Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Hello and welcome to the Bloomberg UK Politics podcast. I'm Caroline Hepge and today on this episode, I'm joined by Bloomberg's financial reporter Will Shaw for a conversation with the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Welcome to Bloomberg, and thank you so much for your time.
Good to be here.
So you're the architect of Brexit, of course well known to many. You have now won a seat in the British Parliament after eight attempts. Your party is sitting just below the ruling Labor Party in the polls here in Britain, and you are poised to go to the inauguration of the US President Donald Trump despite a recent row with
Trump advisor and perhaps hoped for Donut Elon Musk. But today I want to spend a bit of time with Will and you, Nigel, talking about where the Reform UK has the kind of long running the kinds of answers to the long running economic challenges that Britain really has that we've seen in the recent GDP figures, in the concerns around stagflation. You're finally an MP, though scoring highly in the polls, the political mood across Europe has moved in your favor.
You must feel like you've really made it.
Now what about made it? And by the way, thank you, it was a very accurate introduction. We're doing well, We're on the up and you know why, because we're optimistic. You come to a reform meeting. I've done four rallies this year already, all complete sellouts of our members around the country, and I'll expand that to big public rallies as the year goes on. And it's like the rock concert.
They're not depressed. They actually believe that with the right leadership, with the right vision, with the right courage, we can turn the country around. So yeah, we are very upbeat at the moment. I think the Unior Party, if I can call them that, just look labor look morose, The Conservatives bitterly divided. I mean they still all hate each other. So there is a massive gap there in British politics. And you know in your intro you made the point.
It's very good point. Do reform have the right economic answers and social answers to the problems we're in? Well, you can't find the answers until you first identified the problem, and I think we've had so many policy missteps over the last couple of decades, and I think the parties are kind of say, wedded to what they've done already that I don't believe they're in a fit state to put us right.
You've only got five MP's in Parliament overall, though, so you're still quite a.
Joy is of the first part of the post electoral systems? Yes?
Absolutely.
But perhaps one of the key issues, of course is you know you're going to Washington. We know that the Labor Party has appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassied Ambassador to Washington. I suppose the first thing that I'd like to understand is whether you've spoken to Manderson where you've got plans, you know, to try to help Manus well get the best deal for Britain.
Look, I don't discuss private conversations I have with people, and never have done, never will do, which is why, by the way, I'm trusted and I've survived twenty five years in this game. What I will say is this, and I've said it publicly and I've said this privately to the most senior Labor figures, that it isn't just Trump that I've known for a long time and get on very well, which you know, which I do. Half his cabinet. I know, some of them are good friends.
You know, this whole movement. You know, they are people I've worked with for a long long time. So if there's anything I can do for example, well, so.
So you must know Lord Mandelsson very well. Obviously he's a veteran politician. So what do you think of his appointment?
And can you wish Madison and I were in Brussels at the same time, Yes, you know when he was a commissioner.
That.
Look, Madison is bright and clever, wily possibly too. Nobody could ever doubt that Mandelsson is not a good operator. I mean he was part of the genius behind you know, new Labor and the rebranding of the party. All I would say is this that if you really want to get on with the Trump administration, you need somebody who is an entrepreneur. You need somebody who's a businessman or businesswoman.
You need someone who thinks outside the box. And kind of what we're doing is we're going down the traditional Foreign Office governmental route of appointing somebody from within our governing circles, and I think we could do better.
I mean, look, you know you're obviously at odds with the labor governments. Yes, are you going to work together with Peter Mandelsson?
And will you brief.
Against him and the labor government Donald Trump?
If you differ on I will get back to the original question. I've said privately and publicly to senior labor figures that if they need help with the relationship, particularly in terms of negotiating tariffs or maybe sexual free trade agreements, which I do believe are possible with the Trump regime, I of course would help because that is in the
national interest. And I have to say, sitting here this morning with you, how relieved I am that the Chagos Island surrender of sovereignty as I see it, isn't going through before the inauguration. I think if that had happened, we would be in a very, very bad place. So we've got a bit of a reprieve. And remember that Trump is the most instinctively pro British president we've seen for decades, and we ought to use that to our advantage.
