forces. This, Reform says, will provide an integrated force that can lawfully intercept migrant dinghies at sea and return them to France or Belgium without their feet ever touching British soil. It’s based on the hugely successful Australian Operation Sovereign Borders, which physically pushed migrant boats away from Australian waters. The success of this approach led to migrants no longer using this method.
Those fleeing to Australia from various nations had to cross the Indian or Pacific Oceans. They generally used wooden hulled fishing boats 10 to 30 metres long, displacing some 10 to 200 tons and with a freeboard of around about a metre. (Freeboard is the height of a vessel’s hull above the water line). That gave the Australian vessels something to push against.
The migrants crossing the channel come in rubber dinghies. When (over)loaded with 100 or more migrants, the freeboard is a few centimetres; there is nothing to push against. Worse, the unfortunate migrants often sit on or astride the edge of the hull. Reform’s proposed solution is to use rigid hulled inflatable boats (RHIBs) crewed by armed Royal Marines who will force the migrants to transfer into the RHIB. The most common RHIB in service, the Pacific, can carry only six passengers. Transferring 180 migrants from an overloaded inflatable dinghy will therefore take 30 RHIB trips and 60 transfers at sea.
Moving from an overloaded dinghy to a RHIB at sea for the first time is not easy. If someone misses their footing during the move or panics, the stability of the RHIB is compromised. Small boats capsize all too easily. Border Force has rather more experience of plucking migrants from the sea than Zia Yusuf. They use four leased, 24-metre-long catamarans to pick up migrants. The vessels have stern platforms which enable them to collect migrants directly from the dinghies without risk of capsizing themselves. Once the migrants are aboard, they can then be taken to shore, be that French, Belgian or British, at 20 knots.
Under Reform’s plan, each migrant must make two transfers, from dinghy to RHIB and then from RHIB to a Bay Class landing ship, which has a dock in the back of it where the RHIB will land the migrants, who will then be taken to secure accommodation in the ship. A Bay-class ship can accommodate up to 700 troops for short periods and probably the same number of migrants. Once full the plan is for the ship to proceed to a French port and unload.
The plan argues that the French are obliged to cooperate under law. Perhaps they are, but sailing a quasi-warship into any other nation’s territorial waters without receiving prior permission is impolite (at best). Were the French minded to cooperate today, the Border Force cutters would be heading there anyway. Given Reform’s likely (and correct) course of challenging French (and the rest of the EU’s) fishing rights in UK waters, the entente cordiale may become a bit frosty. Their document states that Marine Le Pen’s party supports the idea, but Rassemblement National is not the French government; it might be next year, or it might not. The credibility of Reform’s planned operation hinges on the will of the French electorate in 2027.
There are other major flaws.
The plan blithely states that the service personnel involved will be given the legal right to use force. Tell that to the ex-paras and former SAS men who face trial for their actions in Northern Ireland, which were deemed lawful at the time. They were operating under the clear rules of engagement of the “Yellow Card” and now they’re finding themselves in the dock. Today’s service personnel are, absolutely rightly, very wary of doing anything now that could be found unlawful by a judge some years hence. Harming, coercing or arresting a person comes with considerable risk, particularly for a Marine (armed or otherwise) who has no power of arrest beyond that in common law.
Reform’s document says that the RHIBs will be accompanied by police officers, but their powers of arrest are constrained and may not be delegated to anyone, including a nearby marine. They are also constrained to the territory and waters of the United Kingdom and do not confer the right to board foreign vessels. This may be picky, but accusations of wrongful arrest from the likes of the festering Good Law Project should be anticipated.
Given that it’s unlikely that the Armed Forces will view Reform’s idea with much enthusiasm, indeed the Royal Navy refused to become involved in Operation Isotope in 2021, announced by the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which proposed broadly similar actions to the Reform Plan. A subsequent Parliamentary Defence Select Committee report that:
“..the Government has not attempted to persuade us that Operation Isotrope is anything but an ill-defined policy, prematurely announced. The best case scenario for the Royal Navy is that it will leave with its reputation unharmed: there is no prospect of leaving with its reputation enhanced. (Paragraph 82)”
Although he Reform document references this report; it seems the (unnamed) authors didn’t understand it. Indeed, Operation Fortress retains all of the Johnson errors, plus some new ones.
Arriving in the UK without a visa is already a crime under Section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971. Arresting and detaining illegal migrants immediately on arrival is therefore not a problem. Nor is remanding them in custody in migrant camps. That this government (and all its predecessors) have chosen not to go down this enforcement route is bizarre. That said, recent Home Office figures show deportations have risen substantially since 2022.
