The Brexit Party was just six weeks old when it reshaped Britain’s political landscape by topping the UK polls in the European Parliament election.
But while Nigel Farage’s party gained 29 MEPs across the country back in May, support for the Eurosceptic group has fallen to 7% according to latest YouGov figures. With a general election just six weeks away, the Brexit Party has rejected an electoral pact with the Conservative Party and is preparing to go it alone with candidates in 600 constituencies.
But with members ranging from former Tories to ex-communists, what should we expect in terms of policy from the upstart party? Farage has vowed never to use the word “manifesto”, arguing that it “equals lie”, but here is what we do know about the party’s ideas.
Brexit
What do we want? Hard Brexit! When do we want it? Yesterday!
As the party’s name suggests, the policy around which it is totally united is Brexit. The required payment of the so-called “£39bn divorce bill” has made Boris Johnson’s EU withdrawal agreement unpalatable to Farage, who called for a delay to Brexit rather than leaving on Johnson’s terms.
The Brexit Party stands for no-deal, full freedom to trade around the world and total extraction of the UK from EU institutions.
Voting reform
In July, the party became an unlikely ally of the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP) by joining a cross-party alliance on voting reform.
The cross-party alliance signed a declaration calling for the first-past-the-post method for Westminster elections to be replaced by a proportional system, with a citizens’ assembly to be formed to advise on the change.
Farage has good reason to view the current system as unfair. In 2015, his UKIP party won just one seat in Parliament, despite picking up almost four million votes.
However, in a 2011 referendum, the British public rejected a shift to proportional representation by 68% to 32%.
Abolishing the House of Lords
Launching the Brexit Party’s general election campaign launch last week, Farage said the group would abolish the unelected House of Lords, which he claimed is “stuffed with Remainers”.
In 2014, while leader of UKIP, Farage took issue with then prime minister David Cameron over the lack of peers from the Eurosceptic party in the House of Lords.
All the same, the Lords has had an active role in the Brexit saga, notes the Daily Express, which points out that the peers “hampered former prime minister Theresa May in her efforts to get her withdrawal agreement through the House of Commons”.
Cancelling the HS2 rail project
Party chair and MEP Richard Tice has said that the Brexit Party is “the only party fully committed to scrapping this failed and unpopular £100bn white elephant”.
That claim is disputable, however, with the Green Party also committing to cancel HS2, the planned high-speed railway connecting London and the north of England.
The project is many millions of pounds over budget and has been beset by delays, with the launch of the first section of the line pushed back from 2026 to between 2028 and 2031. Brexit Party chair Tice has said that the cash saved from ditching the project would be used to “invest in the regions and in infrastructure projects which benefit areas other than London”.
Scrapping inheritance tax
In September, Tice announced that scrapping the inheritance tax was a Brexit Party policy, saying that the “Tories bottled it, we won’t” – a reference to the Tories’ proposal back in 2007 to raise the threshold to £1m.
The Brexit Party claims that the tax “hits grieving families when they’re at their weakest” and “punishes those who work hard all their lives for assets they can pass on to their children”.
The party also claims that the tax “generates relatively little” in revenues. But according to the director of the Resolution Foundation, Torsten Bell, the promise amounts to a “very expensive pledge”, with inheritance tax raising £5.3bn for the Treasury last year alone.
Ending interest charges on student loans
In another cost-cutting fiscal pledge, Farage has said that his party would scrap all interest paid on student tuition fees.
Labelling the charges “outrageous” and “unfair”, Farage told a party rally in Birmingham in June that his group would use £200bn to “wipe away” the interest on university debts. According to the BBC, Tice went even further, suggesting that the party might “reimburse graduates for ‘historic’ interest payments made on their loans”.
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Halving overseas aid
According to Farage, the Brexit Party will also halve the UK’s foreign aid budget if it is successful in the December election.
The party has criticised Britain’s “bloated” foreign aid budget, which is used for projects and humanitarian aid in the developing world, and says it would use the saved funds to invest in the UK.
Under legislation approved in 2015, the UK government is legally required to spend 0.7% of the nation’s Gross National Income on overseas development aid each year, which equates to around £13bn.
Free Wi-Fi
The Brexit Party has promised to ensure everybody has access to free broadband on public transport. Farage says investment in broadband would be funded with money saved by scrapping HS2, cutting foreign aid and refusing to pay the EU “divorce bill”.
