The revolt against Reeves
Photo by Toby Melville -Britain is weary of spending cuts. Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, has warned that forces bear the 'scar tissue of years of austerity'. Nigel Farage, in his new natalist guise, has called for the abolition of the two-child benefit cap. Cabinet ministers in unprotected departments revolt against the prospect of further cuts.
Sources dismiss reports that Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband 'stormed out' of a meeting with Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury ('It was cordial and it was virtual,' insists one insider). But they do not deny the tensions within government ahead of Rachel Reeves' Spending Review.
Rayner, tasked with delivering 1.5 million new homes by the end of this parliament, fears this pledge will be impossible to meet without a significant increase in spending on social housing (funding for the affordable homes programme only lasts until next year). She also wants additional support for local government to prevent further council bankruptcies (the number reliant on 'exceptional' support has risen from 18 to 30 over the past year).
Other cabinet ministers yet to settle with Reeves include Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and Steve Reed – all lead unprotected departments and have their own unenviable targets. At the election, Labour pledged to provide 13,000 more neighbourhood police officers, to halve knife crime and to halve violence against women and girls. It promised to upgrade five million homes to cut energy bills and reduce emissions. And it vowed to 'champion British farming' (post-Brexit subsidies are expected to be slashed). The Spending Review is the moment at which ambition will collide with reality.
The Treasury dismisses any talk of a return to austerity. To Labour critics calling for Reeves to raise taxes or loosen her fiscal rules it points out that the Chancellor has already done both. Earlier this week, Reeves boasted that the latter would enable £113bn of new capital investment in homes, transport and energy.
But the Chancellor faces two self-imposed constraints. First, though she loosened her rules in one area, she tightened them in another (in a bid to maintain market confidence). Rather than balancing the current budget within five years, Reeves has pledged to do so within three years. This is the target that is now necessitating cuts to unprotected departments.
'Capital spend takes time, and day-to-day spending is still massively tight and constrained,' a minister told me. 'Interventions that will have an impact on voters in the first four years are off the table, and that's what's killing us. Borrowing has gone up but we're not borrowing to do the things that we want to do – we're borrowing to fix the mess of the last lot.'
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Chancellors caught in such a bind would normally raise taxes, but here Reeves faces her second constraint. She has vowed not to increase income tax, National Insurance (on employees), VAT and corporation tax for the duration of this parliament – the taxes that account for 70 per cent of government revenue. As a consequence, ahead of her next Budget, the Chancellor faces a desperate search for alternatives. U-turns on winter fuel payment cuts and (most likely) the two-child benefit cap only intensify the pressure.
Here is precisely why some ministers believe Reeves should have used Donald Trump's inauguration and the rise in UK defence spending to stage an 'economic reset' – loosening her fiscal rules and/or revising her tax pledges. That, both No 10 and No 11 believe, would have carried a high economic and political price. But the risk for Reeves is that she is eventually forced into her own messy reset.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
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Telegraph
19 minutes ago
- Telegraph
‘British families, not recent arrivals': Farage's strategy to win the next election
Shortly before the 2024 election, two of my opinion research team returned shocked from a trip to Portsmouth, where they had been speaking to working-class swing voters. Local people were planning to vote Labour and the Tories were dismissed out of hand. So far, so predictable. But the researchers heard something new and surprising: people were explicitly saying this was their last throw of the dice for mainstream politics. If Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street off the back of big promises to change the country for the better – and then failed to deliver – they vowed they would defect to Nigel Farage. Back then, there was a giant mismatch between focus groups and national polling. While every poll suggested Labour had irresistible momentum, talking to people in detail revealed the opposite: that there was no enthusiasm at all for Starmer or his team. Any enthusiasm seemed to be with Reform. Yet Reform too had a problem at the ballot box in 2024, which was that voters just wanted the Conservatives out. Putting a cross next to Reform risked complicating matters, while choosing Labour would do the job, so Reform won fewer seats that they otherwise might have. Given that Labour were set to inherit the same problems that the Conservatives had struggled with, Reform's true victory seemed likely to emerge after the election. A high-wire act And so it has turned out. Polls move all the time, but Reform are now polling in the high 20 per cent mark, with Labour polling in the low 20s and the Tories a little lower. This combination of perceived Labour failings on issues like immigration, growth and the NHS, and continued Reform popularity, has propelled Farage for the first time into position as the country's potential next prime minister. It is unfamiliar territory. Successfully evolving from a party of protest to a credible party of power will be a titanic job. And while the prize is enormous, the risks involved in building and sustaining a broad and often contradictory electoral coalition are also huge. It was a conundrum that Farage appeared to address this week, when he made what was essentially his first speech as a possible future prime minister. Ostensibly, Farage was announcing a mini-policy package. But what the speech most clearly revealed was the high-wire act Farage must now embark upon as he appeals to a broader public rather than a minority – even a significant minority – of voters. As a political strategist who has pored over electoral data for 25 years, I have seen how Farage's primary following has been made up of 'upwardly-mobile', lower-middle-class, ex-Tories who revere Margaret Thatcher. But for the last few years, they have been joined by a mass of poorer, working-class voters who have