It’s been noted that Reform leader of Kent Council has had their Twitter/X account suspended for violating the rules of the platform. So far we don’t seem to know why – but given the state of X they must really have gone out of their way to post something offensive.
After winning control of Kent County Council, Reform have taken action to do…very little.
Their Liberal Democrat colleagues report that of the first 5 committee meetings scheduled in June they have cancelled at least four of them, and the status of the fifth wasn’t clear at the time.
The cancelled meetings:
Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee
Planning Applications Committee
Governance and Audit Committee
Regulation Committee
Says a Lib Dem councillor:
I thought this administration claimed they wanted to get to work from day one. Funny way to show it: no meetings, no scrutiny, no decisions, no direction. This isn’t Reform. It’s paralysis.
Going forward, the Byline Times notes another couple of cancellations, including some meetings that you are not really allowed to skip:
They include gatherings of legally-required committees such as the Governance and Audit committee which are essential to setting a budget and keeping finances in check.
You would think scrutinising budgets would be exactly the sort of work these DOGE-fans would want to do, but apparently not.
A Labour councillor comments:
…there is a decision free zone within KCC at the moment. They don’t know what they’re doing.
Higham Ferrers was supposed to hold a local election on May 1st, but it got delayed due to the death of a candidate. It’s going ahead soon. And naturally Reform are standing a few candidates for councillor.
At least one of which apparently will not be allowed to serve on the basis that they are breaking the law in even standing for the position. It is not allowed for a single person to stand in multiple different wards during the same election, which is something that wannabe Reform councillor Elisa Perna is in fact doing.
The Electoral Commission have confirmed to the Lib Dems that this rule is in force. So should Perna be one of the election winners, presumably they would have to immediately stand down and yet another costly byelection would be needed.
Higham Ferrers really isn’t having great luck with its Reform candidates. Alan Beswick is another one standing in that council elections. However, in the few weeks since his nomination, he has decided to go and live in China. And even as much as Reform candidates seem to hate living in the places they are supposed to represent, even they agree that governing Higham Ferrer from 5000 miles away is a bit of a non-starter.
Per Reform Councillor Harrison:
He has just had a change of circumstances. He has got a Chinese wife and something has happened and he has got to go over there to China.
If he gets elected we will have to have a by-election.
It’s hard to argue with the Lib Dems when they say:
With one candidate who shouldn’t be on the ballot paper, one candidate sharing a photo of far-right group Britain First, and another candidate who has reportedly moved to China, the only safe route is for the people of Higham Ferrers to not vote for Reform at these elections.
Accepting donations via cryptocurrency is the new hotness for the politically corrupt. Across the Atlantic, President Trump has managed to abuse the office he holds enough to double his personal wealth since his most recent stint at president began, largely via dubious crypto semi-scams that have made almost all its “investors” poorer, except a handful the very rich – but more importantly it provides an untraceable-in-principle way for people who are not allowed to donate vast sums to a foreign country’s political campaign – aka bribes – to break the law, undetected.
Farage naturally likes what he sees there. So, once again jetting off to foreign lands in lieu of representing his constituents, he’s been seen at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas.
After being introduced as a “UK presidential candidate” – note: there is no such thing as a presidential candidate in the UK – he proudly announced that Reform will be the first British party to accept donations in cryptocurrency.
Of course it’s not clear why anyone would want to donate to them in cryptocurrency, as opposed to the much more convenient if boring conventional money = unless, of course, they were up to no good.
Furthermore, he revealed his plans to make tax changes that once favour the rich and powerful who dominate the murky, world of crypto, including a more-than-halving the capital gains tax that would normally be due on the profits of such an investment from 24% to 10%.
Whether this will allow him to secretly funnel the vast sums of basically illegal money Elon Musk was once reputed to be offering him to his coffers awaits to be seen (or not). But even the Telegraph worries that “Farage’s flirtation with Bitcoin will cost him his credibility” here in the UK where they average person has an attitude to crypto somewhere between “don’t care” and “don’t like”. We can but hope.
