In a wide-ranging speech setting out Reform UK’s vision for the economy, Farage sought to counter claims his party’s plans were not credible.<\/p>\n
He accused both Labour and the Conservatives of failing to cut public spending and allowing the national debt to increase “in the most extraordinary way”.<\/p>\n
“We want to cut taxes, of course we do,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But we understand substantial tax cuts, given the dire state of debt and our finances, are not realistic at this current moment in time.”<\/p>\n
He added that the state of the economy was now “far worse than it was in the run-up to the 2024 general election”.<\/p>\n
Challenged during a Q&A session after his speech over how the public could trust Reform if it reversed promises it had made before the last election, Farage said: “We are being mature, we are being sensible and we are not over-promising. <\/p>\n
“But for us not to take account of the dire state of our public finances, that, I think, would be irresponsible.”<\/p>\n
He promised to make savings by cutting the benefits bill, reducing the size of the Civil Service and getting a “grip” on public sector pensions.<\/p>\n
“But we can’t have massive tax cuts until the markets can see we’ve at least got these things in hand,” he added.<\/p>\n
Farage insisted it was still Reform’s “aspiration” to lift the threshold when people start paying income tax to \u00a320,000, saying this was “vital” for incentivising people to work.<\/p>\n
But he said the party had to be “realistic about the state of the economy”, suggesting that by the time of the next general election it could be “in an even worse state than any of us in this room could even predict”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a wide-ranging speech setting out Reform UK’s vision for the economy, Farage sought to counter claims his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[114,184,85,46],"class_list":["post-113619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}