You may think Nigel Farage shares your values and is the leader who most understands the problems facing Great Britain, but think carefully before casting your vote. Remember that populists tell you what you want to hear, and claim to know what you think and to be on your side, fighting against ‘the others’. With that in mind, does the Reform UK offer stack up with reality?
Who is Nigel Farage?
Nigel Farage is a privately educated multi-millionaire and member of the exclusive East India Club, a gentlemen’s club in St James’s Square in London. He currently earns over £1mn a year from his employment outside parliament, in addition to his salary as an MP of £91,346 plus expenses.
He started out as a commodities trader in the City of London then spent 21 years as an MEP earning £7,811.04 a month.
He was a member of the Conservative party for 14 years before founding UKIP, then joined the Brexit Party – now Reform UK Ltd – becoming the MP for Clacton in 2024. He and Richard Tice have taken it in turns to lead Reform UK.
Nigel Farage argued that Brexit needed to happen in order for Britain to be free to make trade deals with countries such as the United States. He also stated that this negotiation was key for Britain as “Trump is the best ally in the world” and the negotiation of this trade deal would only take 48 hours.
If you think Trump is the UK’s ‘best ally’ you haven’t been paying attention to recent events.
According to Professor Matthew Goodwin, an academic who has studied the rise of UKIP, Farage “is responsible for mainstreaming Euroscepticism, bringing about the 2016 referendum and then delivering the vote for Brexit”.
He may be the man who gave us Brexit, but he is also, therefore, the man who made us 4% poorer as a nation, and said we had to leave the EU to take back control of our borders, only to see a huge increase in net migration.
Here’s a suggestion… judge a populist by what they actually do, not what they say.
Who is Richard Tice?
Richard Tice is also a privately educated multi-millionaire and was chief executive of a property asset management group. Tice had been a long-term donor and member of the Conservative Party until he financed the founding of the Brexit Party, later renamed Reform UK. He owns one-third of the company that controls the party … oh yes, Reform UK is a limited company with two main shareholders, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice – it is not a traditional political party.
Tice was a strong advocate of a no-deal Brexit, and was the first to use the phrase, “no deal is better than a bad deal”. He also rejects that there is a scientific consensus on climate change, stating that it was “absolute garbage” to suggest human activities were the main contribution to climate change.
The bottom line is Farage and Tice are not ordinary people ‘like us’ who understand our problems and are fighting an out-of-touch, London-centric elite on our behalf – you’re more likely to meet them in a London private members club than your local Wetherspoon.
Reform UK business
Reform UK’s manifesto, or “Our contract with you” as they call it, makes some enticing promises, seemingly solving most of the UK’s intractable problems. They say this will cost a whopping £141bn every year for five years.
Among their ‘contract’ pledges are increasing funding for public services, bringing critical national infrastructure under 50% public ownership and recruiting 40,000 new police officers, all while cutting government spending!
They say this will all be paid for by making massive savings of £150bn every year including £91bn by “slashing wasteful government spending”. If this sounds familiar, it should do. Pretty much every government in recent years has set out to do this. They either fail or, if they do make savings – think for example of the Conservatives’ austerity programme – these are devastating for public services.
OK, so their figures are not entirely convincing, but you still like what they are offering. Let’s look at a couple of their flagship policies on the NHS and farming.
Reform of the NHS – £1,000+ monthly payments for health insurance
Among Reform UK’s proposals for the NHS, they say they will give tax relief of 20% on all private healthcare and health insurance while “harnessing independent … health provision in the UK and overseas”. Read that carefully – they would give tax relief for those already wealthy enough to afford private healthcare or insurance while using private, commercial healthcare providers from anywhere in the world.
This is entirely consistent with Nigel Farage’s view that “I think we are going to have to move to an insurance-based system of healthcare”. Reform UK’s ‘contract’ assures us that healthcare would still be free at the point of delivery, which it would be under an entirely insurance-based system, provided you have insurance!
If moving to an insurance-based healthcare system doesn’t seem such a bad idea, let’s look at what that actually means. In the USA, they operate just such a system.
The average premium for non-subsidised health insurance for a family of four is approximately £1,130 per month. Yes, per month!
But that’s not the end of the bad news because your insurance would not cover all of your medical costs. First there are ‘deductibles’ – the amount you pay over a year before the health insurance company begins paying for your care, a bit like the excess you have to pay before your car insurance kicks in. Then there’s ‘co-pay’ and ‘co-insurance’ – your insurer does not pay all of your costs, they may pay 80% while you pay 20%.
To put this in context, the total cost of cancer treatment in the USA on average is £113,000 and, sadly, one in two of us will get cancer during our lifetime. Some 29 million Americans remain uninsured for their healthcare while as many as 550,000 Americans file for bankruptcy each year due to medical bills.
Is this really how you want to replace the NHS?
Farming reform
In 2015, prior to the Brexit referendum, Nigel Farage told farmers and fishermen that they should have no fear about leaving the European Union.
That’s the same man who helped to impose Brexit on the farming industry, putting barriers, tests, checks, extra costs and plenty of red tape in the way of trade with our largest market.
He then backed the terrible trade deals with New Zealand and Australia that undercut British farmers.
And now he’s backing a possible trade deal with the US that would require us to relax rules on agricultural imports from the US. This would be disastrous for British farmers.
US animal welfare and food standards are lower than here in the UK, so their products are cheaper and would undercut our producers. At the same time, they would allow products into the UK that are currently banned for health reasons.
Hormone treated beef carries associated cancer risks to add to general concerns over the way cattle are housed and fed in the US.
In the UK, poultry are reared to strict hygiene, sanitation and animal welfare standards across all stages of rearing and slaughter – a ‘farm-to-fork’ approach.
In the US chickens are kept in large flocks in dirty conditions making it much more likely that bacteria will develop and spread. On farms like this, chickens are often fed antibiotics as a preventative measure to stop infection and chlorine-washed after slaughter to kill bacteria. Chlorine-washed chicken could still carry salmonella and other bacteria, which is a clear human health risk. In fact, rates of food poisoning have been recorded several times higher in the US than the UK.
Nigel Farage has defended allowing labelled chlorinated chicken from the US into the UK as part of a trade deal. This would undermine UK producers with lower quality, lower priced, higher health risk products.
Britain is great
Reform UK say: Britain is broken, Britain needs reform, Reform will fix it, let’s make Britain Great, only Reform will stand up for British culture, identity and values… join the revolt!
This is nonsense. Britain is not broken: we are a great country and always have been. To suggest only Reform stand for British values is insulting to the majority of us who do not share Reform UK’s values. And to urge us to “join the revolt” is hardly consistent with the democratic values most of us hold dear.
Yes, we have many problems after 14 years of Tory chaos, the disaster of Brexit, a land war in Europe and the far-reaching chaos of Trump. And Reform UK are very good salesmen – their offer is compelling. They say they will solve all our major problems while simultaneously cutting taxes.
If it sounds too good to be true…
But in the real world there are no simplistic solutions. Hard work, time and difficult decisions are required. Make no mistake, along with unrealistic solutions come insurance-based health care, lower food standards, damage to our farming and fishing businesses, closer alignment with Trump’s America, and further barriers to our European trade.
Be careful what you wish for.