expectations of state support that simply are not shared by Farage's first followers. So while most of his prospective voters are provincial and on lower incomes, they increasingly pull in different directions. This week showed Reform will struggle to please both sides. In truth, the policy package Farage announced was a dog's breakfast. It will confirm to many in Westminster that they are miles away from being ready for government. Breezily reassuring everyone that cutting waste will pay all the bills is already attracting ridicule. For the scale of the proposals was vast. On the one hand, Farage pledged to protect winter fuel payments for older voters and to scrap the two-child benefit cap. On the other hand, they pledged to raise the personal allowance for income tax. Concerns raised about Reform's credibility on the public finances will not yet have seriously registered among the party's supporters – and most will be enthused at the prospect of Reform channelling Elon Musk and taking a chainsaw to public spending. And on the substance, none of these policies will have alienated any part of their coalition. Accusations of nativism However, their more affluent, Thatcherite voters will have raised an eyebrow at least at their pledge to remove the two-child benefit cap. A year ago, polls showed voters backed the cap by two-to-one as people tired of seeing neighbours using welfare to sustain lifestyles that full-time workers are struggling to match. Farage says removing this cap will boost the domestic workforce and reduce firms' reliance on migrant labour. The policy, he said, '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.' This will be enough to reassure Reform's coalition that he was not in the process of selling out. He will not mind that such policies will inevitably bring accusations of a 'Britain-first' nativism, reflecting his closeness to President Trump's Maga movement in America. Farage knows exactly how to walk that fine line between hard-edged rhetoric and offensive speech; he will be able to justify his comments as reflecting public concern about migrant workers. Reform wants to replace the Tories initially, and they are on track to do so. Instinctively, they know their approach speaks to the mass of lower-income white voters. It would be absurd to suggest that Reform is trying anything more electorally sophisticated than that. However, Farage knows more about Trump's campaigning than even most American politicians. He will be aware that Trump's second campaign managed to attract many ethnic minority voters whose parents and grandparents moved to the US. Trump did so by appealing to these communities' American patriotism and their belief that citizenship and prosperity is hard-earned and hard-won. Just as these communities were hostile to illegal and 'non-conventional' immigration, because it provided short-cuts their families never enjoyed, so Farage might, in time, find that his rhetoric on work, welfare and citizenship plays well with some minority groups too. After all, many ethnic minority voters have chosen the Tories in recent elections, for similar reasons – above all, the party's (previous) emphasis on lower taxes for workers. In any case, Farage will also be able to point to Labour's recent form here. Last week, The Telegraph reported on a memo sent by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, in which she suggested restricting benefits to recent migrants. Above all, what unites the two sides of Reform's coalition is anger with the status quo. Farage came of age, politically, 20 years ago, just when working-class anger was building. He knows better than anyone how to tap into it. Tapping into extreme discontent I got my first taste of this anger in 2004, working on the successful 'North East Says No' campaign against a regional assembly. Our brutal anti-politician message ran like a hot knife through butter. 'Politicians talk, we pay' was our slogan. We were no geniuses; we merely tapped into extreme discontent that was building. Farage's Ukip played a supporting role in this victory. The mainstream parties have never understood Farage because they have never understood the scale of working-class rage. Because the main parties kept winning general elections, they told themselves that the increasingly-common voter revolts were never serious. But these mainstream politicians were not listening to what voters were really saying across England. I ran an in-depth study of the most disaffected voters in the late 2000s – people who said they were openly tempted to junk the main parties or not vote at all. I remember listening to completely furious voters in Stoke, convinced that the country was run by an elite that neither listened to nor cared about them. Moderate political leaders at the time never knew it, but they were effectively running a country made of revolutionary voters who had simply calculated that the mainstream parties offered the best opportunity for actual change in the short-term – above all, from 2010, on immigration. This is something Farage always understood, and which Labour is now slowly realising (hence Rayner's suggestion to restrict migrant benefits). Political failure on immigration Immigration has never been the only driver of working-class discontent. In 2024, the state of the NHS and the legacy of the cost-of-living crisis loomed large. But opposition to large-scale immigration has always been the issue where political failure and hypocrisy have been starkest and most consistently felt. It was the Tories' pledge in 2010 to cut immigration to the low tens of thousands that secured them so many working-class votes and ultimately a chance to run government. Later, it was Boris Johnson's proposed 'Australian-style' points system which helped give them an 80-seat majority in 2019. It is hard to appreciate the popularity of the points policy. It remains the joint-most popular policy I have tested in 25 years (alongside making new arrivals pay for NHS care). Partly explained by reality TV shows they had seen about Australian border police, people thought it offered the perfect solution: a system to allow useful workers in, keeping out those that could not or would not work. When immigration rose dramatically after the 2019 election, working-class voters who backed the Tories for more than a decade felt sick with betrayal. It was this broken promise that led directly to the rise of Reform. Starmer's continued failure on immigration explains why Reform tops all the polling charts. Recent polling by Ipsos showed Reform is more trusted than either the Conservatives or Labour on immigration policy. All this takes us back to Farage's speech this week and his position as a prime minister in waiting. How likely is it that Reform