On Saturday 10 May, Nigel Farage published a “manifesto” in the Daily Mail. While the Mail has described Reform’s pledges as “radical”, you may be unsurprised to learn that they’ll primarily benefit wealthy individuals and large corporations (and in some instances, no one at all). In other words, it’s a continuation of the neoliberal and austerity politics which got us here.
“No income tax below £20,000”
The bulleted pledges begin with a promise which sounds like it will benefit your average working person. If implemented today, a person on £20k a year would go from earning £1,493 a month to £1,617 a month – an improvement of roughly £123 (if National Insurance remained the same). Tax would kick in at £20k, so regardless of how much you earned over that, the extra cash you’d have in your pocket would always be that additional £123 a month.
This isn’t necessarily something to be sneezed at, but it certainly wouldn’t be life changing, and it’s the only measure which Reform have mentioned which would have a notable positive effect on low-wage workers. As other measures they’ve announced will almost certainly make life worse, however, people might not feel the benefit of this £123 at all.
This Reform policy hasn’t come from nowhere; it’s mirroring a popular campaign which forced a response from the government after receiving over 250,000 signatories on the government’s Petitions site. In response, the Treasury said:
The Government is committed to keeping taxes for working people as low as possible while ensuring fiscal responsibility and so, at our first Budget, we decided not to extend the freeze on personal tax thresholds. The Government has no plans to increase the Personal Allowance to £20,000. Increasing the Personal Allowance to £20,000 would come at a significant fiscal cost of many billions of pounds per annum.
This would reduce tax receipts substantially, decreasing funds available for the UK’s hospitals, schools, and other essential public services that we all rely on. It would also undermine the work the Chancellor has done to restore fiscal responsibility and economic stability, which are critical to getting our economy growing and keeping taxes, inflation, and mortgages as low as possible.
Reform isn’t simultaneously announcing plans to increase taxes for the rich (quite the opposite, in fact), so what does that mean? Almost certainly it means they’ll make up for any perceived tax shortfall by cutting the “essential public services” listed above.
Communications consultant Ben Cope noted how much this could actually cost us:
“Appoint a Minister for Deportations”
The first problem with this is that we already have a ‘minister for deportations’ – namely the minister for border security and asylum, whose responsibilities include:
- Border Security Command
- asylum policy
- asylum accommodation
- returns and removals
- irregular migration policy
- organised immigration crime
- foreign national offenders
- Immigration Enforcement
- small boat arrivals
It’s a bit like promising a ‘minister for blackboards’ as if the minister for education wasn’t already responsible for that.
The current border security and asylum minister is Angela Eagle, and she sits under the home secretary Yvette Cooper – another minister who has responsibility for deportations. This is something you likely already know, because Cooper is constantly out and about on the news talking about who she plans to deport next. Just this morning, in fact, she was talking about her plans to deport people who’ve overstayed their visas and to block care workers from coming here in the first place:
'Are you going to drag them onto planes? What are you going to do?' @TrevorPTweets questions the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on how the government will tackle the hundreds of thousands of people who have overstayed their visa. https://t.co/TC2ROCL7wW
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602 pic.twitter.com/NIRFgVTcLr
— Sky News (@SkyNews) May 11, 2025
Left: Yvette Cooper, "We will be closing the care worker visa as well"
Right: House of Commons Library, "131,000 vacancies for care workers" pic.twitter.com/pYUJSzwLBp
— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) May 11, 2025
What Reform are doing is pretending the UK has no one taking responsibility for deportations, which is demonstrably not the case. If anything, successive UK governments have been obsessed with migration and deportations to the point of derangement for years. This is incredibly ironic, of course, given that every action we take seems to make more migration inevitable:
Fixed the chart on Laura Kuenssberg
Added Brexit
Pointing out that with Freedom of Movement we have lower net migation
After taking back control with Brexit, to make up for temporary workers who came in from the EU then headed home a few years later, Brexiter Conservatives… pic.twitter.com/nzkeUpmM9x
— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) May 11, 2025
The UK has an ageing population and a declining birth rate; this means that if we all want to retire we have two options to keep capitalism rattling on for another few decades:
- Encourage people to have more children.
- Encourage working-age people from the Global South to come and work here.
This is what we’re doing currently:
- Make it completely unaffordable to have even one child for a growing number of people.
- Encourage working-age people from the Global South to come and work here, but then make them feel as unwelcome as possible.