A few attempts have now been made to model the impact of Reform’s changes to the tax system that Nigel Farage spoke about in his recent speech. They all show it to be tremendously regressive. Most of the giveaway would go to the very highest earners in the UK over the people who struggle with the basic costs of day to day living, as well as the “average worker” they claim to prioritise.
This chart alone, shared by Sky News, reveals the stark truth of who benefits.
In more detail:
There’s one change to the tax system I missed in my previous post. Farage confirmed that the previously-announced Reform policy of raising of the higher tax band such that you would now have to have an income of at least £70,000 to start paying it as opposed to the current value of £50,271.
This was previously estimated to in theory [cost the state another £18 billion](https://www.ippr.org/media-office/analysis-of-reforms-tax-plans. This is on top of the incredible cost of the other policies we already covered. And it is extremely regressive especially when added to the effect of the shift in the threshold for the basic rate and the other adjacent policies announced.
The IPPR models that the increase in the higher income tax threshold alone would see 80% of the tax break go to the richest 20% of households. They would see an increase of £2700 in average annual disposable income, compared to an estimated £17 granted to the poorest 20%.
The Independent also demonstrates how the majority of the extra income based on these policies will go to the uber-rich rather than the average working person Reform hypocritically claims to love so much.
They quote Stuart Adam, a senior economist at the IFS.
Stuart Adam, a senior economist at the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), said that the “biggest beneficiaries [would be] the top 10 per cent”. “It mainly benefits the better off,” he told The Independent.
He added: “We are talking about the upper middle [class] being the biggest beneficiaries as a percentage of income, and the best-off being the biggest beneficiaries in cash terms.”
Around a third of UK adults don’t earn enough to pay income tax even under the current rules. These people obviously won’t be helped at all by the changes in thresholds. Adam also noted that some of the “extra” income for people on Universal Credit would anyway be negated by the consequent reduction in those payments.
Mr Farage’s plans to hike the tax-free income allowance would boost the incomes of the bottom tenth of earners by 1.3 per cent.
By contrast, the calculations show that the top 10 per cent of earners would see their incomes boosted by 4.2 per cent under Reform’s plans.
To be in the top 10% of earners in 2022-2023 you’d have had to be earning £91,000 a year already, a figure which will have only gone up since then. The top 80% of income earners started at £66,000 back then.
Sky News published some charts showing this regressive result in action when it comes to disposable income; income that the recipient can actually use. The regressive nature of these changes are even starker.
Again based on IPPR figures, in absolute terms the richer you are the more extra income you will receive based on Reform’s changes. They plot changes in disposable income by existing income decile.
They summarise as:
The top 10% of households, by disposable income, have £3,000 a month to spend after housing costs, council tax and direct taxes. A couple in this category would have £5,290 to spend.
These people would gain almost £5,983 in disposable income each year as a result of the changes.
The bottom 10% of households have less than £693 to spend on things such as heating and food each month. The figure rises to £1,195 for a couple. These households would gain an extra £221 per year.
When challenged about the fairness of this, Farage claimed “that people on lower incomes would benefit more than those on higher incomes when the tax cuts were viewed as a proportion of their total salary”.
However, that is another Farage lie. Even in percentage terms the lowest-income decile of people receive the least in terms of extra disposable income.
In terms of the cost to the state:
The top 10% of households would receive 28p for every £1 spent, while the bottom 10% would receive just 2p.
Dr Jamie O’Hallaran, senior research fellow at IPPR, sums the stupidity of these changes well – especially when done by a party that claims to care about left-behind working-class folk.
“These tax cuts would be both very costly and disproportionately benefit those on the highest incomes.
“At a time when public services and household finances are under such pressure, this would be highly irresponsible. Polls also show this is not what the public want.
“Voters are crying out for public services that work, not tax cuts for the top 10%.”
Following a speech by Nigel Farage, Reform has changed overnight from a low tax low spend party into a low tax higher spend party. Populists gonna populist, and they can hardly fail to notice the zeitgeist shifting after Labour’s unpopular recent announcements.
Of course, spend typically comes from tax intake, so it’s as untenable as it sounds. And it’s not like the state sector is overflowing with money at present as the administration tries
He’s decided Reform will reverse a couple of Labour’s more unpopular policies – the two child benefit cap and the removal of the winter fuel payment. Which is great. Who knew they supported a strong welfare state? However doing that will cost the state an extra £5 billion or so.
