STEPHEN GLOVER: I once believed Farage would take up Mrs T's mantle. Now, as he jettisons her core beliefs, he's looking less like the saviour this country needs

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

Nigel Farage is the most significant Right-wing politician since Margaret Thatcher, whom he idolised. He left the Tory Party not long after she was jettisoned, and kept her candle burning bright over many years.
Will he, as his heroine triumphantly did, save this country from economic decline, ever higher taxes, bolshy trade unions, and a bloated and often inefficient state?
I used to think he was our best, perhaps our only, hope to rescue us from the mess we're in. Now I am less sure. As Reform UK eclipses the Tories in the polls, and spreads panic in Labour ranks, Farage is shedding Thatcherite views in favour of Left-wing ones.
Almost every policy he announces is calculated to woo disenchanted Red Wall voters, who have every reason to be fed up with both Labour and Conservatives. His commitments are liable to add to our spiralling debts.
There is admittedly lots of talk – if rather unconvincing – from Farage about slashing public expenditure. But there is less mention of the urgent need to reduce the tax burden, which stands at a peacetime high, and is certain to climb further under Rachel Reeves 's shaky stewardship.
On tax the Reform leader has produced a specific plan. Before his speech in London on Tuesday, he had already pledged to raise the threshold for paying income tax to £20,000. This is intended to appeal particularly to low-paid workers, though it would also benefit the better off.
A wonderful idea, but not one that could be afforded without huge cuts in public expenditure. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, lifting the threshold from the existing £12,571 to £20,000 would cost between £50billion and £80billion a year. That's an enormous sum.
Nigel Farage made other undertakings on Tuesday that will also be expensive. Winter fuel allowance will be reinstated for all pensioners (annual cost £1.5billion) and the two-child benefit cap abolished (cost £3.5billion a year).
By the time Farage enters No10 – if he does – Labour will probably have done both these things. It is less likely to copy Reform's idea of a marriage tax allowance, whose costs are not yet clear.
Instead of showing how he would reduce the ballooning welfare budget (which Labour's milksop reforms will do little to curtail), Farage has come up with proposals that are likely to increase it.
And the cuts to pay for all this? Let's just say that they press the right buttons with many voters, including your columnist. But most of them could have been written down on the back of a beer mat at the end of a long evening.
Is it really practicable, or indeed desirable, to scrap the entire Net Zero budget at a claimed annual saving of £45billion? Granted, Ed Miliband's schemes are wrong-headed and costly, but I doubt that any British government can simply pretend that climate change doesn't exist.
Equally, Reform's promise to take an axe to quangos will raise a cheer across the land. But is every quango useless? As prime minister, Nigel Farage might see the point of some of them. An annual saving of £13billion sounds fanciful.
Nor does the plan to claw back £5billion a year by ditching migrant hotels carry conviction. Where will they stay? They could be put in a well-run camp on some uninhabited island off the British coast – a sensible proposition, I believe – but Farage has vetoed this idea.
Incidentally, Reform's plan to dump cross-Channel illegal migrants on the French coast is also far-fetched. It would be a breach of international law, which grown-up prime ministers are supposed to take seriously.
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.
Here we come to the crux. It seems to me perfectly possible, if not likely, that Nigel Farage and Reform will constitute the next government of the United Kingdom without ever making their figures tally. Lots of voters are so fed up with Labour and the Tories that they will try anything.
After all, this has happened before. During the American presidential elections many people turned a blind eye to Trump's factual errors, obfuscations and wild exaggerations. I don't accuse Farage of such excesses but he has learnt something from his friend.
In our own dear island, Labour won a huge landslide, albeit with an historically low share of the vote, even though it was obvious that it wouldn't be able to honour its pledges without raising taxes. People just hoped.
Reform and Farage are riding a wave of renewed hope, and it will get bigger and bigger unless by some miracle Labour is able to reverse our economic decline or the Tories resurrect their skill at governing. I don't think either will transpire.
Perhaps without realising it, or denying within himself that it has happened, Nigel Farage is reshaping his political beliefs so as to appeal to habitual Labour voters, as well as to disgruntled Tories tired of their party's incompetence and ideological dampness.
Margaret Thatcher – whose very name is anathema in the folk memory of the Red Wall – is being pushed away by a man who was once proud to be described as a Thatcherite. Tellingly, he barely attacks Trump's tariffs, which are an affront to the Iron Lady's free-market economics.
Since for many Red Wall voters the NHS is a sacred institution, I expect Reform's leader will soon be forced to disavow his preference for an insurance-based health service such as exists in France, and pledge his allegiance to the crumbling, irredeemable system we have.
Farage's apparent transformation is nothing less than a tragedy for Britain. I don't ask for a re-run of Margaret Thatcher. This is another age, and of course she made mistakes – not least the harshness of the medicine she thrust on parts of industrial Britain.
But her general prescriptions of lower taxation and a smaller state remain as relevant now as they were 45 years ago. Without these we will never get the economic growth that Labour yearns for. How absurd to imagine it can be achieved by building a few more houses.
I once believed that Nigel Farage would take up her mantle. Here was a brave politician and a man of principle. Hadn't he given much of his life to the cause of freeing us from the European Union?
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.
I still haven't given up all hope. Maybe Nigel Farage still listens to Thatcherite ancestral voices. He might yet cast aside Leftist policies and dodgy sums. But he is looking less like the saviour that this country so desperately needs.