Brexit’s Nigel Farage has responded to the UK’s left-wing government conceding that action is needed on illegal immigration by immediately striking to pull the Overton Window further, stating that the huge levels of legal migration are what ultimately need to be tackled.
Anticipating the forthcoming budget of the UK’s Labour government due later this month in which it has been widely trailed that significant tax hikes are coming to fund the ballooning state, Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage called for huge levels of spending on foreigners to be cut before Britons are asked to bear more burden.
Following the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announcing plans to crack down on illegal migration on Monday — which represent only a tiny fraction of migrant arrivals every year, given how easy it is for most to come to open-borders Britain legally — Mr Farage immediately went further, saying tackling this problem is a key first step in fixing the economy. Saying “this budget will be an attack on aspiration” but a boon to “those who don’t want to work and who want to live on benefits”, Mr Farage predicted “putting up taxes is a choice, it’s a choice the chancellor is going to choose to make”.
He said at a press conference on Tuesday:
…it is legal migration that is doing enormous damage to the British economy and it’s been so difficult to even talk about this subject without being screamed down. Just look at the direct link between falls in productivity and the mass importation of unskilled labour.
That trend has been there now for the best part of 20 years. There are enormous costs to our benefit system of those not just illegally, but who legally have come into our country.
Farage introduced Reform UK head of policy Zia Yusuf who noted that while the government was scrabbling to make tax rises to cover a black hole in the national budget, it could instead find this money by simply spending less, and in a way that would have no impact on British citizens. “The British state exists to serve British citizens. That’s quite a radical idea these days”, Yusuf said, stating:
The question is who will bear the brunt of these ‘tough decisions’. And here’s our perspective, it is foreign nationals who should first bear the brunt before we ask any British citizens to make sacrifices and that’s the fundamental fault line now in British politics… UK welfare should be for UK citizens. I think that’s an entirely reasonable position, and yet the fastest growing line item… is foreign nationals.
Yusuf said under a Reform government, the state would stop withholding data on the cost of foreign nationals in Britain and would save tens of billions by stopping paying out cash to foreigners. Among the items identified for deletion was £8 billion a year on paying universal credit — a welfare programme — to foreign nationals, and requiring foreign migrants to cover the cost of their per-capita healthcare spend with the NHS.
A major area for improvement, Yusuf said, was radically cutting the UK’s enormous foreign aid budget, which sends billions abroad every year, often in very questionable circumstances. Illustrating the broken priorities of the British state he said:
…it is unconscionable that British taxpayers and citizens should be asked to fund foreign aid programmes when 15-year-olds in Wales have a lower educational attainment than 15-year-old in Turkey… [the taxpayer] sends hundreds of millions of pounds in aid to Turkey… charity begins at home… it is unacceptable to be continuing to fund foreign aid at this level while the country is in the state that it is.
Of course we would aspire to do foreign aid, why wouldn’t we, but charity begins at home and it is unacceptable to ask hardworking British people to pay ever more tax to fund these programmes.
If the present Labour government made the “conscious and deliberate decision” to keep taxing Britons to fund pay-outs for foreigners rather than make cuts in the budget later this month, Yusuf said “Frankly, it may be treachery. It’s appalling, and British people are sick and tired of it”.
On Monday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced her package of migration reforms, aimed at tackling illegal migration. Mahmood and her colleagues were plain this was not done out of any sense of conviction on the matter, but rather because public opinion on the migration issue is rock-bottom and it risks — to them — a future Reform government. It has a personal dimension for Mahmood, she said, because public anger over new migration was also perceived as souring the mood on longer-settled migrants too, which she feels threatened by as a second-generation migrant.
Farage said today he agreed with what Mahmood had said on a “rhetorical” level but believes she simply wouldn’t be able to get the plans past her own left-wing lawmakers. Indeed, previous attempts to change the migration system without root-and-branch reform that the legacy parties are totally opposed to — like leaving the European Court of Human Rights, which rules against all attempts at serious border control — under the Conservatives did indeed fail in the past.
Speaking on Monday evening, Mr Farage had already said he had his “doubts”. As reported, he raised concerns that Mahmood’s proposal to trade illegal migration for more legal migration would likely simply lead to higher overall levels of arrivals, with newcomers benefitting from the legal shield of having arrived legally under the aegis of a Labour government.
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