How does that really translate though, in terms of how hard Trump is going to be on taris globally and especially in the UK.
I can tell you that in twenty sixteen and pass the inauguration into the early part of twenty seventeen, the team around Trump were really anxious to get a trade deal with the UK and to do it as quickly as possible. Why they wanted to show that they're not protectionists. They believe in fair competition, but not as they see an unfair competition with China other countries that undercut them
on wages, on environmental standards and everything else. So of course we couldn't do it because we were still part of the European Union. But now we're freed. We're not part of the EU's Common Commercial Policy. We can negotiate our own trade deals. These are the prizes that are on offer. But you know, if the Prime Minister wants to have a reset with the European Union and get closer to the failing economically European Union, it's going to be very difficult.
If we turn to Elon Musk So I thought you about it. Yeah, Joe Biden was speaking overnight. He warns Americans of a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people that he feared could have an impact on the country's democracy through your friendship with Elon Musk, is there a risk of you introducing a similar threat into the UK in terms of like the interests of one very very rich, tach billionaire and his concern and taking a priority over the concerns
of regular voters, and you know, the potential of someone being seen to try and buy an election in the UK.
Well, first things first, I think Biden's record on defending the American constitution, on the way that he used the judicial system, that doesn't bear much scrutiny. I think things went backwards during Biden's time and we concentrated so much power in Biden's hands that he gave Afghanistan back to the Taliban. So you know, we can throw this stuff back and forth. In America, you know, billionaires have more influence over society than mid Dow in Britain as culturally,
there's no question about that. Musk is a very powerful figure, but that there's no doubt. But I also think he's a hero. I mean, if you think back to the last election in twenty twenty in America where the hunter Biden laptop was there. The evidence was clear of criminality for which he now been convicted in one or two things. The evidence was all sorts of things were there that deserved to be in the public domain, especially his father's
close relationship and telephone calls with That's a separate issue, isn't. No, it isn't at all. I tell you why all the social media channels forbade any conversation about that subject. The Americans had an election with no debate on this issue. Mask has come along and bought Twitter, albeit for quite a high price, and free speech is coming back to America and the Western world. You've even seen Meta in this week. I'm an extraordinary u turn that has been made.
So Mask is a forced for good in terms of open democratic argument. When it comes to power influence, I think the important thing. The important thing is he mustn't be seen himself to be dictating what the Treasury Department do, and that is important.
A lot of people would disagree with the point around, you know, free to speech, particularly the Europeans are deeply concerned about misinformation.
The wee misinformation. I know, yes, yes, yes, we must all support globalism, we must all support open borders. If we don't. It's misinformation. I don't buy it.
On Elon Musk with him and the other tech billionaires who support visas for highly skilled workers into the US, that's pitting them against the MAGA movement and people like Steve Balon who are opposed immigration much more broadly.
Who is right in that debate? Well, I'll talk from a UK perspective. You know, we've always favored I've always favored high skilled immigration, people that come in our net, contributors to the country, and crucially who integrate to greater or lesser extent in our culture, our values. I've never had a problem with that. But of course we've done
the opposite to that. Isn't it amazing of the last three million people that settled here in Britain from outside the E the last three million twenty two percent of rimwork, only twenty two percent of RIM work. So how you manage immigration is becoming an increasingly crucial political issue. Bannon
is sort of almost saying no immigration into America. I tell you what, if we want the city of London where we're sitting right now, if we want our tech sector to be a world leader, if we want to turn this place into one of the crypto trading centers of the world, all those things. There's a lot we can do with British people, but we will need some highly skilled people from other parts of the world. I have no problem with that. Adult.
The issue with that though, in terms of the immigration debate, is this. On the one hand, your manifesto ahead of the election last year talks about freezing immigration.
