NIGEL FARAGE’S immigration policies prove him to be an “extraordinarily damaging politician” and “one of the most disastrous,” Scottish National Party MP Stephen Gethins said today.

The SNP’s foreign affairs spokesman’s comments came after the Reform UK leader outlined his party’s plans to deport as many as 600,000 asylum-seekers in its first term should it win the next general election.

Challenging the policy, presented along with plans that could see the party forge a deal with the Taliban to send people back to Afghanistan and leave the European Convention on Human Rights, Mr Gethins told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “He is the architect, along with people like Boris Johnson and others, of the small boats crisis.

“Now he wants to remove us from the European Convention on Human Rights, the convention introduced at the end of the second world war to give us some of the most basic rights, like prohibition of torture and right to life and other basic things we take for granted.

“On Afghanistan, he now wants to do deals with the Taliban,” the Arbroath and Broughty Ferry MP said. “Will that mean people who were abandoned in Kabul, who served alongside the British army […] are now going to be sent back to the Taliban, and are we going to be paying for the Taliban for the privilege?

“I think most people can see that doing a deal with the Taliban to send back women, human rights advocates and others who have campaigned against that brutal regime is unrealistic.”

Mr Farage rowed back on plans today to deport hundreds of thousands of people in the first five years of a Reform UK government, saying this would now not include women and children.

Freedom from Torture’s Sile Reynolds said: “Let’s not forget that the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan is an authoritarian regime which routinely uses torture to silence opposition and deny access to the rights that we, in the UK, all hold dear.

“Afghans today are being tortured for accessing an education, [and exercising] their freedom of speech and right to hold a political opinion.”