Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News. Welcome to in the City. Each week we unpack a story that's crucial to the world's financial capitals.
I'm from sin Leatwa and I'm David Merritt and Dave.
This week a conversation with Zia Usoof, businessman turned rising politician in the Reform UK Party.
That's right, and this comes as a new survey by IPSOS puts the Reform Party, which is led by Nigel Farage, on thirty four percent. That's nine points ahead of Labor and the Conservatives a distant third. So if the figures in the survey were to be replicated across the country in an election, Reform UK would win a majority. It's quite a change from the results we saw less than a year ago at the last general election.
So we wanted to get Zia Usoof on to talk about what he thinks is behind reforms rise in popularity, but also more importantly, what policies we could expect from a form government, especially in challenging geopolitical time like these.
And after the conversation was here you'll hear from our UK Politics correspondent Lucy White. She's been covering reforms rise and policy platform, and we wanted to get her perspective.
One of our.
Conversation Welcome to the City of London, the city of the.
City of the City of London.
Mind the gap between the.
Financial hearts of the country, the city, the city. Welcome in the.
City, clear of the doors, Siyah Yusuf. Thank you so much for joining us.
My pleasure to be here.
Now. You have quite an unconventional actually past your businessman You worked for a lot of the big American banks and then you set up a company which you then sold and went into politics. Tell us about that.
Yeah. So I'm the son of Sri Lankan immigrants into the UK. They came to Britain in the early nineteen eighties. My father just qualified as a doctor there to go over the work. While so I was born up in Bellshill in Scotland. I studied at the LSC, worked at a couple of American investment banks, quit that job to start a tech company, grew that for nine years, successful
outcome thankfully sold it to an American bank. Then when Nigel Fraus said he was coming back into British politics, I could see there was a glimmer of hope for the United Kingdom, the country that I love. So I decided I wasn't going to jump ship. I was going to stay here and fight to try and turn the country around. And that's what I'm doing.
This podcast dives into the issue that really matter around here in the square mile, and Reform is about reforming politics, about reforming the economy. Is your city background core to the policies that you're what was the.
Definitely, Look, it was the formative stage of my career.
You know.
The first five years after I graduated were spent on a trading floor on one of your terminals, twelve hours a day pretty much, and I loved it. I was so grateful for the teams I got to work in. They really invested in and look, you also get a real sense of I got to go and visit great companies like air Bus and companies like Daimler and you know, British engineering companies like Spyroxaca, and you really get an understanding when you walk around these factories of what makes
a great company, what makes a less good company. And one of the things I think Reform has got in its leadership team is, frankly, just people understand however reasonably good understanding of how the world actually works.
But it was my understanding actually by speaking to people that were close to this, that you were so when you were chairman for eleven months of Reform, your job was to professionalize the party. So this gives an idea that actually, you know, you were there to make it more credible, to give more policies so that people understood what Reform actually stood for. At the moment, it feels more like culture Wars, and so.
I disagree a bit with that. When I joined the party's chairman, but Nigel asked me to do that job. They basically wasn't a political party, frankly. So one of the things I don't think people necessarily appreciate about Reform's journey over the last year. It was only in June last year in Nigel announced he was coming back to run to be an MP in Clacton and the party had no MPs. We had about nine counselors and we were polling at around ten percent. Today we're polling at
thirty thirty four percent. The book makers have us as the favorite to be the next government, Nigel favorite to be the next PM. We've got north of a quarter of a million members, that's grown fourfold, and so we've built all of this. We've got four hundred branches across the country. You know, you mentioned that IPSOS poll that IPSOS pulpits reform just six points away from having more support than Labor and the Tories combined.
So, I mean, he's a controversial figure. I can't see many business people around him apart from you. Is it because the opposition is weak? Or is it because Reform is really doing the right things? I mean, is this like a moment for reform?
Well, it definitely is a moment for reform. Richard Tights, the deputy leader and former leader, is also a successful entrepreneur and businessman and has contributed immensely to this journey and policy formulation like the ones that we just have. So look what we have at Reform. It is a small team. We only have five MPs. Now they're formidable MPs.
