8 hours ago
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Farage to give speech on his 'economic vision', with Labour saying he backs austerity and Tories claiming he's leftwing
Good morning. Even though Reform UK has had a clear lead over all other parties in opinion polls for much of the year, it has multiple vulnerabilities. One of them is that immigration is the only potential winning issue it has got, because on all almost other subjects its policy offer is flimsy and its credibility is minimal. And nowhere is this more obvious than on the economy, where the party has already had to admit that the £90bn tax cuts it was proposing in its manifesto last year are now being ditched because they are unachievable.
Today Nigel Farage is trying to address this problem with a speech where, as he puts it, he will “set out our economic vision for a future Reform government”. As Kiran Stacey reports in his preview, Farage will commit the party to wholesale deregulation.
Farage will also say that, under Reform, spending cuts would happen before tax cuts.
Reform will get public spending under control, so that the nation’s borrowing costs come down. Then, and only then, will I cut taxes to stimulate growth. We must get the economy growing.
This is a huge change from what Farage was offering last year.
There was a time when Labour and the Conservatives largely ignored Farage speeches, but last night they both issued lengthy “pre-buttal” comments that contained more information than the Reform party preview. Labour said that Farage would revive austerity. A Labour spokesperson said:
Nigel Farage says he is offering something new – but for all his talk, his plan would take us back to austerity.
We’ve seen from the councils Reform run that they’ve failed to deliver the savings they already promised and are cutting services and raising taxes as a result. They’ve said themselves that those councils are a shop window for what a Reform government would do nationally – we know that this is more empty promises and no real plan.
The Conservatives issued a seven-page document attacking Reform’s economic policy. In a statement, Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, said Reform promises “disintegrate after five minutes” and that its economic policies are “leftwing”.
Of the two lines of attack, Labour “austerity” one is more plausible, not least because of what Farage plans to say today about spending cuts coming before tax cuts. The Tories are trying to depict Reform as “leftwing” partly because some of their welfare proposals don’t involve cuts as deep as those proposed by the Tories and because the last Reform manifesto included a plan for public utilities to be run according to a model involving 50% public ownership, with the over 50% being owned by UK pension funds. But this is not an idea that Reform has been promoting recently; this aspect of the Tory briefing does not take into account Stride’s point about Reform manifesto promises only lasting five minutes.
After the speech, other parties will get the chance to revise their attack lines against Reform.
There is a lot of other stuff on today too. Here is the agenda.
10.30am: Chester crown court starts hearing an election petition challenging the result of the Runcorn and Helsby byelection, which was won by Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin by six votes.
11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, gives a speech on economic policy.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
1.30am: Sir Chris Wormald, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Olly Robbins, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, give evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee about the work of the Foreign Office. The hearing is expected to include questions about the vetting of Peter Mandelson before he was appointed ambassador to the US.
2.30pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the Huntingdon train attack.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
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Healey announces Defence Housing Service being set up to take charge of MoD housing
Ministers are set to create a new quango to run military housing after concluding the Ministry of Defence was not up to the job, PA Media reports. John Healey, the defence secretary, has announced the move after years of complaints about the poor quality of MoD homes. PA Media says:
The Defence Housing Service will operate as an arm’s length public body, with Healey saying the new service would “deliver better value for the taxpayer and fulfil our promise to provide homes fit for heroes”.
When created, it will be one of the largest publicly owned housing providers in the country.
Sources said the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had “not been very good” at operating service accommodation itself, and would be better able to focus on “core defence responsibilities” once housing was hived off to the new body.
Earlier in the year, Keir Starmer pledged to reduce the number of quangos to improve accountability and cut back on bureaucracy.
But defence sources said they had been allowed to create the new housing service as the MoD was still a “net reducer” of quangos, pointing to a “significant” consolidation of innovation bodies.
The creation of the new body is part of a 10-year defence housing strategy, also launched today, that will see £9bn invested in service accommodation and 100,000 homes built on surplus MoD land.
Healey said: “Our British forces personnel and our veterans fulfil the ultimate public service. Our nation is rightly proud of them. And the very least they deserve is a decent home. This new strategy will embed a ‘forces first’ approach that tells our forces, our veterans and their families: we are on your side.”
The “forces first” approach, announced at Labour’s party conference in September, will see military families given “first dibs” on new homes built on defence land.
The strategy will also see almost all of the 47,700 military family homes, known as service family accommodation (SFA), either refurbished or replaced.
Reform could get rid of defined benefit pensions for public sector workers, Richard Tice suggests
The Tories claim Reform UK are “leftwing” partly on the basis of Nigel Farage’s welfare policies. In particular, in their briefing overnight (see 9.34am), the Tories backed this up by saying that they would cut welfare spending by £23bn, when Reform’s plans (so far) only add up to £9bn, and that Farage would abolish the two-child benefit cap (but only for British parents working full-time, Politico reports).
