Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, slammed the Conservative and Labour parties after it was revealed this week thousands of Afghan refugees were secretly resettled into the country without the public’s knowledge.
Farage claimed some of those Afghans are sex offenders, sparking a row with the ruling Labour Party, which denied the claims.
Around 4,500 Afghans have been relocated to the U.K. so far with around 6,900 expected to be relocated overall.
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Meanwhile, waves of migrants continue arriving by boat, further inflaming public frustration over unchecked immigration.
“Amongst the number that have come are convicted sex offenders – I am not, I promise you, making any of this up, and the total cost of this operation has been a staggering £7 billion [$9 billion],” Farage said in a post on X.
“The numbers are off the charts, the cost is beyond comprehension and the threat to women walking the streets of this country, frankly, is incalculable.”
Relocating the 6,900 Afghans is expected to cost £850 million [$1.1 billion]. The £7 billion Farage referenced is likely the total cost of all Afghan resettlement programs since 2021 of about 36,000 Afghans through multiple schemes.
The British government earlier this week revealed it secretly resettled thousands of Afghan nationals in the U.K. after a catastrophic data breach exposed nearly 19,000 applicants who had worked with U.K. forces, an operation kept under wraps by a rare “super injunction” that barred even the mention of its existence.
The injunction was lifted Tuesday in conjunction with a decision by Britain’s current Labour Party government to make the program public.
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A spreadsheet containing the personal information of the nearly 19,000 people who had applied to relocate to the U.K. after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was accidentally released in 2022 because of a defense official’s email error. The government only became aware of the leak when some of the data was published on Facebook 18 months later.
“I can’t think of a better example of the total incompetence, dishonesty and genuine lack of understanding of what the priorities of a British government are than this Afghan scandal,” Farage added.
But U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey denied any known sex offenders had been allowed into the U.K. under the program and insisted everyone had been checked “carefully” for any criminal records
He said if Farage had any “hard evidence,” he should report it to the police.
“Anyone who has come into this country under any of the government schemes that was under the previous government and now from Afghanistan is checked carefully for security, checked carefully for any of those sort of criminal records that would preclude and prevent them coming to this country,” Healey told Times Radio, according to The Sun.
British soldiers were sent to Afghanistan as part of an international deployment against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. At the peak of the operation, there were almost 10,000 U.K. troops in the country, mostly in Helmand province in the south.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