We only have five, but we have a men's support across the country and what we have done already as a result of those made the first election, this wasn't a poll, this was a natural election. So I wouldn't understate what's just happened now We've still had a lot of work to do. We are still years away from a general election. I can tell you partly because I've got asymmetric data on this.
There are so.
Many brilliant people coming forward wanting to help reform, both behind the scenes and to be front of house and front line.
I don't know whether reform has the A list, the A game. I mean, everyone's trying to kind of find space for itself and speaking to a population that's maybe fed up with something. Yeah.
Look, it's perfectly reasonable to say that the British public are utterly sick and tired of the two old parties. Given this is Bloomberg and we're talking about the economy, Britain should be one of the most prosperous countries in the world. We still have great assets in this country, a dynamic fun system. We still have I think, the
best people, the best language, the best time zone. We have the rule of law in an excellent way here, and we have a talent base in areas like finance and AI for example, in the AI era, which should mean that British people writ large are benefiting. Instead, what we're seeing is an unprecedented brain drain British people and wealthy non doms are fleeing the country at an unprecedented rate. They're going to Singapore and Dubai, and they're even going
to America. We've got to turn all of that stuff around. The only way that's going to happen is if you have a first principles approach as and you're really focused on how you're going to get the economy growing again on a per capita basis, and that's what Reform are doing.
This process of kind of professionalizing the image of Reform feels like a big challenge. Robert Headlines have been on in fighting controversies around individual members. Yourself stepped back from your role just this month, saying how you were feeling burnt out. You know you've done high pressure jobs in the past. Tell us a little bit about that process this week, why you left, and then why you came back so quickly.
So look, I basically I had a day off in eleven months, and people listening to this business brings a certain level of pressure. Politics is a whole different level of pressure. And as I said, not just building and assembling a political party from scratch in real time, also doing everything else that the political party need to do
and tell us why I came back. Look number one I received I was inundated, which is lovely heartfelt messages from reform supporters, voters and members who expressed just how important the reform movement is to them. It's not just a political party for many people. That represents the last hope the country has to This great country has whom so many people have laid down their lives for to turn itself around. And look, as I said, I was exhausted and my decision making at the time wasn't great.
We reversed that very quickly. Look, I came into politics in no small part because of Nigel, and I'm going to continue to spend all my time trying to make him the Prime Minister.
I know you criticized her at poachin right, who was basically urging cure Starmer to ban the burker and the interest of public safety, and you said it was done for a party to task a PM to do something that the party itself, your party itself, wouldn't do. Do you stick by that.
I didn't criticize Sarah. Let me care about something. The number one serias of phenomenal MP I speak almost every day. She's a good friend. I was instrumental in getting her selected, getting her elected, and she's going to be such a formidable asset to the country. Look that tweet which I sent out, which I definitely regret now what the point I was making to I was frustrated because I didn't know that question was going to get asked. In hindsight,
perfectly reasonable for me to have not known. I'm not an MP, So I regret that tweet. I don't mind saying that.
Can you just give us a sense? So when we speak to a lot of people, they say I'd like to know a little bit more about reform, but we don't really know where they stand on the economy, So it's you talk common sense without a lot of I guess policy details. So can you give us an idea of what you would do, for example, for this UK? DOAJE like the money is very limited right for any chancellor to play around with? So where are you finding efficiencies?
Well, that is a line that the establishment always uses, right the money. My favorite one is quote difficult decisions need to be made. How many times have you heard that? Right?
But I mean we run the numbers at Bloomberry. I mean, there's just not a lot of money.
Well, hold on, hold on, So let me give you some big numbers. That so fifteen billion in foreign aid, right, five billion a year in terms of free accommodation to asylum sequels and illegal migrants, and that's per year. The twelve billion in net zero costs that will be found directly inside government departments. The real number is much higher and I can go into that. So there's straightaway is almost forty billion, and you're going to have and there
are so many other line items in the budget. When you start peeling this stuff back, I mean you look at the big consulting firms. Some of your listeners might not appreciate this, but the big four accounting firms and the strategy consultants won eight and a half billion pounds in national government tool contracts over the last five years alone. So the notion that there is no money to be saved is for the birds. Now, it is also true
this country is almost three trillion in national debt. But the bottom line is the British economy is not growing. I mean talk about point seven percent. That's less than the population is growing just from immigration. If we do not get the British economy growing meaningfully on a per capita basis, this country is headed to an extremely bad place. The way we're going to do that is by cutting
spending on things that are wasteful. We have to get our welfare bill under control, and difficult conversations do have to be had about it. Of course there are some people who need benefits not of course that is true, but it has never been easier to get onto benefits. So we have to get the welfare bill per capita down to where it was back in twenty nineteen. That will free up a lot of money to reduce the
tax burden on working people. And we also have to buy the way be really honest that we need wealthy international job creators wealth creators.
