Good morning. The late Ambalavaner Sivanandan, a leading voice in Britain’s anti-racist struggle, remarked: “What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative party says tomorrow, and the Labour party legislates on the day after.”

It has been 50 years since Sivanandan made that observation, yet his point – that far-right rhetoric can creep into the mainstream and harden into government policy – feels as relevant now as ever before.

All eyes were on Nigel Farage, leader of Reform, at a press conference yesterday morning as he launched “Operation Restoring Justice”: a five-year plan to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants.

This radical proposal, which would shred the postwar consensus on universal human rights, is pitched as a deterrent to people seeking asylum in the UK. Farage stood alongside former party chair Zia Yusuf as they pledged to deport up to 600,000 people during the lifetime of a first Reform parliament.

My first instinct as a journalist was to ask whether such a plan would even work, but this conference represents something much bigger than that. The real question is how much this rhetoric shifts the Overton window on the right to seek asylum in the UK, and whether we are heading towards a two-tier system of human rights. One for us, and another for those we choose to call outsiders.

To better understand this extraordinary moment in British politics, I spoke to the Guardian political correspondent Aletha Adu, who attended the Reform conference. That’s after the headlines.

Five big stories

Gaza | The UN has demanded that Israel’s investigations into unlawful killings in Gaza yield results and ensure accountability.

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France | One of France’s most popular actors, Dany Boon, will have a starring role in court when a fake Irish aristocrat goes on trial accused of cheating him out of millions of euros.

Art | More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.

In depth: Us v ThemProtesters gather for an anti-immigration demonstration outside the New Bridge Hotel in Newcastle. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian

Nigel Farage did not hold back, setting out a maximalist and radical vision at yesterday’s event at London Oxford airport. Warning of a “genuine threat to public order” without action on illegal migration, he vowed to:

Take Britain out of the European convention on human rights, the 1951 refugee convention, the UN convention against torture, and the Council of Europe anti-trafficking convention.

Detain undocumented migrants indefinitely in camps, with new accommodation for 24,000 people built on “surplus” military bases.

Deport people to countries including Afghanistan and Eritrea, even where they risk torture or death – with the party pledging to pay regimes, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, to take them back.

Detain and deport women and children alongside men.

Impose a lifetime ban on re-entry for anyone deported, and criminalise re-entry after deportation or the deliberate destruction of identity documents, carrying a sentence of up to five years in prison.

“I haven’t seen anything like this,” Aletha Adu tells me straight off the back of attending the press conference. Despite the wide-ranging plan, with huge national and international implications, journalists like Aletha were only given a four-page document. “There’s little to no detail at all. It was chaos. There were lots of cheers to him for deflecting questions around whether he would sleep at night after sending people back to countries where they could be tortured or persecuted.”

Supporters remained silent when Farage was not able to answer the simplest of questions, such as what military bases he would use, she adds. But coming up short on the detail has never been an obstacle for Farage.

“He is able to force the biggest party to react to his framing. And that is forcing a lot of the public to also have a bigger rethink on their views on British politics,” Aletha said.

Dominating the agenda

Summer recess is normally a time for MPs of all parties to rest and recharge, before returning to the brutal business of politics in the autumn. But Farage has taken a notably different approach.

He kicked off the summer going on tour decrying “lawless” Britain and launching his campaign to get a grip on crime; by promising to spend £17bn on new prisons built on military bases, 30,000 more police officers a year, and to rent cells for notorious murderers and others in El Salvador.

He bridged crime and migration by insisting the two are intrinsically linked. Flanked by Reform’s senior female figures, Sarah Pochin, the MP for Runcorn, and Andrea Jenkyns, the mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, he argued that migrants from countries with “medieval” views on women pose a danger to women and girls in Britain.

The debate was further inflamed by reports that an asylum seeker allegedly assaulted a teenage girl in Essex, sparking protests outside the hotel where he was housed and at sites elsewhere in the country.

At every point this summer, Farage and Reform were on the front foot, while the government was left defending the policy of housing asylum seekers in hotels, a system largely inherited from the Conservatives.

“Reform have been using a lot of rallies and media appearances to frame Keir Starmer’s government as mishandling the ‘small boats crisis’. They have been saying Labour have lost control of the borders. They have been using this time during recess to position themselves as the hard line alternative to both the Tories and Labour,” Aletha said.

“It’s definitely piled the pressure on the Labour government to sharpen their own messaging and we saw that on Tuesday’s front pages,” which splashed the announcement that the UK government was preparing to send 100 small boat migrants back to France.

If you look back at Britain’s chequered history with asylum seekers, sitting governments have often reacted to the threat of the populist right. In the early 2000s, Tony Blair’s government introduced a crackdown that hoped to challenge rising support for far-right parties across Europe.

In 2002, his government removed asylum seekers’ right to work and pledged to halve the number of claims. When those policies left people destitute, a then up-and-coming human rights barrister challenged the new rules in court in 2003, describing them as “inhumane”. His name? Keir Starmer.