will form a government? Thatcherite history To answer this, we should first consider how 'sticky' their voters are likely to be. It is one thing to tell a pollster you will vote Reform – or vote for Reform in the local elections – but another thing to put a cross next to a Reform candidate in a general election. But Reform's provincial electoral base has lost all trust in the main parties. While Starmer might be able to bring immigration down significantly, and reduce the flow of small boats, it is unlikely that he will manage to do so on the scale required to soothe Reform voters. Hopes that economic growth will return or that the NHS will see a step-change in performance also seem unlikely. You must still doubt whether Reform can sustain their poll lead in the face of a massive establishment backlash. As I wrote in these pages recently, if public sector unions, the civil service, the legal profession and even the police all line up to suggest that life in Britain will grind to an unpleasant halt with Farage as prime minister, you must assume that many voters will not have the stomach for such a fight. That said, Reform are still heading to secure many dozens of MPs at the next election. At the heart of a much-needed perfectly-run campaign must be a manifesto which emphasises their strength on key issues of immigration and crime, and which reassures voters they are not about to mess everything else up (above all, the NHS). If you were creating a populist party from scratch, polls and focus groups would dictate the design of your manifesto. You would start with the absolute non-negotiables for the public and work from there. But Reform's manifesto cannot be purely determined by opinion research. Farage entirely defines Reform and he has a clear ideological history as a Right-wing Thatcherite. Reform cannot therefore just say whatever voters want to hear. As we saw this week, the nature of Reform's coalition makes policy design hard. Their immigration policies only need refinement and defensive lines, mainly to reassure voters that NHS and care workers will still be able to move to Britain. The same is true of their policies on crime and justice, which pledge a shift of policing towards serious offences and an expansion of prison capacity. Winning over Right- and Left-leaning voters Three things should inform their approach to the rest of their manifesto. Firstly, they should ramp up those micro-policies that they know the public care about deeply, but which tend to be written off by other parties as parochial. For example, Reform could pledge to make driving 'like it used to be'. Filling in potholes is already a Reform priority. They could also scrap most 20mph zones and reduce the number of cycle lanes and low-traffic neighbourhoods. Elsewhere, they could scrap demands for people to have multiple bins. They could force public-facing public bodies like HMRC or the DVLA to start taking phone calls again properly. They could elaborate on their pledges to cut government waste – which appear to be a crucial element of their financial plans – and force all public sector bodies to conduct and publish reviews into the management of their services. These sorts of small-time policies attract derision from commentators but they are exactly the sorts of things that voters bring up unprompted in focus groups. Critically, they would carry no ideological baggage and irritate neither Left- nor Right-leaning voters. They would also provide simple talking points for Reform candidates on the door step. Secondly, and the mess of their policy package this week confirms a need for this, Reform should study the Conservative Party manifesto of 2019 and unashamedly rip off a series of policies from this document – particularly on those areas where a huge amount of technical knowledge is required, which Reform cannot easily access having never been in Government. On education, the Tories said they would back Ofsted inspections, expand the free schools and academy programme and increase the number of 'alternative provision' institutions for those excluded from schools. On transport, the Tories said they would invest in railways in the Midlands and North of England, re-open lines that had been closed in the past, and expand contactless payments across the transport network. On the workforce, the Tories committed to training up hundreds of thousands more apprentices and creating a National Skills Fund to enable individuals and small businesses to undertake skills training. Reform should adapt and market these policies as their own. There is no point Reform re-inventing the wheel on a lot of areas, when the hard work has been done already. Thirdly, Reform should say they are going to trust the experts. The party is already committed to a Royal Commission to look at the future of social care. Reform should take the same approach to the wider NHS and commit to a serious review – led by clinicians – on the future of the NHS, while promising that it will always be free at the point of use and held in public hands. Voters will not care that there have been other recent reviews; Reform's review can make a virtue of being led by those that deliver the services on the ground. Embracing the free market The NHS is the area where Reform are most vulnerable. In the past, Farage has said that Britain should move to an insurance-based system. Given the US has an insurance-based system, it is easy to see why opposition politicians suggest the NHS is not safe in Reform hands. If the NHS is Reform's greatest vulnerability, their greatest choice comes on the economy. Here, their best bet is to embrace the free market in its purest form. This means, for example, bolstering consumer rights against big businesses, encouraging the creation of new businesses by cutting taxes on small firms and their founders, and easing planning restrictions for businesses. This is serious free-market economics, but for ordinary voters. While the public have little sympathy for big businesses, even their working-class base loves small businesses and holds respect for entrepreneurs and the self-employed. No party has yet articulated an economic policy primarily through the prism of these sorts of risk-takers, preferring to talk about abstract macro-economics. Reform should do things differently. Whether Reform can form a government or not, nobody should be under any doubt that voters are in the mood to tear things up. Those people that suggest the British electorate somehow turned in a different direction to Right-moving voters in the US and Europe are not listening. The public did not vote for technocratic competence under Starmer; they voted to guarantee idiotic Tories got the boot. For the foreseeable future, rage will determine British politics.