But the biggest new announcement is his intent to raise the minimum threshold for income tax to £20,000 overnight. This means no-will have to pay tax of their first £20k of income per year, and anyone who earns less than that will not have to pay income tax at all.
Nice in theory I’m sure. But this is a hefty rise from the existing threshold of £12,570 and has a commensurately large cost.
Of course, no formal costings were supplied by Reform – inane populist soundbites never need any evidence that they’ll work from reality. The Financial Times provides us with some annual estimates for all the above, as well as the total abolishment of all inheritance tax he’s announced recently.
Overall, that adds up to a £86 – £115 billion cut in public money.
For reference, it was Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget that made her Briton’s shortest-reigning total failure of a Prime Minister. Famously a lettuce outlasted her tenure of 45 days. Her budget ended up costing the country a tremendous amount as well as making a mockery of any Conservative claim to be masters of the economy. Idioms such as the “moron premium” were coined to describe what happened and the untold damage it did to our country.
And her policies only cost roughly half of Farage’s income threshold cuts alone at £45 million.
Many people are making that point, including Labour chair Ellie Reeves who 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.
Let it never be forgotten that Nigel Farage was the one person who absolutely loved the Truss budgets that would go on to cause untold damage to the UK, as well as cost her her career. Back then:
…Farage described Truss’ budget as, “the best Conservative budget since 1986”, while it was reported in the Daily Express at the time of the deeply damaging budget, that Farage had, “praised Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng for cutting taxes and moving ahead with the policy despite warnings from world economic organisations.”
And we all know how that turned out.
Current Prime Minister Starmer is joining the fray, referring to Farage’s economics are a “fantasy” claiming that:
Farage is making the exact same bet Liz Truss did – that you can spend tens of billions on tax cuts without a proper way of paying for it.
“And just like Truss, he is using your family finances, your mortgage, your bills as a gambling chip on his mad experiment. The result will be the same.
Farage has announced billions in unfunded commitments with fantasy ways to pay for them. It’s Corbynism in a different colour.
I don’t think Corbyn was particularly well known for wanting massive tax cuts but there we go.
Their leader, Kemi Badenoch, basically accused Reform of lying:
I was elected to tell the truth. So I only announce policies that are costed, clear, or save money—anything else is a lie. Our country can turn itself around, but not with empty promises.
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.”
As it stands, I don’t think they have really set out how they would pay for such big giveaways…at some point, if they’re going to be a party of government, they would have to make those numbers add up.
Even the Daily Mail columnists, who could hardly be described as your typical enemies of the Reform party, don’t believe in it:
All in all, there’s an air of unreality about the proposals announced by Farage on Tuesday. Many of the figures are broad brush. They can only be made to add up through a haze of cigarette smoke amid the sound of merriment.
And anyway hate the very idea of it:
My fear is that he is being held hostage by the expectations of his new supporters. They don’t want a smaller state. They just want a better life, which I doubt they’ll get with Farage’s statist policies. He and Reform would then face a terrible reckoning – and Britain a dark future.
…leading Reform activist Tim Montgomerie, who defected from the Tories after founding the ConservativeHome site, admitted: ‘The sums don’t add up.’
Farage doesn’t seem all that bothered. He banged on for a bit about how much money could be saved by magically getting rid of asylum seeker accommodation, ending “DEI” and “net zero”, plus the classic cutting bureaucracy every administration promises. He didn’t note of course that most of what they seem to have supposedly cut so far in local government didn’t cost anything anyway because it didn’t exist.
To the extent that he did make vague claims about which spending he’d cut to make his tax and welfare changes, the bulk of the savings come from abolishing all the pro-environmental policies that fall under his category of “net zero”. This supposedly saves £45 billion a year. Except of course it doesn’t. He seems to have totally misunderstood an Institute of Government report, willfully or otherwise.
Instead, the report claimed that “most of the investment is unlikely to come from the government”, and, as their spokesperson confirmed, “chopping private investment does not save the government money”.
