Reform’s Zia Yusuf savages Labour on tax and spend | Politics | News
Writing in the Daily Mail today, Reform Party leader Zia Yusuf extolled the virtues of his party’s pledge to ‘put Britain first’ by splurging on international development and interests outside the UK, while slamming the high-spending welfare state run by Labour.
He wrote:
The welfare state is a runaway train on which the entire economy depends.
Taxpayers have suffered enough. People who set their alarm clocks and go to work are being asked to pay record amounts of taxes, accept terrible public services and pay for record numbers of people not to work. The tax burden is expected to rise to a staggering 38 percent of GDP by 2030, the highest post-war level.
‘Tough decisions must be made’ has become the refrain of the political class, which repeatedly insists that the British people tighten their belts while continuing to write a blank check to the rest of the world.
Old parties: The scenario never changes
Whether it was the Conservative Party before or the Labor Party today, the scenario never changes: taxes rise, services get worse. What they never admit is that the state is transferring increasingly larger sums of money to foreign nationals, and the only people whose sacrifices are being asked are the British people themselves.
Britain has been transformed into a global food bank, funded by taxpayers who can barely afford their mortgages and energy bills. It is immoral, economically illiterate, and politically indefensible.
There’s only one way to end this cycle of disaster: Reduce government spending and let workers keep more of their wages.
Nigel Farage and I have revealed £27bn of immediate savings that could be made by putting Britons first. By placing the burden of the ‘difficult decisions’ that need to be made on foreign nationals.
Philanthropy begins at home. With British children going without a dental check-up and pensioners failing to get GP places, the UK providing Guyana with £52 million of ‘road to nowhere’ funding is untenable.
Britain transferred £19 million to Pakistan for child abuse prevention programmes, as Labor resisted a national inquiry into gang grooming.
Zia Yusuf’s words
The reform will cap foreign aid at £1bn; This will be enough to meet our core UN obligations, support Ukraine, provide emergency aid and support British interests abroad. Everything else is an unaffordable luxury. This alone saves £10bn this year.
We will increase the fee expats must pay to access the NHS (raising £5bn) and reform PIP welfare to end non-serious anxiety payments (saving £3.5bn this year).
We will end welfare payments to foreign nationals: they receive around £8bn a year from Universal Credit alone. The reform would also save more than £500 million by deporting all foreign nationals from our prisons.
If Rachel Reeves had followed our plans she would have saved £27 billion. Instead it increased taxes by £26bn.
Asking Britons to make sacrifices and pay more tax while writing blank checks to foreign nationals is morally repugnant.
The reform will put the British people first, cut spending, cut taxes and enable the economy to grow. This is the only way we will turn this country around and make it prosperous again.