Reform seem to be saying that they’re going to move the UK from being a superficially anti-immigration country to one which genuinely cuts off the migration taps. Some people want to see this happen, but they’re delusional if they think it’s going to benefit them. Working people will be forced into shittier and shittier jobs, and wealthy people will lose access to cheap labour and consumers with disposable incomes.
We can actually see what a crack down on migratory workers will look like, because it’s happening right now in America, as the National Employment Law Project reported in March:
One of the major engines still powering the U.S. economy is the labor of immigrant workers,” said Rebecca Dixon, president and CEO of the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “Immigrants and their work should be valued and respected. Yet the Trump administration is doing the opposite: Diverting agents from pursuing drug trafficking and sexual abuse to ramp up a program of deportation, putting chained up immigrants on military planes to deport them without due process, stripping hundreds of thousands of workers of their legal status, and cutting off avenues for legal migration. These moves not only harm our immigrant neighbors, they threaten to undermine job growth and pay for all workers.”
Researchers find that past mass deportation efforts have led to job loss and lower wages for workers who are U.S. citizens. One recent study estimates that if the Trump administration succeeded in deporting 8.3 million undocumented immigrants, the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be 7.4% lower and U.S. employment would be 7.0% lower by 2028.
Deportations can lead to policies that further undercut workers’ rights. For example, policymakers in Florida are now considering weakening child labor laws in order to fill jobs that had been performed by undocumented workers, allowing businesses to schedule children as young as 14 to work overnight shifts on school days.
Let’s repeat that last part:
policymakers in Florida are now considering weakening child labor laws in order to fill jobs that had been performed by undocumented workers, allowing businesses to schedule children as young as 14 to work overnight shifts on school days.
To be clear, the situation in America is very different to the UK. ‘Undocumented workers’ are more common over there, and many of their industries actually rely on them completely. The similarity is that both our economies have built themselves on a foundation of cheap foreign workers, and that suddenly undoing that without putting measures in place to reverse inequality will simply lead to more inequality.
Reform: “ditch Net Zero”
Forgetting about the future security of the planet; forgetting about the improvements to air quality, we’re now at a point at which renewable energy sources are often cheaper to generate than fossil fuels.
That’s right.
RENEWABLES
ARE.
CHEAPER.
ALREADY.
AND.
WILL.
CONTINUE.
TO.
GET.
CHEAPER.
In other words, Reform think we should be paying a premium to have dirtier air quality – to have dirtier lungs and shorter lives. This isn’t that surprising given that Nigel Farage is the poster boy for smelling like an ashtray:
After Nigel Farage vows to never return to the pub if the smoking ban is enforced, Labour consider extending the rules to parliament. pic.twitter.com/s8PrPrsYyo
— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) August 30, 2024
Of course, Net Zero isn’t just about energy. For many businesses and local authorities achieving Net Zero will mean switching from petrol-powered vehicles and machinery to electric equivalents. These technological solutions aren’t as advanced as things like solar power, but they are getting there, and once again the benefits are obvious:
- Reduced air pollution.
- Reduced noise pollution.
- Reduced spills and smells.
So, why exactly would we be reversing course on the progress we’ve made to go back to being a dirtier, smellier, and less ambitious country?
Let’s face it – it’s because shareholders want what they always want – and that’s to see a bump on their investment in the next quarter.
Never mind that tackling the climate crisis now will actually prevent much greater costs a few decades from now – never mind that it would be our children and grandchildren who would have to deal with the worst of it.
Ben Cope has pointed out some other reasons why Reform’s climate ideas are “insane”:
2. Reform claims they will lower energy bills through four measures: tax, tax, ban, and legislate to make future energy infrastructure significantly more expensive.
Miraculously, this could make failing to achieve net zero more expensive than meeting current targets. pic.twitter.com/Q3DB9kcO0I
— Ben Cope (@BenHCope) May 4, 2025
The other thing to bear in mind is that the push for Net Zero is a global one. What will it do to our trading relationships if we abandon the pledges that our partners are maintaining? Because emissions targets include the emissions generated in supply chains; i.e. foreign countries would take a big hit to their own climate ambitions if they bought from UK suppliers should we pledge to make our operations as dirty as possible.
Again – as we’re seeing in Trump 2’s America – when you make it harder for countries to trade with you, many will simply stop trading with you.
