Nigel Farage claimed last week to speak for the working class but he is still firmly wedded to the rightwing playbook
For a politician who has done more than most to shape Britain’s current challenges, nothing seems to stick to Nigel Farage. Not the chaos of the post-Brexit referendum years; or the contradiction of his closed-border English nationalism combined with a fondness for courting nomad capitalists from Malaysia to Mar-a-Lago.
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However, something is lost in the argument about Farageonomics. Not only are the party’s numbers hardly better than scribblings on the back of one of its leader’s umpteen fag packets, but there is a more fundamental problem: his plans would not help the communities that Reform claims to champion.
Fiscal recklessness aside, it’s the super-rich who’ll benefit from Reform UK policies, Richard Partington, The Guardian
Tag: Trussonomics
Reform UK Chair Dismisses Worries About Cost of Tax, Spend Plans
The chair of Reform UK dismissed concerns that its plans to cut taxes and increase welfare benefits would rattle the bond market
Reform UK Chair Dismisses Worries About Cost of Tax, Spend Plans, Bloomberg (Paywall)
Farage offers fantasy promises
Labour Party chairwoman Ellie Reeves accused Farage of “fantasy promises”, which “are exactly how Liz Truss crashed the economy”.
Ellie Reeves via BBC
The economic fantasies of Reform UK
Nigel Farage’s fiscal arithmetic is as eye-catching as it is unserious.
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That reality is the sticking point. Raising the tax threshold to £20,000 is estimated to cost between £50bn and £80bn all on its own. Reform claims to have found a cool £225bn down the back of the Treasury sofa by scrapping net zero and insists it could save more still by cutting funding to quangos. Good luck, as they say, with that.
But how successful will Reform’s opponents be at pointing this out? Shadow chancellor Mel Stride has been out and about, calling Farage’s plans “fantasy economics”, while Labour has gone for “fantasy promises”. Farage’s answer to this charge was that all parties fudge the figures in their manifestos, suggesting Reform’s creative accounting was par for the course. Against the general backdrop of disillusionment with the political establishment, the narrative will be that Reform are no worse than the other parties – and that official estimates should be viewed sceptically anyway.
One attack line might get through. “Trussonomics on steroids” was how the Liberal Democrats responded to Tuesday’s proposals.
The economic fantasies of Reform UK, New Statesman