No no, no, no, no no no. Hang on, how amazing. Hang on. Let's just be clear about what we're talking about. There are always people leaving the country. You know. You set a three bed semi in the suburbs of London and you can go and live in Spain for the rest of your life, Portugal for the rest of your life, or whatever it may be. What we're talking about is
not to have overall population explosion due to immigration. So there's still plenty of room for people to come on either work visas or in some cases come to saddle. So I'm not you know, we are not putting up the barriers entirely. What we are saying is that low skilled migration and those people bring independents has net been a negative for the UK economy.
How is that any different from the policy that the last well this government and the previous government have tried to enact because.
That's what they told people in manifestos and then did the complete opposite, which is why we're doing well in the polls. Trust has gone. Don't forget. Don't forget. The Conservative Party in twenty ten, twenty fifteen, twenty seventeen, specifically in the manifesto said net migration of tens of thousands a year. In twenty nineteen, we've got control of our borders backwre Brexit numbers will be lower, and the twenty twenty three number before the revision and by the way,
all the revisions are upwards, is nearly a million. This is this is where we are the biggest problem that those two traditional parties have is trust.
If we turn to the UK economy, and Britain obviously has got deep seated and long running economic problems. Those have asserted themselves in recent days in the turbulence in financial markets. How would you create economic growth in Britain? Everybody says they want to achieve that, it seems exceptionally hard to actually make it happen. How would you bring that back?
I mean Rachel from Accounts is not going to achieve that is she? I mean clearly utterly clueless. I thought that from the start, actually utterly clueless, completely out of a depth.
And there seems to be they want in a landslide election.
Well they did it, but but it wasn't really it wasn't really a pro labor vote was it was just an anti Tory vote that dominated the election. And remember this, it was a fairly loveless victory and they only got a third of the votes and two thirds of the seats. Again we're back to our friend, the electoral system. I was amazed how little scrutiny Labour's economic plans came under in the run up. What is clear is this, What
is absolutely clear is this. They are increasing the size of the public sector and the measures they've taken is already even before April the first, when all this really kicks in decreasing the size of the private sector. And there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding on the center left of British politics as to how economics works. If you don't create private sector wealth, you are doomed. So she can talk, as she did when she came back from China on Monday, of this week, she can say
growth is our number one priority. Everything they're doing is anti growth, including the key component, and the key component is confidence, and there isn't any If we.
Look at the reform manifesto, it talks about a department saving fifty billion pounds a year by cutting wasteful spending PROXY and improving procurements. So that would be about ten percent of departmental budgets every year for five years. How would you bring that about with that huge cuts to the NHS education.
It's very interesting you raised that. It's very interesting you raised that because that was part of our contract that we put out with the people. We were told it's impossible, nonsense, it would be massive cuts to frontline services. Guess what, it's now government policy. So we're very good at leading
arguments on this. What I have no doubt about, and this is going to be difficult for some industries to accept, and I think that could be the next big battle with the trade unions will be over the use of AI, the use of advanced technology and how actually we can increase productivity with fewer human beings. And therein lies your real answer. And I think what you're going to see
with Musk. You know, if he's fully focused on doje this project in America, you will see technology increasingly replacing a lot of human beings and that never all through the history of modern mankind. That never comes without something of a fight.
But is your economic tender actually a real plan, because you're also promising one and a half percent extra growth in terms of what can be delivered to the economy as well as that fifty billion pounds in expended cults.
I mean partly.
You know, the issue is that the government is already in trouble with its own fiscal policies for exactly that reason. And are you going to be able to convince the bond markets anymore? I mean one and a half percent in terms of extra economic growth is pretty much the same as what Liz Trust was offering.
Well, let's put it like this. What we have right now, and not just the rich leaving London and leaving our big cities, which they are in their thousands people are relocating, we're also losing the thirty something entrepreneurs they're going. They can't see any prospect of Britain being a pro business community. And I returned to that word confidence. You know that there are things that make markets work at times that you can't a ways rationalized. But it's about confidence, it's
about optimists, it's about optimism, it's about direction. And I would say this to you. Do you know there's not a single person on the labor front, Bak, not one who's ever set up or worked in private business, not one. The tour is not much better. And what we're saying is that we are and we're not Elon Muss billionaires. But what we're saying is we're a practical group of
people who have among us several successful business people. I think we've got more idea of what makes the economy tick than either the current labor or Tory parties.
