Farage is suddenly a fan of the two-child benefit cap, just after Labour came out against it

On 7 January, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar posted confirmation that Farage’s Reform UK would vote against lifting the two child benefit cap.

Nigel Farage confirms that Reform UK will vote *against* the bill to lift the two child cap, keeping hundreds of thousands of children in poverty.

— Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) January 7, 2026

As the UK government’s website explains:

In November 2025, the UK government announced that from April 2026 it will be removing the two-child limit so that families can receive the child element of Universal Credit for all children regardless of family size. […]

It is estimated that there will be 450,000 fewer children in relative low income after housing costs in the final year of parliament (financial year ending (FYE) 2030) as a result of removing the two-child limit, compared to baseline projections.

So that ‘thousands’ of children Crerar mentions is in fact ‘hundreds of thousands’.

Given that the removal of the two-child benefit cap was one of the few highlights of Labour’s autumn budget, it tracks that Farage and his far-right stooges wouldn’t want it to go ahead. However, up until fairly recently, Reform UK were actually in favour of scrapping the cap.

Farage’s ‘Family, community and country’?

To recap, back in May 2025 Reform UK appeared to back the idea of scrapping the benefits limit.

Farage stated at the time that:

We built this party around three key principles: things that we think need to be fought for and defended, things that we think most people in this country hold the dearest in their hearts – and that is, of course: family; community; and country.

And that is why we believe lifting the two child cap is the right thing to do – not because we support a benefits culture, but because we believe for lower paid workers this actually makes having children just a little bit easier for them.

It’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it helps them.

However, that sudden commitment to helping families didn’t exactly last long.

As the Independent reported in December:

Mr Farage seized headlines when he announced that he would scrap the two child benefit cap, months before Labour decided to do it in last month’s Budget.

But the Reform UK leader later clarified that this was only for “working British people, meaning a couple who both work 37.5 hours a week”.

New Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) analysis shows that of the 470,000 households affected by the two-child limit (in receipt of Universal Credit with three or more children, of whom the third was born after 6 April 2017), just 3,700 – less than 0.8 per cent of the total – have two adults working full-time.

So, Reform went from opposing the two-child cap, to saying it should only be lifted for two-parent full-time-working households, to opposing the removal of the cap altogether. What changed?

The answer, of course, is: nothing. Or rather, when Labour opposed removing the cap, Reform backed lifting it. Then, when Labour revealed in its budget that it would lift the two-child limit, suddenly Reform was all for keeping it in place.

Reform UK is not a political party afflicted with any abiding sense of values or core beliefs. It is a hollow joke — one that exists only to jeer at the party in power, stoke up division, and spew bigoted bile to snatch MSM headlines.

This is contrarianism, pure and simple. If Starmer voiced favour for wearing shoes on his feet, you could bet money that Farage would hang his clogs from his ears.

God help Reform if they ever did get into power — they’d have no-one to piss on but themselves.

Featured image via the Canary