To be here.
We don't need them fleeing. We want them here in the UK. That's a big part of what our policy announcement was today. If you talk to us a demisacebas at deep mind, for example, you know Jensen Wang from Nvidia was talking about he do you use the term goldilocks a situation for AI in the UK. We have a significant percentage of the world's finest AI engineers graduating from our universities likewise in areas like biotech, and then
we also have to start manufacturing here again. We can have a new manufacturing revolution with cutting edge manufacturing techniques in the country, and we need people who understand economics, understand business in charge of making the most important economic decisions in this country.
When I speak to global investors, and I'm talking about in a Blackstone, black Rock, even some of your old shops, Colman Sachs, I mean, they're quite bullish on the UK. It's a bad neighborhood out there. The US because of trade and tariffs, looks like less attractive investment right now.
Great, great, But here's the point. The British economy has had virtually no growth now for a very very long time. And you can arguing about whether it's point three or point seven, it's pointless. The reason why people in this country feel like they're getting poor is because real wages have done nothing now for about two decades. Real GDP capita has done nothing for about two decades. This is
the other thing in business, there's accountability, right. You know, if you're a chief executive and you're paid a lot of money and you're very powerful. If you make bad decisions, the markets will see to it. You are not the CEO for very long. Right in politics and inside the bureaucracy, not only do you not face consequence as you're promoted, you're put into the lords. That's what has happened on these big military contracts that have gone massively and overspent.
HS two. This country is paying eight times more per mile of high speed rail than China or France, eight times more. Why is that? If we win a majority in the House of Commons with Nigel as the Prime Minister, we can make sweeping reforms. We will have a great repeal Act and we can go and solve these problems root and branch.
I was just going to ask how you're going to do it, so you have a repeal Act for what specifically?
So well, that's what we're working on as we speak. I think this country has way too many laws, way too many regulations. A lot of those have to be repealed. We can get into it. The e CHR that prevents multiple convicted illegal migrants.
Touring thousands of staff in Washington and across multiple government departments, people being barred from entry. It's been pretty extreme. Do you see a version of that here with a reform company.
Not not necessarily. I mean, if you zoom out a minute, right, what's happening is endless outsourcing. We're now at the stage where a contractor is now running the recruitment program for the British Army. While that's happening, the cost and the headcount of the civil service has ballooned by fifty percent over the last decade in government in the civil service. Literally you're ramping up spending on outsourcing and agencies and contractors and ramping up the size of the civil service.
I think you can have the size of the civil service and actually deliver a better service to taxpayers.
A couple of things on dough I mean, do you have an early update on your DOGE project and working with ten councils that reform now controls, So what sort of savings have you actually identified concretely?
Yeah, so, look, we already have one number on its early days and a lot of what we're doing is analysis. But I'll give you one exact sample. One of our Cabinet Minister's Cabinet members in West Northamptonshire Council was presented with a Microsoft contract for millions of pounds and told hey, you've got like three days to sign this off, otherwise they'd be penalties. Now that's funny that there'd be penalties
for a contract that you haven't even signed yet. He pushed back and did a really good job and saved nine hundred and sixty five thousand pounds on that contract straight away, And that was within the first week of arriving in the council. And what does that tell you? It's actually a reason to be bullish on the UK because there's so much waste there sort of people who are sitting there signing those contracts off historically a big
Microsoft contract where it's obviously massive gross margins. Right, Clearly most of these companies have been taking councils and taxpayers for a ride. I don't really blame them because it's up to the councils. It's up to the civil servants and the politicians to fight the corner for the taxpay As soon as a reform person turned up, they did that and they saved nine hundred and sixty five thousand pounds within the first seven days.
