Nigel Farage vowed to introduce tax breaks for married couples and abolish the two-child benefit cap in a major speech seeking to position Reform UK as the true opposition to Labour.
Delivering a pro-family pitch, Farage said lifting the two-child limit is the “right thing to do” as it would make having children “a bit easier for British families”. He also pledged to introduce a new transferable marriage tax allowance in an attempt to encourage people to have more children.
In a speech that featured several multi-billion pound commitments, Farage argued that tax breaks for married couples would “perhaps make marriage something that is just a little bit more important in terms of the family.”
Farage affirmed that his party’s biggest aspiration is that “working people should not start to pay tax until they earn £20,000 a year.”
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Reacting to Farage’s address, the Liberal Democrats labelled the proposals “Trussonomics on steroids”, pointing to the Reform leader’s support for the Liz Truss mini-budget of September 2022.
Ed Davey, the leader of the Lib Dems, said Reform offered “unfunded spending pledges and only vague promises of fantasy savings.”
The Labour Party echoed this criticism, saying the “fantasy promises” Farage outlined are “exactly how Liz Truss crashed the economy.”
Farage’s speech comes after a period of electoral and political progress for Reform, following its successes in May’s council contests, mayoral races and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election.
The Reform leader began by saying his thoughts are with Liverpool Football Club after a car drove into fans whilst they took part in the club’s Premier League title-winning parade. “Our thoughts go out to all of them after that mindless act of violence, we also thank members of the public who did all they could to help the victims and, of course, our emergency services”, he said.
Moving to the substance of his speech, Farage said voting for the Conservative Party would merely maintain Labour’s position in power.
He commented: “It’s a Conservative vote that actually would help keep Labour in power, and that is the absolutely fundamental shift of public perception that has happened after 1 May.
“Over 40 per cent of people who voted Conservative at the last election actually wanted to vote Reform, but didn’t do it because they thought it would be a wasted vote, and that has been completely and utterly destroyed as an argument.”
Farage also said the Conservatives have ceased to be a “national party”, adding: “They are now an irrelevance in Scotland, an irrelevance in Wales, a complete irrelevance in the red wall where nobody will ever trust them again.”
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But the focus of the speech was on Reform’s challenge to Labour, a party Farage claimed is suffering the “worst start of any government since [Anthony] Eden and the Suez Crisis in 1956.”
He declared that Reform UK is now the “party of working people”.
He said: “The great divide that is opening up in British society is between those that get up and go to work, pay an ever increasing tax burden, feel ever more hampered by government at every level, and their next door neighbours who choose to do nothing but actually have a very similar standard of living.
“That is becoming increasingly a massive problem in this country.”
Flanked by council leaders, mayors and Runcorn MP Sarah Pochin, he rubbished Starmer as a man who “does not believe in anything”.
Farage commented: “It’s quite extraordinary that for over a year, it was obvious that Starmer would become our prime minister. You would have thought there was a plan; you would have thought there was a passion for what they would do in government…
“And yet, as he stood outside 10 Downing Street, mid-morning on 5 July to give his acceptance and victory speech, in the nine minutes for which he spoke, he referred to his notes 158 times.
“Once every two seconds, the new prime minister had to refer to his notes scripted to the nth degree, clearly without any great feeling, meaning or passion for the job that was ahead.”
Farage challenged the prime minister to engage in a “head to head debate”, referencing reports that Starmer is considering as much before the next general election, expected in 2029.
He also said Starmer should join him in visiting “a working man’s club somewhere in the red wall”.
He remarked: “So that’s my open invitation to the prime minister — let’s go to one of the former mining communities, let’s go somewhere that Labour have held the seat pretty much consistently since 1918, let’s see whether the prime minister will enjoy a few beers with the lads.”
Farage looked to park his tanks squarely on Labour’s lawn with trailed policy announcements on the two-child benefit cap and the winter fuel allowance.
The Reform leader said he believes “lifting the two child cap is the right thing to do, not because we support a ‘benefits culture’, but because we believe for lower-paid workers, this actually makes having children just a little bit easier for them. It’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it helps them.”
He added: “And some will tell you, ‘Well, Nigel, this is not actually a popular policy in the country’. But then I’ve never spent my time being a populist politician. I’ve nearly always spent my career pushing arguments that were minority opinions and trying to make them into majority opinions.
“I think we’ve lost our sense of focus of just how important family is, and I want to emphasise that this is aimed at British families. It’s not aimed at those that come into the country and suddenly decide to have a lot of children.”
Farage also committed to reversing “the taking away of the winter fuel allowance” and backed tax breaks for married couples as the “right thing to do”.
He said: “Now, I know many will say, look, marriage is outdated. Most people don’t bother to get married anymore, and you know, I’m hardly standing here in front of you as a religious priest and moralising. Not sure my own track record was ever so good on this…
“I do think having this transferable tax allowance, perhaps making marriage something that is just a little bit more important in terms of the family, I do believe that it is the right thing to do, and of course, our biggest aspiration is that working people should not start to pay tax until they earn £20,000 a year.”
Anticipating questions about how he will fund such policies, Farage pledged that he is “going to make big savings.”
