Retired Royal Navy Commander Tom Sharpe has dismissed Reform UK's proposal to deploy the military against small boat crossings in the English Channel, saying the plan "lacks quite a lot of substance" and that the Royal Navy does not have suitable ships to spare given existing military operations. (The Guardian)

Reform UK's plan, dubbed "Operation Fortress," would have the navy intercept vessels carrying people making irregular Channel crossings and return them to France or Belgium. The party has described the proposal as the "largest military operation since WW2." (GB News; The Independent)

Sharpe's critique cuts across several dimensions of the plan. On capability, he argued that a billion-pound warship configured for anti-air or anti-submarine warfare is not best used ferrying people, and that a ferry would be more suitable for the task. He suggested the UK's warships would be better employed countering actual military threats than stopping migrant boats. On precedent, he noted that the Reform proposal is "very similar" to a Conservative plan from four years ago, during which time Channel crossings almost doubled. (The Guardian)

That Conservative precedent is well documented. In August 2020, lawyers warned that Priti Patel's plans to use the navy to tackle migrants crossing the Channel would be unlawful and dangerous. By January 2022, the Royal Navy was not expected to pursue the Home Office's controversial policy of pushing back refugee dinghies towards France. In July 2022, the Royal Navy threatened to "walk away" from Boris Johnson and Patel's plan to stem the number of boats carrying asylum seekers across the Channel. A separate UK government consideration in 2021 to turn back intercepted small boats never went ahead. (The Guardian; The Guardian; The Guardian; BBC)

Sharpe identified one of the biggest hurdles as the likelihood of French authorities agreeing to allow the Royal Navy to bring people to their shores. Reform's home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, said that if the French disagreed with the plan, "there would be an argument with the French." Yusuf claimed that French authorities refusing to allow people to disembark would be a "crime against humanity." He also said Reform had sought legal opinion that its plan would be lawful by defining people crossing the Channel by irregular means as being in distress at sea, obliging the navy to rescue them. Yusuf further stated that Reform would tell French authorities they must process asylum claims of those rescued because France is a safe country. (The Guardian)

The legal framing Reform is invoking draws on well-established maritime conventions governing rescue at sea, but its application here is contested. Defining all irregular Channel crossings as distress situations would impose obligations on naval vessels under those conventions, yet it would not automatically compel a third-state port to accept disembarkation. The gap between a duty to rescue and a right to return people to a specific shore is where the plan encounters its sharpest legal and diplomatic friction.

Labour has attacked the proposal on political grounds. A Labour spokesperson said Reform had "reheated an old announcement" in a bid to distract from its leader Nigel Farage's sleaze scandals, accusing Farage of accepting a secret £5m gift from a crypto billionaire and using distraction tactics. The spokesperson also said 46,000 attempted crossings had been stopped and 70,000 people with no right to be in the UK had been removed. (The Guardian)

Farage first promised to stop small boat crossings within two weeks if he wins, speaking at the Reform UK conference in Birmingham in September 2025. (The Guardian) The following month, UK minister Peter Kyle said a bolstered Border Force was tackling small boat crossings and brushed off Trump's advice to use the military to control UK borders. (The Guardian)

The broader context here is a recurring pattern in British immigration politics: proposals to militarise the Channel response surface periodically, face legal and operational objections from the military itself, and have not resulted in sustained pushback operations. The Royal Navy's institutional reluctance, evidenced across successive governments since 2020, stems from the same constraints Sharpe identifies: unsuitable vessels, competing operational commitments, and the diplomatic impossibility of unilaterally returning people to French jurisdiction without Paris's agreement. Reform's Operation Fortress encounters each of these obstacles anew, and its proposed legal workaround, classifying all irregular crossings as distress-at-sea cases, would still require French cooperation on disembarkation that Yusuf himself acknowledges is not guaranteed.