By Isabel Downer
A New Revolution, Again
British leadership has a habit of declaring economic revolutions. Thatcher tore up the post-war economic rulebook, Blair sought a balance between state and market, and Truss went full throttle on tax cutting in her brief experiment. Now Reform UK claims to offer yet another revolution: a populist crusade against what it calls the “madness” of high taxes, green targets, and bureaucratic waste.
The pitch is simple: slash the state, scrap net zero and let enterprise do the rest. The appeal is strong, too. After years of anaemic growth, creaking services and stagnant wages, many voters are in no mood for more managerial caution. Reform’s rhetoric of rupture offers a certain nostalgia – it is less suggestive of a “new dawn” and more so calls to “bring back the old days, but cheaper.” However, it is worth questioning whether this revolution would fix Britain’s pains or merely replay past delusions.
Britian’s Economy: All Stuck Up
If Reform were to win the next general election, it would inherit an economy weighed down by deep structural problems: growth rates stuck at 0.2% in July, public debt hovering around 96% of GDP and real incomes under pressure as taxes are set to climb to their highest level on record.
Beneath the surface lie Britian’s chronic ailments: weak productivity, creaking infrastructure and persistent skill shortages. The fiscal bind is severe, as there is little room to cut taxes without blowing a hole in already strained state finances.
To undo this bind, Reform offers an ideological cocktail of Thatcherism with a populist twist. Its economic prospectus pledges to raise income tax thresholds, scrap business rates for small firms, cut corporation tax to 15% and kill off net zero, all while shrinking the state. The party’s mantra to “slash waste, unleash enterprise”, captures its belief that it is government slowing growth, not deeper economic problems. Economists are less convinced.
The Sums Don’t Add Up
The Reform manifesto estimates business tax cuts will cost £18 billion a year. However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), Britian’s fiscal watchdog, projects that the long-term cost of cutting corporation tax alone could be more than double that figure.
Reform says it could save £30 billion a year by abandoning Britian’s net zero target, mainly by cutting subsidies for renewable energy and emissions reduction. The party cites the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in support. But the OBR’s latest report puts the average annual public cost of decarbonisation at about £9.9 billion, far lower than Reform’s figure. They also note that most of the wider £30 billion “fiscal cost” comes from lost fuel duty, as motorist shift to electric vehicles, rather than from higher public spending. Moreover, most economists assess that failing to reach net zero would, in the long run, cost Britain more than achieving it. In 2021 the OBR modelled a scenario of “unmitigated global warming”, in which climate shocks sent Britain’s public debt soaring to 300% of GDP by the end of the century.
Reform also promises to do what no government has managed in the 76-year history of the NHS: to clear waiting lists in just two years. The scale of this challenge is staggering, as some 7.4 million are waiting for treatment in England alone. The party’s manifesto allocates £17 billion a year for the health service, its largest proposed spending increase. However, analysts at the IFS note that even such a large boost would fall short of what’s needed to meet Reform’s goal. Eradicating the backlog at this pace would be, as one health correspondent put it, “near impossible.”
Another proposed saving comes from halting the payment of interest on the £700 billion of reserves that commercial banks hold at the Bank of England (BoE), a legacy of quantitative easing after the financial crisis. Reform says this would save £35 billion a year. There is a respectable debate over whether or not the BoE should pay interest on all reserves, as some central banks such as the European Central Bank do not. But most economists still doubt the arithmetic, with the IFS estimating that the move would raise far less than £35 billion a year. Meanwhile the Bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, has warned that such a measure would ultimately push up borrowing costs for households and firms.
Also among its boldest claims, Reform says it can save £50 billion a year by rooting out “wasteful” spending across government departments and commissions. But such savings would be hard to find without real financial pain. The IFS notes that achieving them would require far more than a bureaucratic clean up: Carl Emmerson, (specific role at the IFS), warns that “It would almost certainly require substantial cuts to the quantity or quality of public services”. Such cuts are not what the British public is likely to welcome, given that public services are already crumbling.
Overall, even under the most optimistic assumptions for growth, the sums do not add up. The IFS notes that while Reform’s manifesto sets out clear priorities, no government could deliver the full package without finding new ways to pay for it. New ways to pay for it, implying that the manifesto will require sources of funding which Reform has not yet disclosed.
The Immigration Gambit
Beyond cost saving policies, Reform sets itself apart from major British parties on one contentious issue: immigration. In fact, 84% of their voters to want to see small boat migrants immediately removed from the UK and prevented from ever returning, a number that is twice as high as the public as a whole (41%). Echoing this sentiment, the party has promised to “pick up illegal migrants out of boats and take them back to France.”
If elected, Reform plans to deport up to 600,000 asylum seekers. This plan to tighten Britain’s borders comes with a surprisingly modest price tag, at least on paper. The party says its five-year scheme would cost just £10 billion, a fraction of the £47.5 billion once
estimated by their own former MP Rupert Lowe for a nearly identical proposal. Such savings would be impressive, if they were realistic.
The scheme envisages building new detention facilities with capacity for 24,000 people, hiring thousands of staff and chartering deportation flights. Infrastructure on that scale does not come cheap. Similar projects in the past have swiftly drifted into costing tens of billions of pounds.
Reform also promises a new “enforcement unit” that would merge data from the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and police. This is an ambitious plan to merge government systems – something previous governments have tried and often regretted. Past efforts to integrate sprawling databases have consumed vast sums and more political headaches than operational benefits.
To cap it off, the party would hire the police to conduct biometric capture at every encounter, a measure that could cost tens of millions and raises the familiar concerns about civil capacity. The plan’s arithmetic, like its ambitions, seems optimistic. For a party that prides itself on fiscal virtue, Reform may find that controlling immigration is rather more expensive than campaigning about it.
Rage, Reality and Reform
For all its bold arithmetic, Reform’s appeal rests less on economics than emotion. It channels a populist weariness with high taxes, fraying services and distant elites, promising to tear up the rules and start fresh. That message resonates in a country tired of perceived decline.
But governing is duller than campaigning. Fiscal arithmetic, international obligations and the Whitehall machine have a way of putting out revolutionary fire. The ghosts of past experiments, from the radical dreams of the 1980s to the fiscal farce of 2022, serve as a warning. Enthusiasm alone does not rebalance the books.
Even Thatcher, often cited as a model for Reform, needed years of political discipline and institutional control to reshape Britain. By contrast, Reform trades in slogans rather than systems, in conviction without calculation. Its appeal rests on emotion rather economic sense. It makes bold promises that are detached from fiscal reality and reinforced by a populist, anti-immigration rhetoric. This may be an effective way to win seats, but without a credible plan for governing it would quickly be confronted by reality. In Britain, grand upheavals tend to end in administration, not liberation.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own, and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
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