Farage has formally torn up Reform’s manifesto, and replaced it with a baseless fiscal hodgepodge

They called it a contract with the people to signify that promises made before the 2024 general election would be kept to their voters. Last Monday they finally put what was left of it in the shredder.

With budget speculation having been at fever pitch in Westminster for well over a month, and expected to boil on at such heat for at least another three weeks (opting for a far later date than usual will do just that), Reform’s silence on economics had become one of the larger elephants in their Commons menagerie. Outside of local authority finance, Reform have made no real substantive foray into the world of fiscal policy since before polling stations opened in July last year, to great criticism from political opponents. Despite the government’s own performance on tax and spending, fiscal viability is rapidly shaping up to be one of Reform’s largest electoral vulnerabilities. Their set piece press conference last Monday, the party’s rinse and repeat narrative-seizing go-to, was supposed to change that. Instead, we got a limp bundle of half-plagiarised, half-unworkable, wholly pessimistic thoughts from an uncharacteristically forlorn Farage.

Last year, Reform promised every single one of their voters that they’d cut taxes by £90 billion and cut spending by a staggering £150 billion once they got into office. So sacrosanct were these promises that they didn’t just call them pledges in a manifesto, but clauses in a contract. When Nigel Farage descended the steps of Banking Hall to address journalists last Monday, he voided them.

The problem with breaking manifesto commitments is that you have to have an incredibly valid reason for doing so or an incredibly better alternative policy to offer up - and if not, as we have learnt, the electorate will eat you alive and spit out the carcass. Never is this more important than if you’ve built your entire party’s brand story around your own assertions that every other party has been unfaithful one too many times. The fact that Reform opted to do so just a day before Reeves herself would hold a similar press conference to essentially pitch-roll that they too would ditch core tax and spending commitments means that this week will now forever be remembered as the week Labour and Reform broke their sacred vows between their respective voters. So much for being distinct.

Once you get past the hurdles of betrayal and hypocrisy, there’s then the matter of the new slimmed-down proposals themselves - or at least the scantily-clad semblance of some. In many ways, Reform’s economic plans have gone from the most bold of all the major parties (if bold can be a byword for outlandish) to being perhaps the most timid.

The proposed increasing of the minimum income tax threshold from £12,500 to £20,000, a distinction juggernaut of a policy, was all but marched to the gallows. He maintained his promise to ‘look at’ the £100,000+ taper rate tax trap. Rachel Reeves will have looked at the tax trap from her budget bunker. That by no way means she will actually be doing anything about it.

Farage asserted that any idea of him defying the two major parties and lifting the two-child benefit cap was a misunderstanding on the part of journalists - not his own loose lips, and revised such a scheme down from the entire voting franchise to just means-tested families with two full-time working UK citizens. As is the issue with policy proposals as deep as their strap lines, many flaws are immediately obvious. Firstly, there are serious questions over whether it’s even possible for the combined incomes of two full time parents on the national minimum wage would even fall beneath Reform’s threshold for what a needy household would be. The median household income in 2024 sat at £55,200. Combined, a two-parent full time minimum wage household in 2024 would be earning £47,590. Reform have released no figures surrounding the policy at all.

No consideration either is given to what happens in the event of a family breakdown. If a father died or walked away from a family with more than two children under such a policy, would the mother be no longer entitled to child benefits for all of her children, even though their total household income has been slashed? And why should single parents of three or more children from before such a policy be penalised for their personal circumstances. With treasury sources insisting that a complete universalisation of child benefits would actually be cheaper than the additional costs involved in a means-tested relaxation, one has to wonder what the real aim is here, or if any real thinking has been done at all. The whole debacle also raises the question that, if policy commitments can be swept away as misunderstandings, what of Monday’s volte farce could be consigned to the same fate?

Any immigration-linked savings forecasts for all government departments based on the savings plans which survived last Monday’s bonfire - savings which Reform insist will be delivered by policies skeletally announced in similar previous press conferences, must still be taken with a fistful of salt. To deal with sky-high migration, Reform have pledged to scrap indefinite leave to remain (ILR) as an immigration status - ILR being the main avenue to UK citizenship for anyone living in the UK with a visa or asylum arrangement. Reform have also asserted that they would not take citizenship away from anyone who’s already gained it via this or any other route. ILR eligibility takes five years, and those on ILR are eligible for full citizenship after a year of having ILR. The problem is that, by a May 2029 general election, anyone who came to the UK within the Boriswave - the immigrants that both Reform and their voters expect their party’s policies to be targeting, will have been living in the UK for seven years since the wave hit its 2022 peak. Just as Reform have failed to so far address this policy paradox, there’s also no indication that their figures will account for it.