What do you say to the accusation that, actually, because you've also promised tax cards. It feels a bit like reminiscent.
Although so at local level we certainly haven't haven't promised any.
Time, but you have at the at the national levelt Yes, that's true. Great. I mean some people are worried that this is the spell of a lost trust disaster type.
Liz Truss did not announce any spending cuts Nigel's foot. Nigel stood up and gave a spech a few weeks ago and announced three to four hundred billion pounds of spending cuts to happen inside his first term as Prime minister, funded full stop. That's exactly right. Here's the irony. We're formerly the only people who have a leadership team with experience of balancing some quite large budgets. What we're saying
is we need to dramatically cut spending on things. Like I said, the twelve billion on net zero that'll be found in director in budgets, the fifteen billion in foreign aid, and the five billion in terms of asylum. There's a lot more. I mean, you look at the money that is hidden inside these quango budgets. You look at the money that's being spent on these on these consultancies and these agencies, vast amounts of money. That's the work that we're doing.
Now you're also trying to I mean I had a question on you know, trying to basically take reform into the mainstream. And while you're leading in the polls, there's still a lot of voters, whether fairly or not fairly, that associate your party with racism. Are they wrong?
Of course, And I think that that's now So if you are leveling that claim reform, you are now calling that epsos pole leveling that claim at more than third of the public in the UK. Any human who has been in the UK for more than five minutes knows that that claim is absurd on its face.
But there must be a perception. I mean, the perception is still there. You can't deny that.
It might be there for people who are brainwashed by certain media outlets that they might watch. But look, frankly, we're coming across that less and less and less, and the more that we have been attacked without hominem attacks. Partly it is because they can't engage us on the arguments. Secondly, the result of all of this silliness being you know, so ideologically possessed that that's the only argument against us is that the country continues to go to the dogs.
And I put it to you that the more people here from reform, the more they hear from Nigel and our MPs, the more they like us. That's the evidence, and the opposite is true of other political leaders in this country.
Can I pivot a bit to again back where we are in the city of London and what we care about more than anything on this podcast is what the future holds for the city. So what people think about you say is important. Do you care what the city thinks about you as a former banker and what plans would you have in place to improve the fortunes of the financial services.
We need to know. The city of London was once the greatest financial center in the world. We need a strong city of London. I think it is. It is massively overregulated, no doubt about that. You saw our cryptopolicy for example. We've got to lean into the technologies of the future. Yes, of course there needs to be some regulation, but it's gone way way too far. We need to do things on taxation and look, the first act that we want to cut is the one for people earning
less than twenty thousand pounds a year. One of the reasons why the city of London is suffering it's people are worried about law and order. People are terrified of walking around late at night. They can't wear a nice watch anymore. They kind of hold their phone out in public. I grasp it with two hands as if their life depends on it, because in some cases it actually does. So we have to do all of those things. And one of the interesting things I'll tell you as well.
I spend a lot of time in Runcorn during the run Corn and Hellsby Parliamentary by election. And there are some pretty deprived areas, not all of it, but there's some pretty deprived areas of Runcorn, and there are people there. We would hear time and again on the doorsteps, people saying, look, we set our alarm clocks in the morning, we do everything right. We pay into the system, so did my parents, and life has become endlessly more difficult. The cost of
the weekly shop keeps going up. Those energy bills because of that virtue signaling keeps going up. And then they see someone next door on the same at state, who's on benefits, with four kids, whose front gardens a complete mess, doesn't do any work, and they think, why do we bother? And I hear exactly not what. I met one of my friends who still works in the city with a sizeable income. I don't mind saying, you know, a sizeable six figure household income between him and his wife, and
he said exactly the same thing. He said, you know, we both work really hard. Yes we own good money, clearly much higher than the average. But we've got two kids. We can barely afford to send them to the school we want to send them to. Our relationship, it's starting to pray because we don't really get a chance to engage each other because we're so busy. And then we see all that, we see this sense that people are
getting away with not working, not contributing. And the phrase that stuck in my head was they both use the phrase why do we bother? And I think that that's a big reason why reform is getting to be successful. Come on, and why we're going to fight, why we're going to fight for working people. It's really important. Contract is the thing that is breaking.
