Reform leader Nigel Farage has launched his party’s General Election manifesto with pledges to freeze “non-essential” immigration, leave the ECHR and scrap Net Zero. The Telegraph has provided a handy summary “at a glance”:
- Migration: Freeze all non-essential immigration.
- Stop the boats: Leave the ECHR, illegal migrants will be detained and deported, small boats will be picked up and taken back to France, set up new department for immigration.
- NHS: Introduce tax relief of 20% on all private healthcare and insurance. All frontline NHS and social care staff would pay zero basic rate income tax for three years.
- Tax: Lift the income tax threshold to £20,000 and the inheritance tax threshold to £2 million.
- Going green: Scrap the Net Zero drive and green levies to bring down energy bills.
- Spending: Save £5 in every £100 that the government spends.
- International development: Cut foreign aid spending by 50 per cent to save £6 billion.
- Businesses: Lift the VAT threshold to £150,000.
- Education: Introduce a patriotic curriculum in primary and secondary schools. Ban transgender ideology in primary and secondary schools. Tax relief of 20% on all independent education.
- Welfare: Enforce a two-strike rule for job seekers with benefits withdrawn from people who repeatedly turn down work.
The manifesto was called “deeply unserious” by one journalist present, who suggested it would result in £141 billion in extra spending every year – much more than what Labour and the Tories are promising. Farage countered: “It is radical, it is fresh thinking, it is outside the box. It is not what you are going to get from the current Labour and Conservative parties who are virtually indistinguishable, frankly, from each other.”
Party Chairman Richard Tice argued that there were huge savings to be made in slashing £50 billion in “wasteful” Government spending.
ConservativeHome Assistant Editor William Atkinson writing in the Telegraph said that the manifesto “will strike many Tories as exactly what we should have been doing in Government these last 14 years”. “Lifting income tax thresholds. Scrapping carbon targets. Net zero migration, quitting the ECHR, and cutting NHS waiting lists to zero. What’s not to love?”
However, he joined those claiming it was a “a far from serious document”.
Farage is great at identifying problems – stifling taxes, ridiculous immigration levels, climate lunacy– but providing genuine solutions would be too much like hard work. If Reform UK ever got into power, the Sir Humphreys of the Whitehall Machine would stump him within a week. Rather than resolve Britain’s problems, he’d soon decamp from Number 10 to drown his sorrows in The Red Lion.
So, not everyone is convinced Farage and Reform could achieve it or that it is properly costed – though the party would vehemently dispute that, of course. But most on the Right appear to agree that it gets the basics right much better than the Tories have managed over the last 14 years.
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