Tory defection despite Farage’s outrageous Taliban deportation plan shows how low both parties will go

Tory leader Russell Findlay must be at his wits’ end. He spent the last year driving moderate Scottish voters away with his lurch to the right – only to find that he is still too soft for a section of what used to be his party.

The fact that Graham Simpson has turned his coat, despite Farage’s outrageous plan to send women and children into the clutches of the repressive Afghan government, shows just how low both the Tories and Reform will go, and how pointless it is to try to match Farage at his vicious game. It proves once and for all that the only way to beat the far right is for liberally-minded people – the basic decent majority in our country – to take them on directly.

After all, the polls are already in. The vast majority of people across the United Kingdom oppose sending money and refugees to the Taliban as the Reform Party proposes, just as a majority oppose leaving the European Convention on Human Rights as advocated by Farage and his best pal Vladimir Putin. The public are ready to reject Farage and his values – if politicians have the courage to do their part as well.

For too many in the Tory Party, however – and astonishingly some in the Labour government as well – the best argument that they can raise against Farage is that his plan would not work. Apparently giving unaccompanied children to a brutal authoritarian regime would be perfectly fine just so long as the numbers added up.

I am willing to accept that there may be a range of reasonable opinions on how we respond to the influx of refugees to the UK in recent years. Even so we should surely all be able to agree that giving cash to the Taliban while returning desperate people into their clutches is something between “ridiculous” and “utterly immoral”. It reflects poorly on those who thought up this policy but also on those who refuse to condemn it.

The Taliban have even suggested that they might take Afghan refugees back without any payment required, so keen are they to recover the vulnerable people who escaped from their regime. If you think that this is a good sign about the virtues of this policy then I have a bridge or two to sell you.

Meanwhile the practical consequences of giving Nigel Farage a free pass on his wrong-headed and reprehensible plan could not be more serious. We have seen already what happens when his ideas are taken up. After all, the refugee influx which Farage is attempting to exploit was directly caused by his last triumph, Brexit. That is not political hyperbole but simple fact.

Nigel Farage’s Taliban handout comes from the moral vacuum that he occupies in our politics – a vacuum that might just swallow up our country if we let it. Of all the times when we need to stand up against the amoral plans of Nigel Farage and the far right, this is surely it.

Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland