Farage’s “contract”
A Reform UK government would freeze “non-essential” immigration and enact tax cuts worth £90bn a year, declared Nigel Farage this week, at the launch of his party’s manifesto. The 24-page “contract” with voters includes pledges to lift the income tax threshold to £20,000, leave the European Convention on Human Rights and eliminate NHS waiting lists in two years. Reform said that its £141bn of tax cuts and spending increases would be funded by budget cuts and by axing the target to hit net-zero emissions by 2050; the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said that the party’s sums “do not add up”.
At a launch event in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, Farage admitted that his party wouldn’t form the next government, but said that it is aiming for victory in 2029. Last week, Reform was boosted by a YouGov poll showing that it had overtaken the Tories for the first time, leading them by 19% to 18%.
What the editorials said
Reform’s manifesto “is as fantastical as it is poisonous”, said The Independent. Some of the proposals in it are “dangerous”: Farage wants a public inquiry into “vaccine harms”, an idea that panders to conspiracy theorists, and to halt action to combat climate change. Others are based on “fanciful” calculations: his tax and spending plans would leave a £38bn black hole and unleash panic in the markets on a scale that would make the Liz Truss period look like a picnic. Fortunately, Farage has no realistic chance of becoming PM, so we’ll be spared the chaos that would ensue if “this hastily collated rag-bag of populist ideas” were ever to collide with reality.
Not all of its costings add up, said The Daily Telegraph, but Reform’s manifesto does contain ideas that will appeal to Tories who feel that their party has lost its way, such as a hike in defence spending and tough action on immigration. It’s the latest step in Farage’s plan to inflict an “epoch-defining defeat” on the Tories, so that his party emerges as the main opposition to a Labour government.
What the commentators said
Farage’s so-called contract “is as bankable as a £4 note”, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. It proposes a wild array of tax cuts: from allowing people to earn £70,000 before they pay the higher rate of income tax, to abolishing stamp duty on homes worth under £750,000. It promises 40,000 new police officers, 30,000 Army recruits, and “zero” NHS waiting lists – all of which is meant to be funded by public sector savings. Such reckless plans may appeal to some Tory-inclined voters; but “proper conservatives” will see that they have “all the rigour of rough workings done on the back of a Farage fag packet after a two-bottle lunch”. Reform’s contract does contain one good idea, said Iain Macwhirter in The Spectator: Farage wants to “claw back” some of the profits made by commercial banks that deposit money with the Bank of England, by cutting the amount of interest the Bank must pay them. But that too is a fantasy, said Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. It wouldn’t raise the £35bn that Reform claims; and it would be “punished by markets with a corresponding degree of monetary devaluation”.
Farage won’t care that his manifesto isn’t workable, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. On the contrary, he is counting on the fuss that it provokes keeping Reform in the headlines until 4 July, when he hopes to win over disaffected Tories and Brexiters, along with others who see a Labour landslide coming, and don’t want Starmer “to get cocky”. His real dream is for a repeat of Canada’s election in 1993, said John Rentoul in The Independent, when the Conservatives were routed and had to join forces with an upstart party called Reform – whose leader later became PM. But the chances of a Farage takeover are slim. He may win in Clacton; but owing to its support being scattered, Reform will struggle to win more than “three or four” seats in all, and the remaining Tory MPs “will mostly regard him as the enemy”.
What next?
Reform has threatened legal action against a company that it had hired to vet hundreds of would-be MPs, in the wake of a series of damaging revelations about its candidates. The Times reports that almost one in ten Reform candidates are Facebook “friends” with Gary Raikes, a prominent British fascist. Others have written controversial social media posts: one said that the UK should’ve “taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality”; another that King Charles is controlled by global elites. Vetting. com, the firm in question, blamed the election being called early for its failures.