This is what a Reform government would do in the UK

Key topics:Reform UK hit by policy U-turns and internal contradictionsRadical plans: net zero rollback, migration mass deportations, civil cutsInternal splits and Trump-style agenda raise doubts over governing coherence.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By FT Reporters.In late 2025, Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice opened fire on Britain’s biggest wood-burning power station, operated by Drax.It was, he said, a “Great Green Fraud” that had “pillaged” £8bn of taxpayers’ money. If Reform UK took power, it would replace wood-burning power stations altogether.Earlier this year, however, at a meeting with Drax executives, Tice agreed that he would not cancel its contracts after all. He has not publicly repeated his criticism of Drax since. A person close to Drax expressed frustration that Tice had not publicly stated his change of stance either.This is not the only example of senior Reform figures contradicting themselves and each other. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Farage repeated a pledge to stop the Bank of England paying interest on reserves held by commercial banks, saying: “I don’t like the banks very much.”.Read more:.The Economist: Reform UK is reassembling Boris Johnson’s electoral coalition.Shortly afterwards, Reform’s then head of policy, Zia Yusuf, sprang into action, said one bank executive. “He is busy reassuring everyone behind the scenes that, notwithstanding their longstanding positions on reserve remuneration and ‘for the cameras’ comments, they are committed to banks thriving,” the person added.Reform UK up closeThis is the fourth in a four-part series about how Nigel Farage’s Reform UK operates, as it sets its sights on winning power at the next general election.Part one: Reform ran a council for a year. Things went badlyPart two: Who are Reform UK’s voters?Part three: The court of king FaragePart four: What would a Reform government do?Reform UK, which was set up less than eight years ago, has set its sights on national power, after finishing first in English local elections last week. But the question remains: what would it do in office?“Reform’s policy is undeveloped, but that is understandable two years into a parliament,” said Tim Montgomerie, a leading policy voice in the party.One adviser said Reform seemed to be “crowd sourcing” its policies via working groups. At several meetings Tice and Farage have told senior business figures to submit their policy proposals on one sheet of paper or three at a maximum. “Any longer and we won’t read it,” they informed attendees, three different people told the FT.Rob Ford, professor of political science at Manchester university, said: “Over 25 years Nigel Farage has prospered by having just a couple of political views and building an entire movement around a basic message of ‘I don’t like the EU, I don’t like immigration, I do like sovereignty’, it was not a deep programme.”Within Reform today, there are frictions between the radical instincts of some longstanding figures and the more conventional views of some former Tory defectors such as Robert Jenrick, now the party’s Treasury spokesperson.Several policies resemble those of Farage’s friend Donald Trump. Yet Reform is also attempting to distance itself from the US president. “There is a clear sense that Trump is deeply unpopular, Nigel no longer has the access he used to and that there may be a Democratic presidency by 2028-9,” said one senior figure.Reversing renewable energyReform says it would cull “all net zero commitments” to save taxpayers money, although its estimate for the potential savings has changed several times. The party has promised to “strike down” subsidies for wind farms and solar panels, reversing decades of UK energy policy.It has even promised to rip up renewable energy contracts, although there has been some confusion over the issue.At a breakfast in the City of London in mid-February, Jenrick told investors and City figures the policy could face serious hurdles. According to two attendees, Jenrick argued that, while Labour’s energy policy was stupid, reneging on existing contracts could violate the rule of law.A spokesperson for Jenrick denied that he personally disagreed with the policy and said his position had been consistent that some renewables contracts would need to be changed.Reform also wants to hit renewable companies with a windfall tax and ban battery energy storage systems — which underpin intermittent renewable energy systems — due to “safety concerns”. Some experts argue Reform’s energy policies would push up bills, for example, by forcing companies to ensure any new electricity lines are buried underground and by relying on gas power.“If they ever properly cost these policies, I think they’ll have a real shock,” said Susanna Elks, senior policy adviser at consultancy E3G. Reform figures have purloined a favourite Trump pledge to “drill, baby, drill”, saying they want to restart fracking, despite some industry scepticism. Oil companies will be given red-carpet treatment: lower taxes, reduced regulation and an end to restrictions on new North Sea exploration. Reform is seeking to soften its anti-net zero rhetoric with a focus on other green issues, such as dirty rivers and overfishing.Mass deportationsTrump once promised to fix the Ukrainian war within days, to little avail. Farage has promised to stop small boat crossings in a fortnight, a virtually impossible task.Reform says it would withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and disapply the Refugee Convention that prevents Britain from deporting some migrants.Echoing Trump’s use of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the party is promising a UK Deportation Command. It estimates it will be able to detain 24,000 migrants at a time and deport up to 288,000 on five flights a day, figures seen as unrealistic by some. It has vowed that detention centres will only be located in constituencies that do not elect Reform MPs or councils.Countries such as Jamaica and India currently refuse to accept returns. A party spokesperson said a Reform government would use visa bans to incentivise countries to accept returnees or, if necessary, process them in third countries.Overall, Reform’s proposed changes to migration rules could mean 2mn people having to leave the country, according to FT calculations. Yusuf, now the party’s home affairs spokesperson, has embraced this figure, saying: “You’d better believe it.”This represents a big shift: Farage had previously described mass deportations a “political impossibility”. Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future think-tank, said the “visible optics of cruelty and chaos on migration” that have hurt Trump would be an even bigger problem in the “more moderate” UK.Reform UK's Zia Yusuf outlines plans to adopt mass deportations if the party is in governmentReform UK's Zia Yusuf outlines plans to adopt mass deportations if the party is in government © Reform UKIn recent weeks Farage has downplayed comparisons with Trump’s crackdown, telling the BBC that “there is an American president we’re going to follow but it’s not Donald Trump, it’s Obama”.Lucy Moreton of the ISU border staff union said Reform’s plan was “all doable” if it was willing to spend enough to potentially double Britain’s 9,000-strong immigration enforcement team and provide incentives for other countries to accept returns.Whitehall cullReform is intensely suspicious of Britain’s traditional civil service.Former Tory MP Danny Kruger, charged by Farage with preparing Reform for government, last year promised to cut 68,500 civil service jobs, 13 per cent of the total. Along with repeal of the Human Rights Act and withdrawal from the ECHR, this is designed to reduce the legal constraints on ministers.Reform has previously claimed that scrapping diversity and equity initiatives would save £7bn a year, a figure that Alex Thomas of the Institute for Government describes as unrealistic..Read more:.Nigel Farage, Reform UK are still a long way from peaking: Adrian Wooldridge.Farage’s allies have also made a virtue of imitating Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. So far, attempts to implement Doge-style cuts in Reform-run local authorities have fallen far short of bombastic claims made by senior party figures last year.According to FT analysis, the 12 Reform-run councils had found roughly £365mn in savings and extra income but also imposed £250mn in council tax rises.Crypto supportReform has vowed to support the UK’s crypto industry, with Farage telling executives he is their “champion”. That commitment has become controversial after revelations that he personally received a £5mn gift from Tether investor Christopher Harborne before the 2024 general election.In a model crypto bill published last year, Reform set out plans that include launching a sovereign bitcoin reserve fund and making it illegal for banks to deny services to digital token investors. Capital gains tax on crypto would be cut to 10 per cent.The plans closely mirror Trump’s. One UK industry executive said Farage was “copying the Trump playbook” when it comes to crypto. Economic tensionsIn November, Farage ripped up his 2024 manifesto pledge to cut £150bn of state spending while funding £50bn of various commitments, including raising the tax-free threshold to £20,000.The U-turn has left Reform’s prospectus ambiguous. “The overall sense is they have a lot of policies that are very narrowly focused and when you put them together don’t necessarily make a coherent package,” said Andrew Goodwin, UK economist at Oxford Economics. Farage had threatened to eliminate the Office for Budget Responsibility. Jenrick vowed to keep it. Jenrick has also dumped Reform’s plans to part-nationalise Britain’s utilities, although the party is still considering using “strategic stakes”, for example, to support domestic steelmaking. Reform would unravel Labour’s move to tighten ties with the EU.It estimates that Farage’s plan to stop paying interest on reserves held at the Bank of England could save the government £35bn a year. “They have not approached this from the perspective of the [monetary policy] transmission mechanism, but from the perspective that there is a pot of money,” said Simon French, chief economist at Panmure Liberum. “No one realistically thinks it’s £35bn.”Farage wants to roll out a “Britannia Card”, which would allow non-domiciled individuals to pay a £250,000 fee in exchange for 10 years of exemption from UK tax on overseas income, assets and inheritance. Other tax policies are in a state of flux. A previous promise to abolish stamp duty under £750,000 has now fallen by the wayside, as has a Farage promise to abolish inheritance tax.Farage has decided to keep the pensions triple lock despite its escalating cost, paying for this so far unspecified benefit cuts. He previously backed the abolition of the two-child cap on universal credit for working British families, but conceded he “had to admit defeat” in the face of opposition from other senior figures in Reform.Farage has suggested that he prefers a French-style social insurance model to the NHS’s current taxpayer funding, although he has been distancing himself from this idea. Sarah Reed of the Nuffield Trust think-tank said an insurance model would be “an enormously complicated way of fundamentally altering the system without any clear benefit”.Ford at Manchester university said Reform’s manifesto at the next election could depend on who is still in Farage’s top team, given his propensity for falling out with colleagues. “The evidence so far domestically in Reform local authorities shows that if you bring together people with limited political experience and limited interaction with each other and no common detailed programme of government, no institutional structures for working out differences on policy questions, you create a scenario which almost guarantees splitting and fissuring,” he said. .Read more:.Theresa May dismisses Reform UK threat, urges conservatives to focus on economy.“The Labour Party has had a century of experience of this, and look at how bad they are. Imagine a party with no practice.”One potential Reform donor recently met the new Reform-adjacent think-tank, the Centre for a Better Britain. They came away with the view that the party “still had a long way to go in terms of professionalising”..© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd.

This is what a Reform government would do in the UK

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