(The apparent tail off is, according to the Home Office, “because it can take some time for the Home Office to become aware of such a departure and update the system. As a result, data for more recent periods will initially undercount the total number of returns and will increase as additional cases are retrospectively recorded.”)
Obviously the differential between deporting 1,000 illegal migrants a quarter and them arriving at the rate of about 2,000 per month (over 14,000 so far this year) is unacceptable and the cause of most of the problems of uncontrolled illegal migration. Robustly enforcing existing law and building detention camps for migrants (think portacabins enclosed in barbed wire – exactly like Army training camps, not expensive prisons) rather than putting them into the UK’s housing market would be a more effective and cheaper deterrent than Royal Navy high jinks on the high seas.
Reform’s document also neglects to consider the impact of this tasking upon the Royal Navy’s other operations. The Navy is almost out of ships anyway, which means that the River Class offshore patrol vessels are busy – very busy, in fact. The Navy has eight River Class vessels. They are very lightly armed and consequently have limited surveillance equipment. Five of them (the later, larger “batch 2s”) are deployed to maintain a presence in the Falklands, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Pacific. These are tasks that would normally have been performed by a frigate or destroyer, but the rundown Navy doesn’t have any spare. The three in UK waters are for fishery protection and shadowing Russian warships. If they were all employed chasing migrants in the Straits of Dover, which ships would protect the fisheries and the rest of the UK’s territorial waters?
The Bay Class landing ships are even fewer; the Navy has just three of them, having sold one to Australia. Their role is to transport troops (usually Royal Marines) and equipment about the world and to unload them, which is why they have a dock and can carry landing craft. This role used to be what the Albion-class assault ships were for, until they were withdrawn from service in 2025, following a long period of being tied up. The Bay Class replaced the Round Table Class, originally intended to augment the Navy’s assault ships. Since 2020 they have been the basis of the Littoral Response Group. That organisation’s relevance came into question when the assault ships were taken out of service and RFA Argus (a logistics cum helicopter carrier) was found to be so corroded that she is to be scrapped.
If you’re confused by the plethora of ships, organisations and force structures, you’re not alone. The Royal Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary have many problems, including pay disputes. Adding a highly complex task to their already confused and overstretched organisations won’t help, but the Reform Fortress paper doesn’t address this.
The paper anticipates placing a lieutenant general in charge and establishing a new headquarters which, “with assistance from the Home Office where necessary, will then instruct a range of supplementary agencies, with the Coastguard, NCA, Police, Border Force, and intelligence agencies contributing.” Why place an army officer in charge of an essentially maritime operation? Or is that a typo? What supplementary agencies?
It is true that the UK’s coastline lacks sufficient surveillance to detect all small boats, particularly at night. The radar coverage wasn’t designed to do that, although it is being expanded and upgraded. Rubber dinghies are a very challenging thing for a radar to detect, particularly at sea. Reform’s paper suggests using Royal Air Force P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft to detect dinghies.
Certainly the Poseidon has a capable radar designed to detect a submerged submarine’s periscopes. Whether it can detect the outboard engine on the back of a dinghy is questionable (and probably classified). Quite why the paper thinks it necessary to use a P-8 from Lossiemouth in northern Scotland to hunt dinghies off Dover is unclear. The Home Office already operates two Dash-8 aircraft equipped with radar and thermal imagers (which are more capable of detecting migrants at sea) and has been doing so since 2025. Reform’s paper ignores this reality too. (It incorrectly states that single-engine aircraft are being used).
It would be flattering to describe this policy document as unimpressive. It’s a confused mashup of migration data, an argument that migration is a problem, puff pieces for Reform and its leaders and simplistic and often incorrect information. It lacks the detail to convince anyone that the plan is credible; it’s just yet more sound bite politics.
That’s a shame. Reform used to be about changing the UK’s failed system of government, largely created by careerist politicians spouting nonsense about subjects they do not understand. Reform is turning into part of the political establishment, that is, into part of the rotten establishment that embraced the EU, opposed and sabotaged Brexit and bankrupted the country.
I will write further on that soon. In the interim, “Operation Fortress” is an ill-conceived, poorly written soundbite fest. The problem the country faces is not catching illegal migrants; it’s dealing with them sufficiently robustly to deter others from attempting the voyage. That’s not a problem the Navy can solve; it’s a problem a political party intended to completely remould the Westminster establishment could solve if it wanted to.
If Reform is serious about Operation Fortress, it is not serious about changing the UK, let alone improving it. That would mean Reform has become part of the UK’s problems, not the solution, and that a vote for Reform would be pointless; one might as well vote Tory.
Or Count Binface.
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