The Reform leader accepted his plans “are expensive”, but insisted “we can pay for it”. He said his party is “going to make big savings”, by “scrap[ping] the DEI agenda”, closing all asylum hotels and getting rid of the net zero target.
Challenged on this point in the Q&A portion of the press conference, Farage claimed Reform could find as much as £350 billion of savings in Whitehall.
He said: “If you add all that up you have got a pretty eye-watering number of £350 billion. And whilst that may be, I accept, slightly optimistic because it is difficult always to cut everything, I think you can see very clearly the direction that we are going in.”
The remarks come after Keir Starmer committed to expanding the eligibility for the winter fuel payment at prime minister’s questions last week.
The PM is also reported to be open to scrapping the two-child benefit cap. Speaking on Tuesday morning ahead of Farage’s speech, education secretary Bridget Phillipson heavily hinted that Labour will abolish the controversial limit, introduced in 2017 under a Conservative government.
Phillipson, who serves as co-chair of the government’s child poverty taskforce, said ministers are examining “every lever” to lift children out of poverty.
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Farage only cares about his ‘own self-interest and personal ambition’, says Labour
In an intervention overnight on Tuesday, Labour launched a pre-emptive attack on the Reform leader, branding him a “private-educated stockbroker and career politician”.
Ellie Reeves, chair of the Labour Party, accused Farage of having “only ever cared about his own self-interest and personal ambition.”
Reeves claimed the Reform UK leader “wants to abolish the NHS” and challenged him to clarify his position on the state pension, which Labour suggests Reform will cut “to pay for his reckless tax cuts.”
Labour supplemented the attack with a dossier recording “10 times Nigel Farage failed working people”, which includes accusations that he admires Vladimir Putin and holds “backwards views on maternity pay.”
Speaking in Westminster on Tuesday morning, Farage outlined that Reform UK is “appalled, as a party, at the growth of two-tier Britain, under two-tier Keir.”
He said that Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to 31 months after she made a post on X in the hours after three girls were stabbed and killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, “should not be in prison”.
Connolly told her 9,000 followers: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them.”
Farage said on Tuesday: “The sentence that was given to her was absolutely excessive, and while she should not have said what she said… there were millions of mothers at that moment in time after Southport feeling exactly the same way.”
Also speaking at the party press conference, Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin said the prime minister is sounding “more like a Reform politician every day”.
Pochin, who won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election for Reform earlier this month, said: “[Starmer] is U-turning on the policies that lost him the [Runcorn by-election], like the winter fuel allowance, like his policies on the asylum hotels, like the disability benefit cuts.
Reform chairman Zia Yusuf, who followed Pochin and preceded Farage, reflected on the recent success of his party, labelling Reform’s progress “the greatest political acceleration in British history”.
Yusuf rued a “dark time” for Britain and celebrated Reform as a “real viable alternative” to the Conservative and Labour parties.
The Reform chair declared: “So this is a dark time, no doubt, for our country. There are many people who frankly felt pretty hopeless that no matter whom you voted for, the red team or the dark blue team, you basically got the same thing.
“What’s clear now is that there is really, for the first time in about a century, a real, viable alternative. The stranglehold the two old parties have had on British politics is decisively over, and now there is hope.”
Yusuf called Farage “extraordinary” and the “most impressive, effective and consequential British politician of our lifetime.”
Reacting to the Reform leader’s speech, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey said: “Nigel Farage praised the disastrous Truss mini-budget, and now he wants to repeat it with huge unfunded spending pledges and only vague promises of fantasy savings. It’s Trussonomics on steroids.
“We all remember far too well what that means: crashing the economy and sending interest rates soaring. It’s even more ludicrous coming from a man who is licking the boots of Donald Trump as his trade war does such terrible damage to our economy.
“Just like the Conservative Party, Reform aren’t a serious opposition to this government. Only the Liberal Democrats are championing the positive change our country needs.”
Labour chair Ellie Reeves said: “There’s nothing new about what Nigel Farage said today: the tens of billions of pounds of fantasy promises he made this morning are exactly how Liz Truss crashed the economy, devastating the finances of families across the country.
“Those families don’t need to be told what the consequences would be of this nonsense. They live through it every month through the higher mortgages, higher rents, higher prices, and higher bills inflicted upon them by the last government.
“Labour is delivering security and renewal through our Plan for Change. NHS waiting lists are falling, the economy is growing, wages are rising faster than prices and we’ve had four interest rate cuts, along with three major trade deals that will put more money in working people’s pockets. All Reform offer is a return to the chaos of Liz Truss.”
Paul Nowak, general secretary of the TUC (Trades Union Congress), said: “Nigel Farage is a political fraud who’ll jump on any bandwagon to chase headlines. He is full of empty promises, writing cheques he knows will never be cashed.
“Because when it really counts, Farage always sides with the rich and powerful against working people. He ordered his MPs to vote against banning zero-hours contracts and fire-and-rehire – practices that leave workers exploited and insecure.
“He’s a cheerleader for Donald Trump, who has launched a full-blown attack on public sector workers in the US. And who bankrolls Farage? Hedge fund managers and speculators – the same people profiting from economic chaos.
“He pretends to be anti-establishment, but in reality he’s as establishment as they come.”
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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