Reform UK Unveils Budget Written Entirely in Crayon

£25bn of imagined savings, real-world cruelty and mathematics that should come with a trigger warning.

What is a week without a Reform UK press conference these days? The rate that they’re pushing these out honestly makes me think that they’ve been given some unholy voucher of some sort.

This week’s version is really just yet another opportunity for Nigel to do what Nigel knows - shout loudly at migrants and disabled people while completely misunderstanding the realities of what a workable plan that sorts things out looks like. So, much of the same, really.

The £25bn savings plan¹ that they were flogging at this week’s event, with all the grievance filled outrage we’ve come to expect from each episode of this ever-running series, was done under the auspices of giving Rachel Reeves some ideas ahead of this month’s autumn budget.

The “plan”, according to Farage and Zia Yusuf (his sidekick that’s the most prolific resigner I’ve ever seen) will avoid tax rises, cut deficits, restore order and demonstrate the party’s famed “common sense” approach to what governance would look like if they get the keys to the kingdom.

Except, the problem is, what was on display was just not that - it was just yet another shopping list of the legally impossible, fiscally incoherent, internationally reckless and economically self-defeating proposals that would ultimately cause even more damage than Reeves could conjure up on her worst day.

Before we get onto the Reform UK policies though, it’s worth reminding of a few basics, because every serious fiscal institution - the OBR, IFS, Institute for Government, OECD, really, pick your favourite acronym - have agreed on the core drivers of the UK’s fiscal pressures, which are:

• Productivity - too low.

• Workforce participation - too low.

• Health needs - too high.

• Population ageing - accelerating.

• Public services - hollowed out.

• International obligations - real, binding, expensive and interconnected.

Nan’s Not Bankrupting Britain (But Politicians Might Be)

And on that basis, Reform UK entered the chat, looked around at the panoply of mountainous issues and decided that the true villain in all of this is… A Bulgarian warehouse worker on UC, international aid meant to ensure our place in the world and support our allies and a mum with anxiety receiving PIP.

I simply cannot overstate just how deeply unserious this is.

The flagship policy, and what I can only assume to be the most eye-catching one to get their base worked up, is ending Universal Credit payments for foreigners (read: people who had the audacity of not being born in the UK who now live here on indefinite leave to remain), including this time EU citizens with settled status.

The whole policy is morally problematic, but the latter half, the bit about EU citizens, is the part that’s deeply, deeply unhinged - and blatantly illegal. The Brexit Withdrawal Agreement (you know, that thing precipitated by Farage’s first project, Brexit²), is not a suggested set of guidelines that the UK needs to think about following - it’s a binding international treaty that spells out, in painstaking, literal, lawyer-proofed language that EU nationals who lived in this country before 31 December 2020 must be treated equally to UK citizens when it comes to the question of residence and, extremely importantly, welfare and social services.

We, as the UK, signed it. We ratified it, disseminated it and built legal infrastructure around it - and yet still, we find ourselves looking at an increasingly red-faced Farage promising, with the certainty of a man halfway up the peak of ignorance on the Dunning-Kruger curve, that he wants to unilaterally rip it up with a free month notice, “regardless of retaliation threats.”

The idea alone if it were to come from someone with actual power would be guaranteed to trigger an instant trade-war with our closest trading partner - but never mind that, Nigel says its fine. He hasn’t of course actually asked anyone in Brussels, because for some reason, he’s not “terribly popular in Brussels” - but presumably the market will simply bend to a combination of his pluckiness and “common sense”.

Honestly, if it weren’t so incredibly dangerous, I would laugh³.

The second part of his policy is also related to the world outside of the UK - cutting foreign aid to £1bn. Not “reducing it because times are tough⁴” or “rebalancing commitments” - no, no, cutting it all the way down to a figure that wouldn’t even cover the UK’s commitments to Ukraine, never mind our World Bank Guarantees, Gavi contributions, Global Fund pledge and various climate change agreements.

Worry not though, because according to Farage, £1bn is more than enough to “ring-fence” our support for Ukraine - which would be great, if it wasn’t mathematically, logistically, spiritually and strategically impossible considering that our military support for a war against Russia vastly outstrips that. All of this is before we even get to the small matter of the UK which has always advertised itself as a reliable partner to governments, NGOs, multilateral funds and every global crisis we (pretend to) care about when the cameras are rolling.

It’s worth noting that international aid in and of itself isn’t really charity - it’s influence, leverage and security. Reform’s proposal to nuke our contributions to the world would be the equivalent of getting up at NATO, dropping your trousers to show your Union Jack underpants and shouting “LOOK AT HOW FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE I AM!” at the top of your lungs while every ally quietly mutters “oh, dear God, not again.”