A challenge to human rights

Many of our most fundamental human rights, among them the right to be recognised as a person before the law, freedom from torture, and protection against arbitrary arrest, detention or exile, were established in the aftermath of the second world war. Their universality was historic: they applied to everyone, regardless of background. Reform now vows to take a sledgehammer to those laws and conventions.

Farage’s plan to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, including women and children, and to withdraw the UK from human rights frameworks has, unsurprisingly, provoked a torrent of condemnation.

Kolbassia Haoussou, director of survivor leadership at Freedom from Torture, described the plan as “a gift to repressive regimes” and warned Britain would be abandoning one of humanity’s “clearest moral lines”. “This is not who we are as a country,” he said.

The Liberal Democrats and the Greens have also criticised the plan on ethical grounds. The Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader Daisy Cooper condemned Reform’s mass deportation plan for “ripping up” human rights and involving potential payments to autocratic regimes. The Green party MP Ellie Chowns denounced Farage’s “inflammatory” rhetoric as designed to whip up public anger and said the proposals were “unworkable”.

Ball is in Labour’s court

Parliament is set to return within the next few weeks and Labour will do so in an uncomfortable position. It has to respond to the agenda that Reform has set.

“The prime minister’s spokesperson did not rule out paying the Taliban to take back asylum seekers. This scary rhetoric shows this is a government under pressure to prove to [certain] voters… that they can also be tough when it comes to dealing with asylum seekers and dealing with this ‘small boat crisis’,” Aletha said.

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She adds that Reform’s aim is for Keir Starmer to return after summer recess feeling as though he has lost the country, despite only being one year in power. “Labour are not setting the tone at the moment, they are being pushed and pulled in all sorts of directions and it’s not really feasible when you are actually in charge. You’re supposed to be leading the agenda, not necessarily reacting to it.”

Is there any chance that Labour will return this autumn making the case for immigration? Aletha suggests that is extremely unlikely. “I have asked them previously about opening more safe routes to make sure people don’t need to make this horrible crossing to get to this country and it’s completely off the table. They said, ‘we have enough safe routes’.” She adds it also does not seem possible “given the level of anger coming from people politically aligned on the hard right”.

It is particularly striking that for some voters, even the extreme policy that Reform is advocating may not be enough. “I spoke to a Reform insider at the press conference who told me, ‘Even I’m scared about interacting with some of our supporters. They’re always angry. Nothing we say is good enough.’”

I suspect No 10 will be watching closely to see how Farage’s plan lands with the public. It comes on the heels of a striking poll showing that 45% of respondents support halting all immigration and deporting those who have arrived in recent years. The danger for Labour is clear: Farage might shift the country even further to the right.

The danger for the rest of us is that even Reform may not be able to handle the demands and response their rhetoric goes on to spark.

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This story of how students and a leftwing activist built a workers’ cooperative in Hull that grew into a multimillion-pound charitable social enterprise is fascinating. Aamna

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The front pages

Lead story in the Guardian is “Farage accused of ‘ugly’ populism over plans for mass deportations”. The Express has “Farage: ‘I will deport 600,000 illegal migrants’”. “Finally, a politician who gets it” – that’s the Mail while the Telegraph’s headline should be allowed to sink in: “Taliban to give Farage deal on migrants”. More on that in the i paper: “Farage’s promise to ‘deport ‘600,000’ migrants involves deals with Taliban and Iran’s Ayatollah”. “Farage: end the scourge” is the Metro’s version. The Mirror pushes back with “Britain is better than this”. The Times throwing it back on the government makes for a strangely understated headline: “Labour bid to head off small boats hits trouble”. Splash in the Financial Times is “US offers air and command back-up for Ukraine force”.

Today in Focus Photograph: no credit

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Revisited: Bruno Pereira was considered one of the great Indigenous protectors of his generation. And this made him an enemy of a man called Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, also known as Pelado. The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, reports on the story of the two men and what happened when their paths collided

Cartoon of the day | Ella Baron Illustration: Ella Baron/The GuardianThe Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

Maryline Henry, one of the group of women running a farm in La Vallée de Ferney, Mauritius, which was started after an oil spill devastated the fishing industry. Photograph: Lorraine Mallinder

In 2020 the Japanese-owned ship MV Wakashio ran aground off the coast of Mauritius spewing oil into pristine waters. It was the biggest ecological disaster to hit the island, ruining the local fishing industry that people had depended on for generations.

Realising the extent of the damage, a group of women decided they would have to learn to farm the land in order to feed their families. They were soon training in agro-ecology, permaculture and beekeeping.

This year they have grown a tonne of organic fruit and vegetables. Not only are they able to feed their loved ones but they are selling the surplus to support their families, many of whom are still struggling financially. “I’ve found something that keeps me going, and every day we’re getting food to take home,” says Marie Claire Robinson.

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Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.