The government must stop serving the interests of giant multinational companies at the expense of British small and medium-sized businesses, not resort to mass migration as a fiscal tool, and stop artificially inflating the already sky-high price of energy for ideological reasons, giving the country a fighting chance of survival, Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage has said. Speaking in a City of London banking hall, the Reform UK leader sensationally predicted the markets are so close to snapping on British government debt that it’s likely the government will be brought down in a giant fiscal crash, leading to a snap election, long before the present Parliament is due to expire in 2029.
Tilting at the human quantitative easing through mass migration that governments have been defaulting to for decades has to end, Mr Farage said, noting how it undermines wages for working Britons, loads vast long-term liabilities onto government spending in terms of future benefit payments, and supercharges the housing market. He said of how governments — which have even admitted themselves — have engaged in importing workers as a short-term economic boost while ignoring the long haul:
…for some years we’ve been living under an illusion, we’ve not been prepared to face up to just how much of an economic mess we’re genuinely in. As we slip down the global league tables we kid ourselves — ‘it’s OK, we’ve got GDP growth’. But there wouldn’t have been GDP growth over the course of the last few years if it wasn’t for mass migration on a scale hitherto never even contemplated, and of course excess government borrowing. That is all that has keep GDP figures up.
And indeed I think we can argue very strongly that on an individual basis, mass migration has made the average Briton poorer. You take a year like 2024, a record level of people coming into the country, and GDP per capita falling…. we convinced ourselves that by importing masses of cheap, unskilled foreign labour that somehow that would be good for our economy. Well, it was good for the wage bills of big companies in the short term. But catastrophic when it came to training and educating of our own workforce.
One of the most pressing crises facing young people in the United Kingdom today is the price of housing, with house-buying out of the reach of many except those with generational wealth, and particularly in the cities with the best jobs. While soaring prices are a market function of soaring demand meeting insufficient supply, the impact of mass migration on that demand is almost never discussed publicly, and government intervention in the market has tended to be ineffective if not downright harmful.
Mr Farage stepped up and acknowledged that Britain’s “population explosion” — driven almost entirely by migrant arrivals — does in fact have an impact on house prices, and proposed a remedy. He said, “It’s in the area of mass migration where perhaps we can move a lot. A move towards net-zero population increase through migration would ease pressure on rents, it would ease pressure on house price affordability”.
He also committed to “the biggest building programme of genuinely affordable housing in this country that has ever been seen”. While this is something the present Labour government has also promised, by building while leaving the borders wide open, the only obvious beneficiaries of the programme so far have been housebuilding companies themselves.
Turning to the impact of the enegry crisis on the economy, Mr Farage noted, “our electricity prices are four times that of the United States of America, double that of most of our European competitors, and we’ve done this to ourselves”. The cost of energy has made manufacturing all but impossible and makes the present government’s big talk about an AI industry revolution laughable, given how intensely power-hungry data centres are, he added.
Farage said: “It’s all going. Chemicals, refining, cement, heavy engineering, steel, we’re losing literally all of it. China, the beneficiary in almost every single sector. And why? Because for ideological reasons we have chosen to have the most expensive industrial energy prices in the world… three or four more years of this and there will be very little manufacturing left in Britain at all.”
The answer, Mr Farage argued, is to back away from this ideological push for ‘green’ energy at any price, scrap net-zero subsidies, and pivot back to the oil and gas of the North Sea, which is presently being run down to zero under punitive taxation and a suspension of new drilling licenses.
In short, between tackling the soaring benefits bill, getting competent people into government, not running the British state as a satrap of international business, Mr Farage vowed: “Reform will not only think differently, Reform will do differently. We will sweep away these outdated conventions, we will become the most pro-business, pro-entrepreneurism government that has been seen in this country in modern times.”
The speech is the latest in a recent series of press conferences hosted by Reform, typically at major London venues and characterised by questions and answers sessions giving dozens of outlets a chance to speak to the party’s leadership, often running longer than the speeches themselves, while honing in on specific issues that have dominated political media coverage this year. Last week, Reform’s new hire, Danny Kruger — until weeks ago seen as a top Tory thinker — laid out the party’s plan to radically remake the British deep state with “profoundly deep structural change to the system”.
Breitbart News
Read the full article .