The third fantasy on show was the plan by Reform to nearly triple the Immigration Health Surcharge from its current £1,035 per person per year to £2,718 per person per year, based on an exceptionally dodgy way of calculating what the NHS spends on each human living in the UK every year⁵.

The impact of this would be that a migrant coming to the UK to work for us would look at paying around £8,000 for a three year visa in health surcharges alone. A person who wants to bring their spouse along? £16,000. Want to throw your kids in for the ride? A total of £24,000⁶.

The goal of this seems two-fold - to milk some more money out of migrants⁷, and presumably to discourage “freeloaders” from coming to the country.

Except that the people you’ll be discouraging and punishing will be the nurses, civil engineers, IT professionals, hospitality workers and care workers that we have a chronic, screaming, existential shortage of⁸, every one of which not only bringing their skills, but even more importantly, their tax contributions.

And fewer tax contributions? Lower revenue.

This is not in any way or form “fiscal responsibility” - it’s a targeted sabotage of your own country.

To complete the quadfecta of anti-evidence policymaking, we end with disability benefits, and Reform UK’s plan to stop all PIP payments to people with what they call “non-serious anxiety disorders⁹.” In terms of exemptions, a finger was held in the air at the press conference, and we were told that this may include diagnoses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, PTSD and possibly some personality disorders.

Anxiety? Too soft. Depression? Maybe. Complex trauma? Depends on whether you’ve said the right thing on ITV.

It is policy by (poor) intuition, delivered at scale during a time in which there are more than 600,000 people on PIP primarily for anxiety or mood disorders, many of whom are in work anyway, and are using PIP to cope with the additional costs that enable them to remain in work at all¹⁰.

The removal of PIP simply does not shrink the number of people who need it - all it does is transfer their needs straight into other parts of the state, like crisis mental health care, homelessness services, safeguarding, GPs, social care and the criminal justice system.

Individually, these proposals would be ruinous, but combined, they would be utterly catastrophic - while not touching sides on the issues of productivity, labour shortages, chronic underinvestment in the country’s services or the fact that we don’t have enough workers to support the growing number of pensioners with higher health needs in a health and social care system that’s been institutionally hollowed out for a decade and a half.

Not a single one of these issues would be addressed by making life harder for migrants, cutting the foreign aid budget, pricing out skilled migrants or cutting PIP for people who are in desperate need for it.

But the truth is that this doesn’t matter to Reform, because as ever, these policies are not about fiscal balance, economic growth or repairing the state - they’re about punishing migrants, refugees and disabled people. They focus in on the Daily Mail starter kit of convenient villains who get cast in the Reform moral universe that sees the country’s deficit not as a structural problem, but as a character failure. It’s a policy that shouts “your suffering is how we show we are serious.”

Except, it’s not serious. Not at all.

A serious country simply cannot run itself this way, and a serious government would never behave this way - because true fiscal policy acknowledges and articulates the trade offs needed, is grounded in evidence, sticks to obligations and at least makes a basic attempt to understand the impact of macroeconomics. Farage and Reform UK are incapable of all of this, being able to only work in slogans and imagined savings that fall apart the second they meet the reality of treaty law, tax receipts or even the basic mathematics of a country that’s growing older.

The worrying part of this all isn’t just that Reform is wrong about this though, it’s that they are so staggeringly, performatively proud of being wrong, but doing so under the auspices of “common sense”, something that we have all found just isn’t so common or sensible at all.

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1. The word plan doing a helluva lot of heavy lifting for something that gives the impression that a full pack of crayons was used in its drafting.

2. And raises the question of whether you really - as in really, really - want to trust the architect of that particular mess to touch anything more complex than a Ninja blender.

3. Far louder and more hysterically than I already am at any rate.

4. Like we’ve already done.

5. This is where the health strategist in me nearly had a seizure, because they basically worked it out by the “NHS budget ÷ population” method, which is how you cost a school bake sale, not a national health service.

6. Assuming that kids are charged roughly half the cost as they are currently on the system - certainly not guaranteed.

7. Whose visa / IHS contributions alone already add billions to the public coffers.

8. Ah, those Brexit benefits really shining through.

9. A term that the DSM-5 can be heard audibly scoffing at.

10. A point to note here - at no point has Reform (or the government for that matter) raised the idea of massively increasing access to mental healthcare to address the rise of mental health conditions contributing this - because we wouldn’t want to actually fix things.