Reform UK have called on the Prime Minister to sack chancellor Rachel Reeves after she attacked Brexit boss Nigel Farage on fake racism grounds, putting words in his mouth over the skin colour of children in poverty.
The UK’s Labour government is to introduce new rules ending the ‘two-child cap’, a restriction in the UK welfare state that limits pay-outs to the first two children in a claimant family. It has long been criticised for increasing child poverty, but Labour didn’t commit to the expensive change in their election-time manifesto.
Mr Farage’s Reform UK has given qualified support to the change, arguing that the cost of expanding the generosity of the welfare state to larger families fallen on hard times could be dramatically reduced if this was restricted to Britons only, arguing that most beneficiaries to a universal rollout would be foreigners. He restated this position on Wednesday afternoon, complaining that his previous remarks on the matter had been “wilfully misinterpreted” and that he is “pro-family, pro-children, pro-working people who find it very, very hard to pay for childcare”.
The Reform UK party leader continued: “I think the way this government is doing it, looking at some of the stats, its going to start to benefit huge numbers of foreign-born people, and that goes back to this point. We have to prioritise British-born people, whether its for child benefit, or if its for social housing, so I think when it comes we will vote against it.”
The Labour government’s chancellor Rachel Reeves told The Guardian that she was “angered” by Farage dissenting from her plan, even if most of her anger appeared to be directed at things Reform UK spokesmen said Farage hadn’t implied. Instantly making a connection between UK-born and white — a link that has long been severed in the UK — Reeves blasted: “I don’t really care what colour a kid’s skin is – some deserve to be in poverty and some don’t? That makes me pretty angry”.
She added: “Does Nigel Farage want to go around and say: ‘White? Yeah, you can have the money. Black? No, I’m sorry, it’s not for you.’ What sort of country does he think we are?”.
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s policy supremo, hit back at Reeve’s comments, calling her an “ethno nationalist” for assuming a link between place of birth and skin colour. He said: “She believes only white people can be British. She equates Britishness with race, according to her only white people are truly British” and called on the Prime Minister to sack his chancellor for racism, a neat rhetorical inversion of usual leftist rhetoric.
Reform’s Dr David Bull also commented on the scuffle, adding: “Rachel Reeves is deliberately being disingenuous and trying to smear us as racist saying we would base it on skin colour.”
Remarkably, the Labour-Guardian attack line on Farage insisted that if the change in rules cleaved to what they think Farage’s conditions are, then almost no extra families would be able to claim benefits, as close to all large family claimants aren’t British-born households. The Guardian stated in its attempted gotcha:
…Reform’s policy on the two-child benefit cap would help less than one per cent of those affected…
[and]
Analysis by Labour on Farage’s proposal to only give additional benefits to households with two working parents born in the UK suggests the policy would help just 3,700 – less than 1% of those affected by the two-child limit.
By Labour’s own research, the Reform plan to limit payments to Britons, the government would save 99 per cent of expenditure on a £3 billion-a-year policy.
Labour in turn denied that they’d been inadvertently racist on Thursday, insisting Reform’s response was “division”.
Thursday’s exchanges are the latest in Labour’s bid to interrupt Reform’s soaring polling as their own collapses. This strategy burst onto the scene last summer with an orchestrated attack line against top Reform figures by Labour that went so hard a top Labour peer felt motivated to apologise to Mr Farage on behalf of his party for defaming him.
The effectiveness of this strategy, in any case, is unclear. As reported in October, Reform’s polling lead over Labour had continued to open after the ‘racism’ attack line campaign and Mr Farage himself has suggested the attempts are so nakedly political the public may have seen them, leading to “solidifying our core support”.
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