The EU's proposed asylum policy is "a direct threat to our civilisation", Nigel Farage has claimed in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, arguing that as many as 500,000 Islamic extremists could flood Europe were the policy implemented.

The clear demand for the rapid implementation of what the Ukip website calls "a common EU migration and asylum policy" ... would be wholly unacceptable to a United Kingdom that already has levels of immigration that are too high, and as Isis have previously threatened, could lead to half a million Islamic extremists coming to our countries and posing a direct threat to our civilization", he is quoted as saying.

There are a few problems, here, though. Firstly, there isn't such a thing as a "common EU migration and asylum policy". There is a Common European Asylum System, which is altogether a different thing.

Farage, in fact refers specifically to the system, and during his speech waves a print-off from the EU brochure on it. But if he had actually read it, he would have seen that it helpfully points out that the EU is putting into effect the Member States' international obligations under the 1951 Geneva Convention on the protection of refugees.

Now there's the rum thing. In its manifesto, UKIP tells us:

We will comply fully with the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees; speed up the asylum process; and seek to do so while tackling logjams in the system for those declined asylum status. We will continue to honour our obligations to bona fide asylum seekers.

Effectively, therefore, UKIP fully supports the basis of the Common European Asylum System, and is committed to allowing asylum seekers into this country and, where they qualify as refugees, affording them leave to remain. And, by the way, there is no such thing as a bona-fide asylum seeker. The status is unqualified - it simply describes someone who is seeking asylum.

Where Farage's intervention is particularly clumsy, though, is his inherent assumption that the UK will bear the brunt of the inflow. Yet the number of asylum seekers the UK has to absorb is relatively modest , primarily due to the cooperation of EU Member State authorities, via the Sangatte Protocol, the Le Touquet Treaty and the Evian Arrangements.

Far from acknowledging the role of these agreements, Farage instead argues for adopting the Australian system, whereby the boats are stopped and asylum seekers are processed offshore.

All this is great stuff, but for the another problem: the Australian policy is almost certainly in breach of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the one with which Ukip is committed to full compliance. At least, when Michael Howard proposed something similar in 2005, he had the sense to realise that, to give it effect, we needed to withdraw from the 1951 Convention. Hence, he produced a policy for the 2005 election which stated the following:

A Conservative Government will give the UN Secretary General 12 months’ notice of Britain’s withdrawal from the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees and the 1967 New York Protocol. The 1951 Convention is increasingly unworkable today.

It was designed to give shelter to the small number of Eastern European dissidents who managed to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, not to deal with the challenges of mass migration. As Mr Blair has said:

The 1951 Convention … was drawn up for a vastly different world, in which people did not routinely travel huge distances across multiple borders (The Times, 4 May 2001).

The Convention prevents governments taking immediate action to deport asylum seekers whose claims are obviously not genuine. Nearly all applicants – irrespective of the merits of their case – are entitled to the full process of claim, consideration and appeal.

At the same time, a Conservative Government will enter reservations against those parts of the European Convention on Human Rights which would prevent it implementing its asylum reform programme.

The depth of this offering, and the grasp of the issues makes Farage's offering sound like a pub-bore rant. If the media was on the ball, it would pick up his contradictions – but, short of that, someone ought to tell Farage that his party is making a fool of him, with a little help from himself.