Then there’s the policy proposals which will have sounded incredibly familiar to anyone within the party reform purports to despise the most.

Firstly, there’s their new energy relief scheme, which, without any underpinning details, promises to cut the cost of energy for consumers by £165. At their party conference in October, the Conservatives released a fully costed plan to reduce domestic energy bills by, you guessed it - exactly £165. Such potential policy plagiarism has the exact same whiff about how some of the only workable elements of Reform’s equally hollow September deportations plan seemed to be practically identical to Deportation Bill the Conservatives introduced to the commons six months prior. Pledges to reverse both Labour’s Family Farms Tax and small business inheritance tax relief cuts trail the Conservative’s own pledges made almost a year prior.

Finally, in questions afterwards, Farage dodged giving any firm commitment on the future of the triple lock. Whilst there are valid questions around the triple lock and the viability of the current state pensions system as a whole, adopting such a stance could haemorrhage Farage support, especially if other mainstream parties stick to the status quo.

But can Reform be trusted on the tax and spending cuts that remain?

A glance at how they’ve performed at a local authority level so far suggests not.

In the late stages of the May 2025 local election campaigns, almost every single one of Reform’s 1,706 local candidates stood on a pledge to cut council tax, in many cases delivering the pledge by post with letters addressed from Farage himself. Reform’s intense focus on local tax and spend policy arguably made it the election’s biggest local issue. Since winning control of twelve county councils in England, the prospect of any such cuts have completely evaporated. Of the eight Reform-led councils who’ve so far indicated what their 2026 council tax rates will be, six have already declared that they will be raising council tax by the highest value they legally can.

Furthermore, Doge, the promised delivery vehicle for such cuts, has quietly slunk off with its tail between its legs in utter failure. Kent, the scheme’s main flagship council, is among the six. But look across all Reform councils and wasteful spending is evidently rife. 

In Lincolnshire, County Council leader Sean Matthews spent £1,135 of taxpayers’ money to repaint the lines of four spaces in the county hall’s carpark so that the deputy council leader, the council chairman, and himself could have larger reserved parking spaces. Following on from operation raise the colours, Nottinghamshire County Council announced plans to put up 150 union flags on lampposts themselves, accepting a quote for over £450 per flag - over a hundredfold more than protesters have been able to source flags of the same size on Amazon. Most outlandishly, Derbyshire County Council are now spending £5 million on hiring external consultancy contractors to devise an efficiency programme - according to the manifesto DCC councillors stood on, Doge is supposed to be providing such a service for free. These are the exact unnecessary splurges Doge was supposed to rout out, and it hasn’t even cleared the rot out of councils run by their own politicians. 

When questioned on Doge’s efficacy so far after Monday’s press conference, Richard Tice, now head of Doge after Zia Yusuf's two stints, told a reporter to ‘grow up’. He has since embarked on an entire morning press round of national broadcasters denying that Reform made such manifesto pledges in May’s elections at all. If Doge is genuinely functioning as intended as Tice asserts, then Reform’s cost cutting efforts have been so poor as to have rendered tax rises. How then can the public put trust in a single one of the party’s cost cutting pledges?

At best, both Reform HQ and their local candidates concocted a false populist local manifesto to get into power in exactly the same manner that they accuse candidates of all other parties for doing; at worse, they simply had absolutely no idea what they were talking about fiscally pre-election whatsoever. Either way, it does not bode well for the credibility of any current or any future reform pledges. Reform tried to make May 2025 a referendum on council spending, but it’s now failed to find cuts to such an extent that they are putting them up more than many of their predecessors.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, is that barely a crumb of what Reform’s press officers surely would have liked to have been plated within the day’s headlines ended up breaking through the week’s media narrative at all. In fact, it just encapsulated Reform’s broader struggle to have occupied any large proportion of the airwaves in recent weeks at all since the Conservative Party conference. Reform MPs have even struggled to push a coverage-worthy narrative within the commons, with even Nigel Farage’s PMQs boycott on that very basis ending in failure after just one week, presumably because it went almost completely unreported.

Reform’s tearing up of its manifesto, and their launch-failure of its replacement baseless fiscal hodgepodge, may well be remembered as the first tangible sign of an inflection point.

Image: Flickr/Steve Bowbrick

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