Nigel Farage has warned that cash-strapped families must prepare for more tax rises and an early general election. The Reform UK leader said Rachel Reeves showed “just how socialist” this Government is as it laid out £26billion in tax hikes and a hike in welfare spending.
The Reform leader said the Budget was an “assault on aspiration and an assault on saving”. He said it was an “Alice-through-the-looking-glass Budget with a healthy dose of socialism thrown in”. He said that Reform UK supported lifting “the two-child cap for working British couples in the form of a tax credit” and claimed Labour’s changes would “go to people who are already living on benefits or who were not born in this country”.
The Government said annual spending on welfare per year is forecast to rise from £333billion in 2025-26 to £389.4billion in 2029-30.
That is higher than the previous forecasts of £326.1billion in 2025-26 and £373.4billion in 2029-30, reflecting the bumper sums being added by Ms Reeves
Mr Farage said Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Budget was an “Alice-through-the-looking-
And the Reform leader told the Daily Express: “The public need to prepare for more tax rises.
“I think the public might need to be prepared for a general election. I struggle to see this lot going on to 2029.
“I believe there will be a fiscal event at some point in the next couple of years, and I think she’ll face a Budget where she has no option but to cut spending.
Nigel Farage has warned of an early election (Image: Getty)
“We saw today just how strongly socialist this Labour Party is.
“Some of the biggest cheers for the Chancellor was when she was saying, ‘the sort of school I went to, you posh Tories didn’t care about’.
“So it was an awful lot of class warfare out there and I think the risks for Labour of a massive fracture on the Left are really all too real.”
He said that Reform UK supported lifting “the two-child cap for working British couples in the form of a tax credit” and claimed Labour’s changes would “go to people who are already living on benefits or who were not born in this country”.
Mr Farage added: “That is why the cost of this will be £3billion whereas the cost in tax credits for our plan which, by the way, would be one of the most pro-family things that any government have done for many, many years, our cost of that will be about a tenth of it.”
He said his party was “not going to guarantee anything on the triple lock”, adding “we’ll have to see what the economics of this are like nearer the next election”.
Speaking at a press conference in Whitehall after the Budget, Mr Farage said: “I would very much sum up this Budget as an assault on aspiration and an assault on saving.
“One thing that was very clear to me watching the Budget was that we are in an economic doom loop, and no one seems to recognise it, neither the last Conservative government nor this Labour Government.”
He added: “We’re very, very clear that we genuinely are on the side of alarm clock Britain, because here’s the problem, who is going to pay all these increased taxes? Not just the frozen thresholds, they’re bad enough, but all the other taxes.
“Basically, working people are going to be subsidising a welfare bill that shows no sign of going down whatsoever.”
