Do the figures in Reform UK’s ‘manifesto’ add up? | political news

The Reform Declaration, or “Covenant” as they call it, is a strange document.

Most manifestos are written to give voters a preview of what life will be like if the party in question is in power.

Latest election: Farage has been candid about the electoral goals of reform.

But the Reformists have made it very clear that they have no ambitions to win this election, and instead see their best-case scenario as appointing some members as the start of a real opposition to Labor, which is expected to win on July 4.

Nonetheless, they have provided a huge number of manifestos (I may keep calling them that, if you don't mind) showing what they would do if they were given the opportunity. Moreover, they valued the fact that the declaration was a serious document, that their plans were “fully funded.”

So what about them? Do the numbers add up?

Well, in a way, yes. But in another sense it is not.

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4:59 Do the reform numbers add up?

We'll get to the latter in a moment, but as Reform says, let's just deal with the big numbers that make their plan seem affordable.

First the big numbers. Essentially, the reform says it has a range of funding measures – some tax increases and more spending cuts – worth up to £150 billion.

This is a lot of money, but so is the £141 billion that will be donated, mostly in the form of tax relief.

So on the surface it looks like they were planning to raise more money than they wanted to spend. Not only are their plans “fully funded,” they actually leave a safety buffer. imposing! If you believe in numbers!

So what about those numbers?

Most political parties attempt to provide figures for one year, usually the last year of the next parliament, but Reform has averaged the figures so it is a bit difficult to be sure whether the figures are achievable. But that's not the biggest problem.

The real problem here is that you barely need to touch a policy before holes start to appear in it.

Read more on Sky News. Sunak insists the Tories can still win the election. What political parties promise

Let's start with the biggest funding move. The party believes the government could save £50bn by “cutting wasteful spending”. This certainly seems like a good idea. And in a way, the numbers on the back of the envelope seem to back this up.

In the end, the government's total current spending (i.e. less investment) minus debt interest payments amounts to about a trillion pounds. Five pounds out of 100 of those would actually amount to £50 billion.

But here we begin to encounter some insurmountable problems. Because that £100 billion isn't just government departments spending money out of thin air.

In fact, £140 billion of that is state pensions. The reforms do not plan to cut this, so they will probably have to subtract this from the total available to cut this waste.

About £180 billion of that is other welfare spending. The reforms actually plan to cut welfare spending, saving £15 billion in the process, but crucially this is in addition to the £50 billion they are trying to save from government waste.

There is a hole in the total

Something similar can be said about international aid. This amounts to a spend of around £12 billion. But the reforms already plan to halve this, raising £6bn.

And then there's government spending, which says the reforms will actually increase spending, not cut it. The most notable one is national defense.

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2:24 Farage: 'It's not a manifesto release.'

Leave out all these areas where the reforms have signaled they will protect the budget or have already “spent” savings elsewhere in the manifesto and the total government bill to be cut is not £100bn. It is only 610 billion pounds.

Let's assume that the reform could actually save the remaining “butt” of UK state spending £5 for every £100 spent. Savings would then be £30 billion rather than £50 billion.

You're probably starting to see problems by now. Suddenly the safety buffer was gone, leaving a hole in the sum total of reforms. There isn't enough money coming in to pay for all the tax cuts they want to propose.

They're in Liz Truss territory. Although there was a much bigger tax cut than the former Prime Minister had assumed.

Facing issues that major political parties avoid

This is rather shameful. Because while many people (particularly from the “establishment”) are likely to nod to a reform manifesto, it also faces several issues that the major political parties avoid addressing in their manifestos.

For example, the reformists say that as a result of the quantitative easing programme, the Bank of England will raise £35 billion by cutting the amount of interest it pays to private banks. It sounds very strange at first, but it's actually not that different from what many other central banks around the world are already doing.

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The reform figures may be overly ambitious. If the UK followed what the European Central Bank is doing, it would probably only raise a tiny fraction of that. Maybe £5 billion or £10 billion.

Nonetheless, it is very strange that neither Labor nor the Conservatives even mention this issue. I would be quite surprised if Labor, if it came to power, did not do something along these lines (albeit in a less radical framework).

But one thing that is clearly not realistic about this manifesto is that the numbers it speaks of for reform are too large.

This is several times larger than Mr. Truss's plan, and still larger than any plan presented by any major political party this election. The only other political party planning a larger sweepstakes is the Green Party.

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