The “leftwing” description is even harder to sustain in the light of this report for Politico by Dan Bloom about Reform’s economic plans.
Bloom says Reform could get rid of the pensions triple-lock. He interviewed Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, and when he was asked about the triple-lock, Tice replied:
Let’s be clear, we’ve said we don’t guarantee it. Everything’s up for review, because nothing’s affordable if we keep spending more than we’re earning. And we’ve said that consistently … if we the country go bust, which is the direction of travel we’re heading, one way or the other, nothing’s affordable.
But Tice told Bloom that he should be asking about public sector defined benefit pensions.
You’re not asking about the much, much bigger issue, right – which is, how long can we carry on offering defined benefit pensions to all public sector workers?
That is a much, much bigger issue that is not properly discussed in Westminster, in the media and so on.
When Bloom asked how Reform might replace defined benefit pensions for public sector workers in the future, Tice replied:
That’s where patience is a virtue. These are such big issues — you don’t answer them in a day, a week, frankly, or a month.
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, says on Bluesky that he hopes Nigel Farage gets challenged by the BBC today over Brexit.
I hope the BBC will challenge Nigel Farage today over the economic damage caused by the Brexit he championed.
He needs to be held to account for the damage he’s done instead of always being given an easy ride.
As Kiran Stacey reports, Farage is going to use the ‘never properly implemented’ line ab about Brexit in his speech. He will say:
When it comes to Brexit … we have not taken advantage of the opportunities to deregulate and become more competitive. The harsh truth is that regulations and regulators, in many areas, are worse than they were back in 2016.
Tax rises and drop in investment predicted to limit UK growth
The prospect of looming tax rises and a fall in business investment will restrict the UK’s economic growth rate next year to less than 1%, according to a health check of the economy by a leading consultancy. Phillip Inman has the story.
Farage to give speech on his 'economic vision', with Labour saying he backs austerity and Tories claiming he's leftwing
Good morning. Even though Reform UK has had a clear lead over all other parties in opinion polls for much of the year, it has multiple vulnerabilities. One of them is that immigration is the only potential winning issue it has got, because on all almost other subjects its policy offer is flimsy and its credibility is minimal. And nowhere is this more obvious than on the economy, where the party has already had to admit that the £90bn tax cuts it was proposing in its manifesto last year are now being ditched because they are unachievable.
Today Nigel Farage is trying to address this problem with a speech where, as he puts it, he will “set out our economic vision for a future Reform government”. As Kiran Stacey reports in his preview, Farage will commit the party to wholesale deregulation.
Farage will also say that, under Reform, spending cuts would happen before tax cuts.
Reform will get public spending under control, so that the nation’s borrowing costs come down. Then, and only then, will I cut taxes to stimulate growth. We must get the economy growing.
This is a huge change from what Farage was offering last year.
There was a time when Labour and the Conservatives largely ignored Farage speeches, but last night they both issued lengthy “pre-buttal” comments that contained more information than the Reform party preview. Labour said that Farage would revive austerity. A Labour spokesperson said:
Nigel Farage says he is offering something new – but for all his talk, his plan would take us back to austerity.
We’ve seen from the councils Reform run that they’ve failed to deliver the savings they already promised and are cutting services and raising taxes as a result. They’ve said themselves that those councils are a shop window for what a Reform government would do nationally – we know that this is more empty promises and no real plan.
The Conservatives issued a seven-page document attacking Reform’s economic policy. In a statement, Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, said Reform promises “disintegrate after five minutes” and that its economic policies are “leftwing”.
Of the two lines of attack, Labour “austerity” one is more plausible, not least because of what Farage plans to say today about spending cuts coming before tax cuts. The Tories are trying to depict Reform as “leftwing” partly because some of their welfare proposals don’t involve cuts as deep as those proposed by the Tories and because the last Reform manifesto included a plan for public utilities to be run according to a model involving 50% public ownership, with the over 50% being owned by UK pension funds. But this is not an idea that Reform has been promoting recently; this aspect of the Tory briefing does not take into account Stride’s point about Reform manifesto promises only lasting five minutes.
After the speech, other parties will get the chance to revise their attack lines against Reform.
There is a lot of other stuff on today too. Here is the agenda.
10.30am: Chester crown court starts hearing an election petition challenging the result of the Runcorn and Helsby byelection, which was won by Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin by six votes.
11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, gives a speech on economic policy.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
1.30am: Sir Chris Wormald, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Olly Robbins, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, give evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee about the work of the Foreign Office. The hearing is expected to include questions about the vetting of Peter Mandelson before he was appointed ambassador to the US.
2.30pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the Huntingdon train attack.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