Yeah, confidence is a very difficult thing obviously to gauge and to inspire and quite quick to sort of disappear. But the thing about your economic policy, can you sell this to voters? Can you actually sell a plan that is promising a lot of growth which may or may not happen. But he is definitely offering enormous tax cuts now which definitely brings in.
Less the timing cuts to the revenue.
Well, let's be clear about the tax and with.
Bond markets, by that and also that it does mean effectively cutting the size of the state, and that is definitely not clear in your manifesto.
You know there's four point.
Two million adults now on health related benefits in the UK.
Do they have to go back to work? I mean will.
Carrying to inform uk wor we need carrots and sticks, right?
But does the electric know that that's actually the stick?
Hang on the carrots very easy. The big tax cut we want is to raise the threshold of which you start paying tax up from twelve and a half thousand a year to twenty thousand a year. That is the big that.
Is enormously costly. You cannot do that. It massive cuts to government.
That is enormously costly unless what it does is give people on benefits the real incentive to go back to work. Because the number of doors I've not so.
How is that electorally possible? It's a little bit like have you a malaise plan? It is very difficult to sell that to a broad sway.
The vice I would say to London based media come out and knock on doors in the poorer parts of the country because the number of people that have told me to my face you know, I want to go to work. I want us to be better off as a household. But as soon as I work more than sixteen hours a week, I lose all of my benefits. There is this terrible welfare trap.
So you think that that tough message of get back to work is actually very palatable to the British population. For example, you know the star I mentioned Argentina, have you Melley, which again by the Republicans and Donald Trumpandi and Alomas think that that has been immensely successful, and a lot of markets that might agree.
I do, yeah, and you do too.
The cost of that economic success that is not as well touted is that poverty within Argentina has jumped from forty percent of the population to fifty percent of the population.
That is the cost of doing that.
Well, what I'm trying to do is keep people a way out of povercy by making work pay. And I accept that it comes at a big initial cost.
I absolute accept a big initial cost on day one. Absolutely no, I absolutely accept that. But I also think the stick, Yeah, there has to be a stick. I mean, what is all this nonsense about four day weeks work from home?
And how can it be to Umber ten on that promise to the electorate that you have to get back to work. Anybody who's suffering from depression, who has you know, benefits coming in, you have to give that very hard.
Would they vote about the working population? What about those people I see on the m twenty five at half past five on a Monday morning, right hang on heading off to work, working much longer hours than their parents or grandparents ever did, paying ever higher burdens of town. What about them? No one ever talks about them, No one ever talks about hard working Britain and the burdens they're under. And you know what, I think they'll vote
for us, I really really do. And I think you'll find there are people on benefits who know they shouldn't be on benefits, who will see what we want to do as being a way to help them to be better off.
But if your voters had the manifesto, which you call a contract with voters.
As well as we have, do.
You think that that is actually what is being communicated on the doorsteps.
It's more devoted for us. I suppose we need a bit of honesty about this. Why don't we Why don't we tell young people at the university in the school that actually the only way you will ever succeed in work in life is to work hard. That hard work is good. Success is good, making money is good. We need a change of culture.
The people, the people that you're talking about meeting on knocking doors. Of course, that's extremely important. Those people do need the numbers to add up if your policy is going to work and it is going to benefit. The memorial terms the ifs said of the proposals in the reform manifesto, spending reductions would save less than stated that tax cuts would cost more than stated by a margin
of tens of billions of pounds a year. The problem is if you if you don't have the kind of rigor of the economic plan, you can't help the people that you're making the promise.
Well, you can, because there are many other things you can do about cutting the sides of the public sector. I talked about the use of AI, I've talked about procurement changes and cuts already. But the thing we're all forgetting is the just enormous dead hand of the quangocracy on everything from financial services to fisheries. The extent to which businesses are scared on a day to day basis scared that some unaccountable person comes in tells them they're
doing everything wrong, demands extra costs for them. Again, you see, unless you have unless you have frontline politicians who are actually in business, they don't. And maybe what this is doing.
There may be a case for cutting regulation here in the UK, but you're not going to find fifty billion pounds by cutting quangos.
That is simply not this.
But the idea also is that Britain has been through this now twice. The promise of cutting taxes now and feeling the benefit later, cutting taxes now and getting growth later.
It did not last for Liz Trus.
The October budget, you know, even though it was much more conservative with a small scene, also has not withstood the market pressure well either. And so that's why we go back to the figures. The figures are not credible. You're offering something that's not possible.
You will notice you will notice that actually on tax for example, which you both talked about to me, that we're being much more cautious than Liz Truss was. You know, Liz Trus was going for big bang right everything at once, and clearly way too much at once without corresponding initial spending cuts actually put big spending cuts in. Although something may have objected to it, it might have been a different outcome. What we are saying is we want to
reduce the overall burden of taxation. Right, yes, but the first big tax cut, the important first tax cut, is that one at the lower end of the tax spectrum. All right, So we're not promising everything at once.
Okay.
There are a whole number of other very big pledges in terms of you know, net ZERI might get into that later, but well, one that is very very much of interest to our audience, you knew speaking to an investor audience. The manifesto talks about slashing interest payments on what the Bank of England pays to commercial banks for the QB program.
I mean it's something that does have.
Some support racket, Okay, that's your view. It does have some support amongst economists. Put you basically peg the savings at thirty five billion pounds. Some economists say yes, you could do that, Barkley's, for example, twenty billion pounds. That's the problem also with the figures is that it promises more than it could deliver. How could you keep control of your monetary policy.
If you don't pay the banks.
Give us credit. Okay, give us credit. We were the first people on the political stage to expose this racket. Nobody else even talked about it because they'd be living on Q like a drug addict. All right, So you know, we're actually quite good. Are putting some arguments and putting some debates out there that nobody else dares to have. And whether Barkley say twenty or thirty or whatever they say, it shows you that we were in the right ballpark to begin to expose what was going on.
Park.
Well, look, we weren't going to win the last election. What we wanted to do with the contract was to set out our vision broadly of where we want to go. Now, the responsibility that is upon me now is very very different. We're now in a completely different place, and I fully accept that. Between I fully accept the point you're making that between now and the next election we've got to be more specific rather than general. I fully accept.
That if we turn back to the US, I mean, presumably nobody in Britain is as close to Donald Trump as yourself. What in four years from now, like, what can the British public expect you to have achieved from that relationship in the national interest. What's like the best case scenario of like how you will of levels in.
A short term. In the short term, we have a seas far coming in the Middle least just because of Trump. Great, let's hope there is an end to the extraordinary blood letting a million battle casualties. It's like the song were Drones. I mean, it really is awful Ukraine and what is going on. Let us hope some equitable solution can be found there. I think you'll see Saudi Arabia drawn back towards Israel. I think you'll see the Abraham Accords extend.
I hope you'll see Iran isolated on the world stage as being the really bad actors that they are. And all those things, of course are in our interests, maybe not hugely directly in many cases in terms of what's in it for us. That's what you're really asking. And I understand that, Look, this really is up to the government.
You know, if if this government is intent on being run by human rights lawyers which are happy to give away potentially the nuclear capability of America's most important single base in the world outside mainland America. It ain't going to go well. If this government is determined to reset our relations with Brussels in the sense that we start to mirror single market rules that come onto a statute book, they were going to find it very, very difficult. But
it was interesting. I thought the other day that Starmer gave the AI speech. It's all a bit of functory, but he gave the speech about AI and he was asked the question. One of the journalists asked him, well, because of Brexit, we're now free and you mentioned European attitudes towards tech. So Starbar got to make his mind up which way do we go? And the closer we tie ourselves to Brussels, the more difficult it is. At the end of that four years, as you've asked to
have achieve economically what we could. I am certain that in terms of intelligence, I'm certain that in terms of special forces working together, I'm sure in terms of those things the next four years will be a great success. But it's on the economics that people want to see some results. I am certain that with the right government we could have free trade deals negotiated on booze, motorbikes, financial services, and maybe agriculture, we just leave because maybe
it's too difficult. I don't know, but I think it's an awful lot of progress that we can make with an administration that wants to do it.
