YESTERDAY’S Reform UK announcements on benefit spending and the family perfectly illustrated both Nigel Farage’s strengths . . . and his weaknesses.
He has a fantastic gift for identifying issues where the major parties are vulnerable.
AlamyNigel Farage believes Brits should have more children[/caption] GettyBrits must have more babies[/caption]The most obvious of these is, of course, immigration.
But Reform’s latest pivot into family policy shows the same deft touch.
It also shows a willingness to tune in to the concerns of younger voters, which the Conservatives would do well to learn from.
Too many Tory MPs and their aides dismiss the concerns of under-35s worried they can’t afford to start a family or have more than one child.
As one former adviser put it to me when I raised the issue, Britain can and should “just import people”.
Political opportunity
Which is exactly what they did in the last Parliament — as immigration soared.
The Conservative Party has paid dearly for such thinking as its support among younger voters (meaning anyone younger than their fifties) collapsed.
Which means there is a huge political opportunity for a party which makes a serious effort to close what campaigners call the “birth gap” — the difference between the number of children British women say they want and the number they end up having.
Not only would strong pro-family measures be popular in their own right, but they are also essential to any realistic attempt to wean the state off the opiate of runaway mass immigration.
Why? Because the welfare state is essentially a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
All public spending is paid for out of taxes paid by working-age people.
(This is true even where government pretends otherwise: National Insurance is not insurance, just another tax, and pensions are paid for the same way as other welfare.)
An ageing population means either squeezing a smaller tax base harder and harder or importing more ready-made workers from other parts of the world.
(Or, as we’ve seen in recent years, both.)
Before the modern welfare state, everyone understood that having children was an investment in their own old age.
That’s why people in poorer countries still have far more offspring than those in developed nations.
Modern society has lost sight of this, and unbeknown to them, many voters now expect to live in the shade of trees their children will plant.
But they’re not having enough children, so we have to import other people’s.
So far, so good.
AlamyFarage’s proposals to pay for his new plans don’t yet add up[/caption]But what about Farage’s actual policies?
Here, the Reform leader still has work to do.
Take the proposal for a married couple’s tax allowance, under which one spouse would be able to claim a combined personal allowance on the first £25,000 they earn.
Sounds good, right? And it is — except that Reform proposes to raise the personal allowance to £20,000 so the advantage to married couples is relatively small.
Allowing couples to choose to be taxed as a household, rather than individually, would be a better idea.
At present a family with two parents earning £50,000 can get all their child tax credits, but one with a single earner on £61,000 or more starts to lose them.
Tackling this penalty on single-income households would have the most impact.
Then there’s his proposal to scrap the two-child limit on support under Universal Credit.
It will certainly make life extremely difficult for Sir Keir Starmer, and maybe that’s the point.
Labour MPs are desperate to get rid of it. But beyond the cost, there’s a reason No10 hasn’t got rid of it already — and that’s because it’s popular.
Even more expensive
Why? Because ordinary working families have to make extremely difficult financial decisions about having children.
Prior to the cap there were two groups that didn’t: The rich, and those on welfare. That offends many people’s sense of fair play.
A better approach to make life easier for all parents, not just those on welfare, is making childcare more affordable, and allowing families to spend childcare allowances more flexibly.
That would, however, be even more expensive — and Farage’s proposals to pay for his plans don’t yet add up.
His big savings from easy targets are wishful thinking; freeing up cash for these policies means pain elsewhere.
So there is work for Reform still to do.
But where the party is right is that Britons SHOULD be having more children.
Indeed, we cannot afford not to.
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