A retired Royal Navy commander has spoken out against Reform UK's plan to use the military to stop small boat crossings in the English Channel, saying the plan "lacks quite a lot of substance" and that the Navy does not have the right ships to spare. (The Guardian)

Reform UK's plan, called "Operation Fortress," would have the Navy stop boats carrying people across the Channel and send them back to France or Belgium. The party has described it as the "largest military operation since WW2." (GB News; The Independent)

Commander Tom Sharpe's criticism covers several areas. On the question of equipment, he argued that a billion-pound warship designed to fight aircraft or submarines is not well suited to ferrying people, and that a regular ferry would be more practical. He suggested the UK's warships should be used against real military threats rather than stopping migrant boats. He also noted that Reform's plan is "very similar" to a Conservative plan from four years ago, during which Channel crossings almost doubled. (The Guardian)

That earlier Conservative plan 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 carry out the Home Office's controversial policy of pushing back refugee boats towards France. In July 2022, the Royal Navy threatened to "walk away" from Boris Johnson and Patel's plan to reduce the number of boats crossing the Channel. A separate UK government idea in 2021 to turn back intercepted small boats never went ahead. (The Guardian; The Guardian; The Guardian; BBC)

Sharpe pointed to one of the biggest challenges: getting France to agree to let the Navy bring people to its shores. Reform's home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, said that if the French disagreed, "there would be an argument with the French." He claimed that French authorities refusing to let people disembark would be a "crime against humanity." He also said Reform had obtained legal advice that its plan would be lawful, by defining people crossing the Channel as being in distress at sea, which would require the Navy to rescue them. Yusuf said Reform would tell French authorities they must process the asylum claims of those rescued, because France is a safe country. (The Guardian)

The legal argument Reform is using draws on long-standing international rules about rescuing people at sea. But applying those rules here is contested. Saying that all Channel crossings count as rescue situations would place duties on Navy ships under those rules, but it would not automatically force another country to accept the people at its port. The gap between the duty to rescue someone and the right to return them to a specific country is where the plan runs into its toughest legal and diplomatic problem.

Labour has criticised the proposal politically. A Labour spokesperson said Reform had "reheated an old announcement" to distract from its leader Nigel Farage's sleaze scandals, accusing Farage of accepting a secret £5m gift from a crypto billionaire. 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 strengthened Border Force was tackling small boat crossings and dismissed Trump's advice to use the military to control UK borders. (The Guardian)

The broader context here is a pattern that keeps repeating in British immigration politics. Plans to use the military in the Channel come up periodically, run into legal and practical objections from the military itself, and have not resulted in lasting pushback operations. The Royal Navy's reluctance, seen across different governments since 2020, comes from the same problems Sharpe describes: the wrong ships, other military duties taking priority, and the diplomatic reality that you cannot return people to France without France's agreement. Reform's Operation Fortress faces all of these same obstacles, and its proposed legal fix, calling all irregular crossings rescue cases, would still need French cooperation that Yusuf himself admits is not guaranteed.