“Scrap Inheritance tax under £2million”
This is our current system in place for Inheritance Tax:
Inheritance Tax is a tax on the estate (the property, money and possessions) of someone who’s died.
There’s normally no Inheritance Tax to pay if either:
- the value of your estate is below the £325,000 threshold
- you leave everything above the £325,000 threshold to your spouse, civil partner, a charity or a community amateur sports club
You may still need to report the estate’s value even if it’s below the threshold.
If you give away your home to your children (including adopted, foster or stepchildren) or grandchildren your threshold can increase to £500,000.
If you’re married or in a civil partnership and your estate is worth less than your threshold, any unused threshold can be added to your partner’s threshold when you die.
As you can see, this is already pretty generous, with ways to get out of paying anything.
The argument in favour of Inheritance Tax is that without it rich families will continue to get richer and richer while those of us who don’t have £2m to bequeath will see our descendants face increasing inequality. New Statesman provided some figures on this in 2023:
If inheritance tax were abolished, almost half of the gains would go to the 1 per cent wealthiest in the population. The estates of this group, made up of people with wealth of over £2.1m at death, would benefit by an average of more than £1m each. Around half the money would also go to London and the South East, consistent with the entrenched regional wealth disparities across the UK.
Surprise, surprise – a policy which will primarily benefit rich people in the South East – who could have predicted it?
The problem with Inheritance Tax is that people instinctively feel that they should be free to leave their money to whoever they like, and they perceive the tax as being unfair even if they have nowhere near £325k themselves. In part this is because we live in a society which encourages everyone to think of themselves first, their immediate family second, and society not at all.
For Labour to counter this messaging, they need to do more to tax wealth in this country so as to make people believe that they’re serious about ending inequality. Without that, Reform will continue to capitalise on issues like this.
Oh, and let’s again point out that all the money in the world won’t mean much if our children inherit the total collapse of the climate.
“End war on farmers and pensioners”
The ‘war on farmers’ is just the Inheritance Tax issue again, but in this case it’s mega farms using family-owned operations as a shield to get out of paying anything.
The ‘war on pensioners’ is a massive own goal from Labour, with Keir Starmer’s disastrous attack on the Winter Fuel Allowance making him one of the most reviled men in British politics (and deservedly so). Nothing Reform have planned will make life easier for pensioners, and yet Starmer has fumbled this issue so badly that they’re once again able to capitalise.
Reform: “drill, baby, drill”
This wording comes directly from Donald Trump (sort of):
Donald J. Trump seems to think he invented the phrase "Drill baby drill." He actually stole it from the McCain/Palin 2008 campaign. I included examples of several folks at the RNC in 2008 yelling the phrase.
Trump stole it from McCain. Just sit with that for a moment. pic.twitter.com/Yhu7qiLbkn
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) March 3, 2024
What’s interesting here is that right-wing parties in Canada and Australia were hammered in recent general elections, with their failure happening to one degree or another thanks to their close alignment with Trump. To see this in action, the red line in the following chart shows what happened to the Canadian Liberal Party’s polling after Trump began talking about annexing Canada:
Canada's election is in four days. And this is one of the most incredible political charts I've ever seen.
Liberals v. Conservatives, probability of winning. pic.twitter.com/KizI2bQ9BE
— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) April 24, 2025
Interestingly, the UK public isn’t currently punishing Reform in the same way; this is despite Trump and his vice president JD Vance actively insulting Britain and its troops. In part, this might be because unlike his Australian and Canadian counterparts, Starmer isn’t making any effort to stand up to Trump, and as a result he’s failing to capitalise on any sentiment against the man.
It’s also worth noting that the serious damage to the global economy which is now inevitable as a result of Trump’s actions aren’t even fully being felt yet. The next UK election will come a year after Trump has finished his second term, though, and it will be interesting to see if Reform can get away with their links to him by then.
Beyond the links to Trump, their policy to dig up more fossil fuels is just the same nonsense as above. It won’t benefit working people in the UK; it will benefit the mega corporations to whom we’ve sold our dirtiest assets – many of which aren’t even British companies.
What reform?
So, what reform are Reform actually offering?
Really, it’s all just further rightward nudges to a system that’s been lurching that way for decades.
Don’t get us wrong, we do think that things could get much worse under Reform; we just don’t think it’s the sort of reform their voters will ultimately tolerate.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia) – image cropped to 1,200 x 900
