Brexit leader Nigel Farage is expanding his policy platform with an eye on winning the next British general election, prompting the media to pile-on a proposal to try and make life slightly easier for hard-pressed families.
A future Reform UK government would reform the tax system to let workers keep more of their earnings, and help families where one parent works and the other focusses on caring for children, party leader Nigel Farage said this week.
The UK’s legacy media was fast in its bid to slap down the idea, describing it as impossibly expensive or even just impossible, that trying to materially improve the lot of young families at a time where fertility rates are at an all-time-low isn’t worth the squeeze.
“Nigel Farage’s promises have little credibility” said The Times editorial, while The Daily Telegraph posited that demand for children is essentially inelastic and it doesn’t matter how much money you take from or give to families, they will still have the same number of children. The Guardian meanwhile trumpeted a warning of “fantasy promises”.
On Thursday, the Prime Minister joined this counter-attack, accusing Farage of planning an “irresponsible splurge” that would wreck the economy, a claim presumably presupposing Sir Keir’s Starmer’s own government wasn’t already doing just that. Farage replied in turn, saying the Prime Minister resorting to “dirty tricks borrowed from the 2016 referendum campaign to attack me”, calling it “Project Fear 2.0”.
In all, Mr Farage reflected on Thursday morning: “In the last 24 hours I have been attacked by Starmer, Badenoch, Swinney, Sarwar and just about everybody else — except for the voters. We must be winning.”
Nevertheless, the proposal would rectify a long-known subject of collective, performative blindness by the British political class: that the tax system either by fault or feature punishes traditional family structures.
Under the present system, a family with two earning adults pays considerably less income taxes than another family earning the same headline amount but with only one working adult, because married couples can’t pool tax-free allowances and bands. Declaring his party for “family, community, and country”, Farage said of his new tax policy: “we want to go much, much further to encourage people to have children, to make it easier for them to have children”.
This would mean, he said: “…a transferrable tax allowance between married people… I know many will say marriage is outdated… the evidence is there to prove it, where people who are married stay together for the longest period of time, the children that grow up in those environments have the best chance of success in life.”
Of levelling the playing-field between single income families and dual income families by allowing couples to pool their tax-free allowance and tax-bands, Farage said: “this transferrable tax allowance, perhaps making marriage just that little bit more important in terms of the family, I do believe it is the right thing to do.”
And tax bands are increasingly a brewing political and social crisis in the United Kingdom. In many cases set decades ago, a tax system meant to punish the super-wealthy has never kept pace with inflation, meaning middle-class middle-earners are now paying punitive super-tax bands. As reported of this phenominon — fiscal drag — in 2023:
…the upper tax bracket, which was first created decades ago to punish the super-wealthy. Today, a failure to adjust the threshold as inflation soars has seen upper-working and middle-class occupations like teachers, nurses, and police officers dragged into the punishment band.
As late as 2003 not a single nurse in the UK paid tax in the top band, but a decade later tens of thousands did, and now hundreds of thousands do. Nurses are not meaningfully any wealthier in 2023 than 20 years ago, but they are taxed more.
By 2028, it is thought a fifth of all taxpayers will be paying the 40 per cent higher tax rate once meant only for the very wealthy.
Perhaps anticipating criticism — as the primary hate figure of the London political-media nexus, Farage has to expect it — the Reform leader said of paying for these changes: “I accept that it’s expensive but I genuinely believe that we can pay for it because we’re not ideologically tied to the same ideas that we believe the Conservative and Labour governments have go so wrong over the course of the last few years”. He went on to suggest simple policy changes like simply not accepting mass-scale illegal migration any more, and not funding green projects any more to free up £350 billion for tax cuts.
The policy announcements this week which, beyond a new system of tax for married couples also mooted an expansion of the tax-free allowance all workers get to make up for what’s been lost with inflation, allowing government benefits to be paid for more than two children per family, and reversing cuts to allowances for pensioners. As well as a process of fleshing out the Reform manifesto for a future national election and with an eye on the top job, these moves are also part of something of a now long-ongoing political rebirth for Farage.
Long seen as the final heir to Thatcherism in British politics, that is a label that Farage has distanced himself from as he settles into a position of supporting a reasonable welfare state as long as it isn’t open to the whole world. While Farage has previously distanced himself from Marine Le Pen of France, for instance, for being too economically “left wing” this concept of government benefits actually being sustainable as long as they aren’t run in parallel with open borders is slowly gaining traction in parts of Europe.
Farage prefaced his comments this week by saying he was making these promises “not because we support a benefits culture” but because he wants to support family formation, and to the exclusion of foreigners. Indeed, he repeated several times these policies would only be available to “British families”, not “those who come into the country and suddenly decide to have a lot of children”.
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