Business News Wales
22 minutes ago
- Business News Wales
Will Planning Become an Election Battleground in Wales?
It's been nearly a year since Labour took over at Number 10 and in that time, it has made sweeping changes to the planning system. In its effort to 'Get Britain Building Again' the changes seek to enhance housing delivery and to amend long established Green Belt policy to allow housing development in appropriate circumstances. However, the changes to the planning system in England will not impact Wales as planning is devolved to Welsh Government. Unlike England, Wales has had no mandatory housing targets since the removal of TAN1 in March 2020 which required local authorities to produce joint housing land availability studies, and changes in national policy (Planning Policy Wales) which removed the need to have a five-year housing land supply. This was replaced by monitoring housing delivery based on trajectories set in Local Development Plans (LDPs), which – based on the Welsh housing delivery figures – has not been successful in meeting the challenge of providing sufficient new homes since 2020. Although there are now Labour Governments in both Wales and England, this does not mean there is an increased likelihood Wales will be influenced by English policy. It seems likely the current system in Wales will be in place for the foreseeable future. For the current housing delivery approach in Wales to work effectively it requires up-to-date LDPs that take forward the new standards in relation to housing requirements introduced in 2020, deliverable allocations and the formulation of robust housing trajectories. Of the 22 LPAs in Wales only four have an up-to-date plan which accounts for the changes for monitoring housing delivery (Bridgend, Flintshire, Merthyr Tydfil and Wrexham). Wrexham is a special case, with an ongoing legal battle between the council and Welsh Government which has now reached the Supreme Court, placing uncertainty on whether the recently adopted plan will be withdrawn. Without up-to-date LDPs or an alternative national policy approach there is little incentive in Wales to ensure that LPAs are delivering the required amount of housing. This has led to annual completions being below targets, with 2023/24 completions equating to 5,161 dwellings. This is set against Future Wales: National Plan need of 7,400 dwellings per annum over the first five years of the plan – which has not been met in any year since its adoption. Although the initial implementation of Welsh Labour's housing delivery policy through the planning system did not deliver the intended result due to slow delivery of new LDPs, 18 councils are reviewing their plans, with adoption for most of these planned by 2026/27. Once adopted this may lead to the increased housing delivery Welsh Labour hoped for, primarily managed through allocations. Or it will demonstrate that without a national exception policy to allow speculative development to meet the ever-growing housing need, housing growth in Wales will continue to be stymied. Currently, the UK Government is taking steps to address the housing shortfall within England. However, it appears in Wales that the Welsh Government has yet to address the housing shortfall with the current policy approach. Without a step change in Welsh Government thinking it is unlikely the situation in Wales will change. With Welsh Government elections looming in May 2026, housing delivery may become a similar key policy issue for political parties, mirroring the political battlegrounds of the Westminster elections. For all involved, the stakes remain high and the housing crisis in Wales rumbles on. Whether Welsh Labour or another political party can deliver housing at scale via the planning system remains to be determined. However, we will see if the elections crystalise the issue.
The Independent
31 minutes ago
- The Independent
Stark poll shows Nigel Farage could become Prime Minister
Electoral Calculus forecasts Nigel Farage would secure a 74-seat majority if an election were held tomorrow, as Reform UK gains traction. The forecast indicates Labour would drop to 136 seats, while the Conservatives would plummet to 22. A Techne UK poll for The Independent shows Reform at a record high of 31 per cent, surpassing Labour at 22 per cent and nearly doubling the Conservatives' 16 per cent. Experts caution against over-interpreting polls, noting that geographical vote distribution is crucial, but others suggest Reform has reached a critical point. Keir Starmer has intensified attacks on Farage, warning his policies would be as damaging as Liz Truss 's, while Reform dismisses these claims as 'project fear 2.0'.