But I mean, why do we bother? They don't want to be on benefits? Like I understand that this is a huge concern and immigration, you know in this country needs to be fixed, But why do we bother if you're if you have two jobs, you're in an OK position. Things maybe need to change, but it's tough to say, why do we bother?
Well that the tax burden on everyone that I just described, right, even though and I'm using that example advisedly right because they're at very different extremes in terms of the Bell curve of economic distinction and salary. But the sentiment that they have is that they are being taxed ever more and they are getting less and less and less for it when they want to go and see a GP.
It's incredibly difficult. Having children has never been harder economically for people in this country, which is why a birth rate has collapsed below replacement. And this real sense of unfairness. We know people of mind paying taxes if they feel like they're getting something valuable in return.
So obviously it's been a very significant weekend in the Middle East. Part of preparing for government potentially would be your geopolitical policies. Kis Darma's getting fairly good reviews around the word. I spend a lot of the time in the United States about how has been triangulating on the Ukraine issue and on the Middle East. Now do you have a policy? Do you support the United States strikes
on Iran? And if you were in government, how would you navigate this very delicate and difficult moment for the world.
The first thing to say is reform is about focusing on the UK I tweeted out yesterday, A country that cannot even defend its own borders has no business and will not be taken seriously lecturing any other countries about there.
Where should spending be Then, when you're looking at the priorities and where money's going to be saved, But should we be ramping up to three and a half percent?
Yes, we want to be ramping up spending on defense. So the way you're going to spend more on defense ultimately in absolute terms by growing the economy, Right, So that's the first thing. If you don't have a fast growing economy and a buoyant economy, you will not have a strong defense. Secondly, we need to spend it in smarter way. So let's stay drone warfare where there's been
some high profile cases. For example, Russia had a whole load of its nuclear aircraft fleet decommissioned by Ukrainian drugs. Ukraine is firing three to six thousand drones every single day. I'll let you take a guess as to the total number of military drones available to His Majesty's armed forces. I want to take a guess how many less than two thousand?
Right?
We are so ill equipped in this country for modern warfare. We obviously have amazing men and women who give their lives and give their careers to service for this country. And so we have to grow the British economy and if we do that, we will have a strong armed forces.
Is that maybe just final question? Is there a country or a politician that you admire?
I admire the United States, and I admire I do admire President Trump. I don't agree with everything he does or says, but I do admire him. I think he's a very determined man, and I think he has done a lot of good for America, even though I don't agree with everything he does. I'd also say Georgia Maloney in Italy I think is someone who has done a great job. But look, Britain is a proud country. It
has an amazing history. This is the other thing I wanted to close on is We're not in the business of saying Britain's in managed decline, and that is the axiom on which every politician in Westminster, pretty much outside of Reform knowingly knowingly operates. We think Britain can be an awesome country again, that we can be excited to live here and soa can our kids and their kids. But it's going to take a lot of work and time is running out, is.
The a useuph Thank you so much for joining yes today.
Thank you.
So that was a conversation we taped with Reform UK's is the AUSU earlier this week. Now, Lucy as our UK politics reporter, you've been tracking Reforms right and popularity, but more importantly trying to understand what the party stands for when it comes to economic policy.
It's interesting, it's seemed quite a change over recent years. So Reform UK can trace its roots really back to the UK Party, the UK Independence Party, which was again
headed by Nigel Faraj. Nigel left that party after essentially becoming one of one of the very few sort of instantly recognizable figures in UK politics, and he's founded the Brexit Party that was sort of continuing in the same vein as the UK Independence Party, but to to bring the UK out of the European Union essentially was no deal. He wanted a very clean split from the European Union.
After achieving that, well we did have a deal of some sex, yes, the brexit bit, not the deal a bit, we found him, you know, wanting to rename the party essentially, and he landed on reform UK as he sees it. The UK is broken, the UK needs fixing, and that covers pretty much evering from reform of the welfare state to cutting back on migration, which has always been a huge vein in Niger Faragi's politics.
