Before the rally at Leeds Arena, Farage visited The Commercial pub on Elland Road in Morley to drum up support and speak to Reform UK activists.<\/p>\n
While there, he told the BBC that since last year’s local elections, “what we’ve been able to do is to bring in council tax rises lower than everybody else, and two or three of them are the lowest in the country”.<\/p>\n
“My promise is, we will keep the record we’ve built already and our council tax rises will be lower than the other parties, because we will be much more cautious about levels of expenditure.”<\/p>\n
Farage described local government in England as “a mess”.<\/p>\n
“Every council in the country is burdened with debt. Local government is in big trouble,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Leeds’ debt is off the charts. It’s the second biggest debt in the entire country. Even the interest payments in Leeds on the debt are over \u00a3100,000 a day.<\/p>\n
“I’m not for one minute pretending we can come in, wave a magic wand and make it better overnight, but I can promise we’ll come in, adopt a different approach and incrementally we’ll build that over the four-year term.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before the rally at Leeds Arena, Farage visited The Commercial pub on Elland Road in Morley to drum…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493862,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-493861","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}