There are a lot of policies Reform UK hasn’t worked out
Labour has launched a Reform ‘Don’t Know’ manifesto, highlighting at least 16 policy areas where the hard-right party has failed to spell out how they’d fix the issue.
Ahead of Reform’s party conference tomorrow and on Saturday, Labour has launched a new manifesto website, branding it: “Reform ‘Don’t Know’ Manifesto. All complaints, no answers.”
It adds: “Reform know what they don’t like. But they don’t know how they would fix things.
And that’s why Nigel Farage’s favourite answer is ‘Don’t Know’.”
The spoof manifesto outlines Reform’s stances on key issues such as immigration, the NHS, tax, prisons, and clean energy investment, but concludes that Reform has no concrete plans to tackle them.
On asylum and immigration, Farage’s favourite topic, Reform has pledged to detain and then deport “all illegal migrants”. The manifesto asks: “But where will they be detained? Does that include women and children? What incentives will be provided to countries like Iran?”.
Farage’s comments have provided no clarity on these questions. At a Reform press conference on 26 August, he refused to say where the detention centres would be.
He also said women, children, “everybody” would be detained, but contradicted himself the following day, stating: “I was very, very clear yesterday in what I said that the deportation of illegal immigrants, we were not even discussing women and children at this stage.”
On the NHS, Farage doesn’t want healthcare to be funded through general taxation anymore, but can’t say what alternative funding model he’d use.
In 2014, Farage was caught on camera telling Ukip supporters that the state-funded NHS should move towards an insurance-based system run by private companies.
Regarding prisons, the Reform leader said some of the UK’s “most violent” criminals could be sent to El Salvador, before saying it “may be quite an extreme example”.
He said: “El Salvador may be a quite extreme example, but the idea that we could send prisoners to Kosovo, to Estonia and everything else is a very, very serious proposal.”
That’s a lot of reckless and inflammatory rhetoric from Reform, but no solutions.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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