So that's the thing. So in the past it was the sort of the one issue thing was like get brittin now the EU and then that mission accomplished. I mean he failed to become an MP all that time, didn't he. And now they've actually got some MPs now that they've got a bit of a broad well technically
a broader agenda. But you know, listening to our conversation with him, I guess what struck me was that we were asking about lots of economic policies and they had this big new non dom thing that came out, but everything kept on coming back to that same thing, which was always been the Nigel Farage policy number one, which is about immigration. Yeah, still are they still actually really a one issue party?
It's interesting because I think Zia Yusef has been one of the key figures in trying to professionalize reform UK and so he has really been wanting to broaden out that kind of spectrum of policy from just being an immigration focused party to really looking at kind of economic policy.
You know, as you mentioned, we saw the non dom issue raised earlier this week where they have trying to attract wealthy non domicile people back to the country too, as they see it raised tax revenue here, and Zia last month talked about cryptocurrencies, you know, how he wants to make the UK a real cryptocurrency hub. And we're really seeing a much bigger breadth of policies across the party. But as you say, what they're really kind of what they always hone back to is that issue of migration.
That's the kind of anger that they're trying to tap into among the British electorate of people who feel that they've been hard done by because we have seen such huge numbers of migrants come to the country.
It's really important in the UK to remember, of course, this is historically almost a two party system, and so they really want to break away from that. But are they more right wing the Tory right.
It's on certain social policies, it certainly seems so. I mean, we've heard various of their MPs that I mean, they've only got five MPs at the moment, but we've heard some of them talk about, you know, wanting to tighten up abortion legislation, for example, make it harder for women to get abortions. We've heard some of them talking around a sister dying and sort of coming at that from a very you know, kind of socially right wing angle.
But it's hard to kind of say exactly because on certain economic policy they are trying to challenge labor from the left as well, because you know, you've seen them sort of talk about reinstating the winter fuel payment to elderly people that labor pulled when they first got into power. I think, rather than looking at it as an issue of right and left, what they're really looking at it from is trying to tap into that kind of base
of working class people. Who feel like they aren't recognized by either of the mainstream political parties and trying to figure out what they want and what might appeal to them, while also keeping you know, the wealthy, high net worth traditionally right wing voters on side.
So that sounds like pretty good definition of populism to me, isn't it?
Absolutely yeah?
And that's a playbook. So you know, when we talked to the Conversation, didn't we about you admire President Trump and said he certainly does might musque and that obviously calls himself now the doge of the UK. So are they just kind of cherry picking from the kind of populist regimes, obviously the trumping the biggest one, and trying to repeat that playbook in the UK.
It certainly seems that way in certain of the policies that they have taken forward. I mean this, the Non Doms Britannia card that they're talking about, giving people a Britannier card giving them the right to live in the UK is pretty much a sort of direct translation of the Trump card, even though it's an awful lot cheaper than the Trump card.
Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds every ten years is it rather than what was it five million?
Did I get that right?
Yeah? Several million pounds for sure.
You know, it's a bit cheaper than the US basically.
Whether they're doing down or not, I don't know, but no, it's it's it's it's difficult to to see, you know, kind of how the UK would be able to bring in millions and millions.
And again we asked him in there in the conversation around more specific economic or even things that were useful for the city of Life, and I don't know, and I just don't think they had much me on the bones there, do they.
Well, I mean, it's it's important to remember that we are four years away from from another general election and you could level the same criticism and the Conservative Party exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, So you know, it's a long way off yet, but they are kind of coming at this really from ground zero. You know, they've never had more than one MP before. Now they've got five. But you know, there's still a lot of questions around who's going to be their cabinet if they if they do get into power, who would be the chancellor? You know, there's there's a few names in the pot already who could who could
probably fill that position. But you know, there's a whole cabinet that they'll have to fill, and it's it's relying a lot on trust from the electorate to think that they would vote a party into power when they have absolutely no idea who any of the people are.
Oh see, so interesting. Thank you so much, thanks for listening to this week's In the City from Bloomberg. This episode was hosted by me Francins Laquis with David Merritt. In the City is produced by Somersaudi and Moses and Dam, with sound designed by Blake Maples. Brindon Francis Unim is our executive producer. Special thanks to Zia Yusuff and Lucy White. Please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts.