Little Appetite

Tim Montgomerie is one of the great fallers out, but that is not the only reason why it is no surprise that he has left Reform UK. As Patrick Butler writes:

There is little appetite for cuts to disability benefits even among Conservative and Reform voters, and proposals to reduce spending could prove politically risky, according to an authoritative national survey.

The British Social Attitudes (BSA) report found that while support for welfare spending as a whole had dipped sharply in recent years, just 7% of respondents backed cuts to disability benefits – and 49% said they should be increased.

Two government-commissioned reviews – of the personal independence payment (Pip) benefit, and support for jobless youngsters – are expected imminently, amid speculation they will seek to restrict spending on disability benefits.

The BSA report notes that any ministerial proposals to axe disability benefits would carry little support among Labour voters, of whom just 5% favoured reduced spending and 57% backed more generous spending.

Support for spending on disabled people remained high among Tory and Reform UK voters of whom 40% supported more spending on claimants who could not work, and just 10% supported less spending.

The report’s co-author Robert de Vries, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, said: “Despite growing political divisions on welfare, support for disability benefits remains remarkably strong.

“Very few people favour cuts, disabled people are seen as among the most deserving recipients of support, and proposals to reduce disability benefits appear politically risky across the political spectrum.”

However, the report acknowledges it was difficult to be precise about public support for disability benefits, some of which depends on respondents’ subjective ideas of whether claimants were “deserving” or “genuinely” unable to work.

It was possible that there was support for cuts to specific groups of disabled people, with some conditions such as depression and anxiety ranking relatively low in an informal public hierarchy of “deserving cases” compared with, say, people who use a wheelchair.

Equally, the report added that initial public support for proposed cuts can change when it becomes clearer precisely who will be affected, and what the consequences are in terms of numbers of claimants pushed into hardship.

“We … cannot say in advance whether a particular cut to disability benefits will be supported or opposed by the public, but it is clear that this is very challenging terrain for a government to be confident of taking the public with them,” the report said.

The survey interviewed 4,656 people across the UK between August and October 2025. It has tracked British public attitudes since 1983 on a range of issues from immigration and taxation, to marriage and sexuality.

Last year the government was forced to U-turn on £5bn of disability benefit cuts in the face of public opposition and a Labour backbench rebellion over plans that would have pushed hundreds of thousands of disabled people into poverty.

It subsequently launched a review of Pip headed by the former welfare minister Sir Stephen Timms. Its initial findings, published in July, found that Pip, which is claimed by nearly 4 million people in England and Wales, should be overhauled. However, it said changes would have to be financially sustainable.

A separate review by the former Labour MP Alan Milburn into how to support nearly 1 million young people aged 16-24 who are not in education, employment or training (Neets) has led to concerns that benefit support for youngsters claiming Pip or the health element of universal credit may be cut.

Both the Conservatives, who launched a review to save £23bn, and Reform UK, which claims drastic cuts to Pip could help save up to £50bn, are keen to bring down what they characterise as out of control disability benefits spending.

The BSA report notes that while disability benefit spending has risen in recent years, overall levels of welfare spending have remained flat, suggesting that media and political claims of an unsustainable system are overstated.

Identifying “the mismatch between Reform’s policies and the voters it is trying to attract”, Rachel Sylvester writes:

Robert Jenrick, the party’s Treasury spokesman, has announced plans to save £50bn a year by cutting welfare, including disability benefits. He wants to replace personal independence payments (Pip), given to those with a long-term physical or mental health condition, with a “health security allowance” that would pay almost nothing to about two thirds of current claimants. But the data suggests this will disproportionately affect Reform voters and those the party needs to win over.

A study by Imperial College London’s School of Public Health found that the areas where Farage’s party did well at the last election have a higher prevalence of people living with chronic diseases than other parts of the country. The Reform constituencies had the highest average prevalence of 15 out of the 20 health conditions that were analysed including asthma, coronary heart disease, obesity, diabetes and depression. These voters are far more likely to rely on disability benefits including Pip.

To take an example from the West Midlands, in the parliamentary constituency of Walsall and Bloxwich, high up on Farage’s target list, there are 11,449 Pip claimants and a Labour majority of 4,914. In Birmingham Northfield, there are 10,600 people on the disability benefit and a Labour majority of 5,389. Reform cannot win – and Farage will not get to No 10 – if these voters decide it is against their own economic interest to support Reform. Analysis by the journalist Fraser Nelson has shown that almost all Reform’s target seats are heavily dependent on welfare. In Jenrick’s own constituency of Newark, there are 6,011 Pip claimants. His majority when he stood there as a Conservative at the last general election was 3,571.

This is not the only policy tension for a party that has always been torn between economic free marketeers and cultural protectionists. Reform voters are typically older and poorer than the wider population. Their average age is 56 and 27% say they are “struggling” on their current household income, yet Farage is promising to prioritise British-born workers under 35 when allocating social housing. He urges trade unions to affiliate themselves with his party while opposing new employment protections, and positions himself as a “man of the people” while promising to repeal the Renters’ Rights Act.

Reform wants to position itself as the “party for the workers” but it is run by a former commodities trader, property investor and banker, and funded by a crypto-billionaire. Farage has declared his intention to “bring cryptocurrency in from the cold” with a pledge to cut capital gains tax on crypto assets and create a “bitcoin digital reserve at the Bank of England”, which may appeal to his party’s donors but is irrelevant to the hard-pressed voters it needs to reach.

Tim Montgomerie, the right-wing commentator recently suspended by Reform, says Donald Trump won power in the US by convincing former Democratic voters that he would not take away their top-up benefits. “If Reform are going to achieve the same kind of result, they need to offer economic as well as cultural reassurance,” he argues. The NHS is another vulnerability, which is why Farage insists he has no plans to privatise it.

