Nigel Farage reveals Reform UK's plan to slash immigration with bombshell new tax
EXCLUSIVE: Writing for the Express, Reform UK's honourary president Nigel Farage says voters have been lied to about migration.
There’s a good reason why this is the Immigration Election.
It’s because Labour and the Tories have lied to us about immigration for over 25 years and only Reform UK will tell the truth.
It’s bad enough that no one voted for uncontrolled mass immigration. Even worse, six prime ministers in a row have deceived the British public.
But it’s the sheer scale of the disaster that takes your breath away.
In 1997 the UK population was around 58 million. Today it is over 68 million — and those are the ones we know about.
A staggering 7.5 million of that population growth has come from immigration.
That is a population around five times the size of Birmingham, and this year the government is set to hand out over one million more work visas.
Labour got our country hooked on the deadly addiction of mass immigration. They got cheap workers for their friends in big business and they wanted to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. The gutless Tories carried on where Blair and Brown left off.
The resulting population explosion has been a catastrophe for our nation. Homegrown workers have seen huge downward pressure on wages.
Britain has suffered the longest GDP per person recession since 1955.
Mass immigration has led to a housing crisis, record NHS waiting lists and huge pressure across our crumbling public services. The poorest have been hit the hardest.
Mass immigration has also made integration impossible and our country has become far more dangerous.
Separate communities have grown up that reject British values. Most illegal migrants come in with no criminal checks.
So foreign criminals and terrorists walk our streets and the law-abiding public suffer horrific crimes and terror attacks.
If you think this is bad, then brace yourself. A Labour or Tory government would mean we are still only halfway through this nightmare experiment.
ONS figures say the population explosion is set to reach nearly 74 million by 2036, driven by over six million more migrants. That means by 2036 around one in four people in the UK will be foreign born.
Be in no doubt. A vote for Labour or the Tories is a vote for the ‘woke’ pro-immigration political class of civil servants and human rights lawyers to change our country forever.
That is why none of the other parties will talk about immigration.
But Reform’s policies have a clear purpose. We will freeze immigration. Pick up the small boats and take them back to France. Stand up for British values and ensure that the interests of hardworking, law-abiding British people come first.
We will also introduce a new Employer Immigration Tax on the employment of foreign workers.
This will deter low-skilled foreign labour, boost the pay-packets of British workers, rescue our crumbling public services and take the pressure off our limited housing stock.
Our new Employer Immigration Tax will mean businesses have to pay a higher national insurance rate if they employ foreign workers instead of British citizens.
The current NI rate is 13.8% of an employee’s salary. We will increase this to 20% for foreign workers. Our message is clear: businesses should be employing and training British workers and we are going to make sure they do.
Foreign health and care workers would be exempt from the tax to help prop up our NHS, as would businesses that employ five staff members or under.
Not only will the Employer Immigration Tax incentivise firms to employ Brits, but it could raise more than £20billion over the next five years to be spent on helping our young people into high-skilled jobs through apprenticeship and training programmes.
Getting more British citizens into work would also mean annual savings on welfare bills in the billions: every million people off benefits represents a saving of £10,000 per person per annum, or £10billion.
That is the kind of commonsense approach our country needs and the stakes could not be higher.
But there is hope. For the first time in a generation, there will be a real choice at the ballot box.
On July 4th Reform will field candidates across Britain. The British public will be able to vote for a party that has the leadership and courage to stop mass immigration and put our country first. The backlash against the open borders political class is coming and it will be sooner than many think.
