Badenoch attacks Starmer and Farage over welfare
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has accused Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage of indulging in "fantasy economics" over their approaches to welfare policies.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Badenoch says both leaders believe in getting struggling taxpayers to "fund unlimited child support for others".
Her commentary comes after the Labour government indicated that it was looking at the possibility of scrapping the two-child benefit cap.
Farage said earlier this week that his party would also get rid of the policy and back more generous tax breaks for married people.
Badenoch added the country could not "afford their fantasy economics" and that Britain deserved leaders who did not "treat economics like a branch of showbiz".
"This week we have seen Labour and Reform in a race to the bottom to scrap the two-child benefit cap," she wrote.
"Starmer and Farage now believe in getting taxpayers - many of whom are struggling to raise their own children or choosing not to have them in the first place - to fund unlimited child support for others."
The Conservatives have said the policy - which they introduced - of limiting means-tested benefits to just two children in most families should not be scrapped.
Reform UK have pledged to remove the cap if they win power, but have not detailed how they would fund the billions it, and all their other pledges, would cost.
In a speech this week, Farage said he wanted to lift the cap "not because we support a benefits culture" but because it would ease the burden on lower-paid workers.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has said the government is looking at scrapping the two-child benefit cap but warned it would "cost a lot of money".
Speaking on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show last week, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner refused to confirm whether the government would remove the policy.
Pressure has also grown from Labour backbenchers over the issue since the party's poor performance at the local elections earlier this year.
Badenoch's attack comes after Farage said this week the Conservatives had become an "irrelevance".
For his part, Sir Keir said the Conservatives had "run out of road", were in "decline" and "sliding into the abyss".
Badenoch argued her party was now "the only major political party to take a serious look at the welfare state".
First minister calls for end to two-child benefit cap
Rayner refuses to confirm if two-child benefit cap will be abolished
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‘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. 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've 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 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. 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. 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). 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. 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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. 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