But what a wicked liar is Pat McFadden. Far from its being a perverse incentive, claimants need reams of medical evidence to apply for Universal Credit Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity, and even then it is routinely turned down, significantly worsening the health of people who were already seriously ill. McFadden is as despicable as the Labour MPs who accepted the halving of LCWRA for new claimants as the “compromise” to save Personal Independence Payment, which is an in-work benefit, whereas those who manage to get onto LCWRA are by definition to ill to work. Next, those MPs will accept the abolition of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court as the “compromise” to save trial by jury in the latter. All four measures, none of which was in the Labour manifesto, should in fact have been rejected out of hand. The abolition of the automatic right of appeal still should be, and the halving of LCWRA should be reversed. Or do Labour MPs not want to see off the Conservatives and Reform? After all, as Sam Leith puts it:

If public life contains a very high-profile, very vulnerable fantasist with an inexhaustible appetite for money and publicity, what is the duty of care that we all owe them? It’s a question that seems to arise repeatedly in the so-called post-truth era. Of course, anybody’s lies and delusions are, to a substantial extent, their own responsibility. But these situations always exist in a context.

If such delusions are sustained by zealots who put ideological conformity above the truth, by an excitable and partisan media that prefers not to dig too deeply into something that sounds like a good story, and even by so august an institution as Cambridge University, disaster cannot be far away.

Elevated to a prominence for which they are manifestly unqualified. Encouraged in damaging fantasies. Placed in the sort of spotlight that means humiliating exposure and a psychologically devastating unravelling are all but inevitable. I speak, of course, of the Reform Party leadership.

Even as they speechify about what they’re planning to do in their first 100 days of government, the wheels of Reform’s clown car are sailing serenely past the driver’s-side window. Just in the last couple of days, thanks to Channel Four, they’ve lost two senior apparatchiks and look to be heading for yet another formal investigation into their imaginative approach to party funding. The party’s former policy chief James Orr and Nigel Farage’s so-called “right-hand-man” Dan Jukes both stand accused of trying to circumvent electoral law in order to accept a large donation from a foreign donor. They deny the claims, it seems only proper to say.

Nigel Farage, present on the hidden-camera footage but (he claims) too busy with his champagne and oysters to have been paying attention to what was said, now hopes to magic the whole thing away by capering on stage in Union Jack socks and dismissing his long-standing allies as mere “contractors”. Not sure that’s going to cut it. Perhaps he should try saying that all this coverage is negatively impacting his mental health.

It’s not that the conversations that Channel Four broadcast look corrupt – though they do. It is, more damagingly, that they look like amateur-hour; once again from a party that has been struggling to stop making Baldrick-like mistakes such as repeatedly selecting and then having to sack racist idiots from its candidates’ list, or having a Welsh leader who takes Russian bribes.

A big, potentially illegal, donor to the party is introduced to the leader before anyone seems to have vetted him through so much as a cursory Google. Farage’s galaxy-brained sidekicks – one of them a professor at Cambridge – appeared to boast openly of circumventing electoral law and Dan Jukes, what’s more, named other people he claimed used the same dodge. I can’t imagine those other donors will be delighted, or future donors encouraged, by that aspect of the exposé. “Loose pub talk” it may be. But “loose pub talk” isn’t what you look for from the top-level machinery of a party supposedly preparing for government. And it’s a bad look, isn’t it, to insist that nobody has done anything wrong but with the same breath consign the two people who you claim have done nothing wrong to outer darkness. I wonder how they will react.

It’s a fantasy to imagine that you’re prepared for government when (for reasons that we can only speculate about) you have a well-developed policy on cryptocurrency before you have a well-developed policy on the defence of the realm. It’s a fantasy that you can reassure moderate voters that you’re a level-headed and responsible party while you tolerate bigmouths like Zia Yusuf slandering former servicemen as traitors, or the absurd Matt Goodwin collectively insulting Iraqi refugees as “illiterate goat-herders”.

It’s a fantasy to think you can position yourself as a defender of free speech when you’re so touchy and defensive that you expel Tim Montgomerie from the party simply for daring to observe what anyone with eyes can see, which is that you are, er, touchy and defensive.

It’s a fantasy that it’s possible to fund a party of Britain-first patriotism when half your friends and cheerleaders are domiciled offshore for tax purposes; or to run a party of the salt-of-the-earth working man from a succession of Mayfair private members’ clubs and networking meets with international billionaires and crypto tycoons.

It’s a fantasy that it’s possible to sustain a rhetoric of old-fashioned decency and common-sense justice while a non-zero number of your senior people seem to be, if not outright crooked, at least what we might call crook-adjacent: Take Farage’s trip to Florida in 2024 where he met Elon Musk, which was part-funded by the convicted fraudster George Cottrell; and, of course, the party’s ex-leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, who is locked up after he was convicted of eight counts of bribery.

And it really is a fantasy to imagine that the wider public will not notice or care about any of the above. A small base of diehard supporters may feel deeply enough about your stop-the-boats rhetoric to overlook everything else. But it’s quite the stretch to imagine that this monomania will be shared by enough floating voters to sweep you to power.

The biggest of all the delusions, and the one that has really cooked them, is upstream from all of this. It flows from Farage’s gauche crush on the guy on the other side of the pond – and it is the fantasy that Donald Trump’s nakedly kleptocratic approach to gaining and exercising political power, and his weird personality cult, will transplant seamlessly to the UK. So far, thank goodness, it does not. Time for a return to reality.