Is there a risk that Donald Trump's quite mercurial and he he'll listen to He'll listen to yourself and be influenced by that, and then we'll move on to the next person.
Something about Donald Trump, He's not really influenced by anybody. He listens to people, He makes his own mind up. He's very very good at making his own mind up. He's also very good at seeing the big picture. And I think one of the things maybe people don't like him, and I get it. He's a New York occurrent. It's
not everyone's style. But one of the things I think that people should credit him for is that the big thinking in the first four years with Trump presidency was on foreign affairs, and it was a huge success.
Have you spoken to Donald Trump directly about Tommy Robinson. I mean, obviously, Elon Musk is a big fan of Tommy Robinson. Tommy Robinson is someone with a criminal record. His supporters have associations with street violence. He's sort of rooted in the EDL and the British National Party. You obviously have differences with Tommy Robinson.
I won't have that fundamental differences. You know. Tommy Robinson has nothing to do with me, has never been anything to do with me, and never will be anything to do with me. My brand of politics is non sectarian, non racist. It always has been and it always will be. And mister Robinson can deal with the head he likes, but he'll never have anything to do with my party. Want to be absolute clear about.
Have you spoken to Donald Trump directly or Donald Trump's team directly about that?
I think Donald Trump's team have got bigger things to worry about than Tommy Robinson. There is an element of the there is an element of the conservative right in America that view Robinson as a hero figure right because they see him as the man that fought the grooming gangs, all right and by the way, a topic that does need more debate and does need more sorting out. What they don't see is all the rest of it, and they don't know the full story.
In my opinion, you talk a lot about your closer relationship with the US and how important that relationship is.
Our closest trading partner is.
Still the EU only in your mind. I mean, you knowest our biggest country relationship is not trading. No, Well, Germany is a country still, isn't it.
Yeah?
There you are the EU as a whole.
Who's the biggest foreign investor in Britain?
Who do you think?
Who?
I also talked about the rise of.
With similar views of anti migration parties across Europe.
It does who said I'm an anti migration.
Party, Well, you did yourself.
I didn't. I said the opposite. I said, we're prose. You asked me about high skilled, high skilled people, and I said, if they come into Britain, bring high skills, pay taxes and integrate, I've got no problem. You know, our brand of politics, my brand of politics is different to many of the other European pastes. All right, that's really clear about that. There are similarities that are a
crossover points, but there are differences. But let me just come back to Europe very quickly, in the economics and the statistic that I think everybody following this podcast needs to just get embedded in their minds. I think it's crucial. In two thousand and eight, the American economy was exactly the same size as the Eurozone today. It's double the size,
double the size. And that's what you get if you have economic policy based on idealistic but I'm realistic net zero goals, over regulation, welfare ism as being a really good alternative to go into work, and that's what you've got a failing Europe. One of the reasons I wanted Brexit was to give us an opportunity to get away from that failing model. I'm not saying we have to be identical to America, but I think in terms of business culture as a heck of a lot we can learn.
Okay, n I know a whole another shooting person you just started.
Nie of Ours.
Thank you so much for joining us on the Bloomberg UK Politics podcast, The Reform UK Leader joining us alongside the Bloomberg's Finance.
Report at will.
Sure if you like the program, don't forget to subscribe, give it five stars so that other people can find it on Apple, Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen.
I'm Caroline Hepgar.
This episode was produced by James Walcock, audio engineer with Shan Gustamachia. We'll be back with more on Monday, This is Bloomberg