The Climate Change Committee said earlier this year that meeting the UK’s climate targets would cost the government between £6bn and £23bn of additional capital investment by the year 2035, falling to between £1bn and £4bn by 2050.
But anyway, it’s a funny kind of savings when:
Keir Starmer’s government has not yet committed to making those investments.
And let’s not get into the fact that not tackling climate change is going to create almost unimaginable extra costs that won’t be able to be sound-bited away when the world gets even hotter.
He also double-counted his “DEI” savings as they were already incorporated into the figure he gave for “quangos”. And it was noted that any big savings from the rest of the quangos would have to come from abolishing the projects they work on, rather than some imaginary reduction of administrative costs.
“Are you chopping Arts Council funding, or the money distributed by them to people in creative sectors?” asked Rutter.
Asked if he had a ‘magic money tree’, Mr Farage admitted his sums were ‘slightly optimistic’…
But anyway, the cost vs savings balance – the actual devastating impact this could wreak on the UK were it to be done – aren’t the point in his view. What self-respecting populist would ever care about economic reality? His response:
You can argue about numbers adding up. You can probably argue that at no point in the history of any form of government has anybody ever thought their numbers added up.
One thing he wouldn’t commit to keeping is the pension triple-lock, which will certainly displease a section of his potential electorate.
The roadside setup in Hertsmere, Hertfordshire, shows deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, chancellor Rachel Reeves and education secretary Bridget Phillipson depicted as cows waiting to be slaughtered.
This is a dehumanising and misogynistic portrayal of hardworking female cabinet members who are delivering change for our country on behalf of the British people.
The Lib Dems agree, raising also the issue of the rather dark “abattoir” theming in an era where MPs already feel it necessary to take extrasafety measures to protect themselves from violent attacks. Their spokesperson claims that:
This is horrifically misogynistic and, after seeing politicians murdered in recent years, inferring that some should also be sent to an abattoir cannot be dressed up as anything other than an attack on democracy.
Nigel Farage of course doesn’t care either way. He’s “very proud” of his candidates even if, to be fair, he seems to agree that “It probably isn’t very funny.”
Reform councillors in Doncaster took time out of their busy day of stopping government waste in order to install a cardboard statue of their beloved leader, Nigel Farage.
Nigel Farage cut out inserted in the Reform office in the council!
proudly explains Alexander Jones, Reform councillor for Edenthorpe and Kirk Sandall.
Reform MP Sarah Pochin is asked about how exactly Reform plan to enact their flagship policy to “stop the small boats”. It becomes very clear that this party-of-slogans has no idea how to tackle even their top priority.
The best she could really come up with was “it’s about [having] the will” apparently – as if none of the other mainstream parties want to stop the boats. They all do.
The interviewer, Victoria Derbyshire, has to conclude that:
Basically what you’re saying to me is you wouldn’t be able to stop people getting in the boats.
It took less than a month after Reform’s Barry Martin successfully campaigned to be elected to Staffordshire Council for him to realise that the job wasn’t really his cup of tea.
He outlined his concerns in a previously public Facebook post:
Now thinking of resigning.
Moving on to more interesting things to do, so dull n boring, the next months as far as i can see long long mtgs with contrary ppl, endless travel, training n emails, rein it in on the social media.
Moi? Barry doesn’t do dull and boring, as u know. Maybs gone up a seriously irritating, brain-numbing branch line and the pay is so poor for all u do. pushy others demand incessantly. admins strangely n leaders on the big bucks.
Taking a leaf out of the current US administration’s tendency to govern via Twittter poll, he asked his Facebook followers for:
your thoughts. As the song goes – Should I stay, or should I go?.
Apparently very few people cared enough to voice an opinion either way. But I’m sure the residents of Staffordshire will rest ever so easy now he’s announced that he’s not (yet) going to be the sixth councillor Reform lost in quick succession. He’s going to stay. Sigh.
Had a blip. NOT RESIGNING. Team Reform on it!
The New European reports that this isn’t the first time the unlucky constituents of Staffordshire have had to suffer lazy nonsense from a party with more than its fair share of far right tendencies.
…in the noughties, BNP councillor Steve Batkin only spoke twice in his first two years and one of those was to ask what the word “abstain” meant.
