Reform UK’s “shadow chancellor” Robert Jenrick was emphatic about who would be able to claim welfare in Britain if his party won power, as he unveiled a raft of proposals on Monday that he said would save his country £50 billion (€58.5 billion) on its ballooning benefits bill.
“No British citizenship, no benefits,” he said curtly. “It really is as simple as that.”
Except it isn’t. The Irish can usually be relied upon to ensure a few complications.
Tory defector Jenrick and Reform’s relentlessly jaunty deputy leader, Richard Tice, summoned the sunburned Westminster press pack across the road from parliament, where recess tumbleweeds abounded, to a conference room at historic Church House, which also houses the headquarters of the Church of England.
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Perhaps they were praying that their tough new proposals banning foreigners from claiming benefits and forcing the long-term unemployed to sweep streets would distract from the Reform’s summer of byelection bin-battling angst over Nigel Farage’s finances.
The Reform leader traditionally dominates the summer political news agenda by at least co-hosting these sort of headline-grabbing events, but he is still, apparently, avoiding media scrutiny over the £5 million he secretly accepted from a crypto billionaire.
It was left up to the Jenrick-Tice chummy double act to hold the fort.
Welfare reform is a hot topic in Britain – the issue arguably killed Keir Starmer’s premiership. Jenrick’s glossy new policy document was designed to show his party will be ruthless in cutting the benefits bill, with up to £21 billion of the savings coming from foreigners.
Jenrick was accompanied on his walk to the stage in the Hoare Memorial Hall by a man-mountain security guard. Senior Reform figures are still understandably skittish over personal security after the murder last month of Ann Widdecombe, a party matriarch. Burly ex-army types in sharp suits littered the room, surveying all.
Reform’s brand of nostalgia politics often harks back to Britain’s self-perceived Churchillian heydays. The very room that Jenrick chose to unveil his first big policy as Reform’s money man (perhaps after Farage) was frequently used by Churchill to make big announcements to the British nation during the Blitz of the second World War, when parliament across the road was bombed by the Nazis.
Reform, however, is more interested in blowing up Britain’s welfare state. The party believes that cutting benefits from almost all foreigners, including European Union citizens with settled status, could save £21 billion. That would be more than doubled by cutting disability benefits by, among other ideas, forcing businesses to take out insurance to cover employee sick pay instead of the British state paying for it.
Finally, in the most eye-catching bit, Jenrick announced that the long-term unemployed would be put to work for 20 hours each week stocking libraries, scrubbing school yards and delivering meals-on-wheels to the elderly.
Reform’s policy document, Making Benefits Work, claims the party was inspired by the Republic’s community employment schemes, the thrust of which are quite different from the Reform proposals.
The Irish often find ways to be inserted in UK politics.
Much of the questioning afterwards focused on how the EU would react if benefits were pulled from its citizens, breaching Brexit deals. Jenrick and Tice seemed to enjoy poking the Brussels bureaucrats in their eyes.
Jenrick kept repeating his “no British citizenship, no benefits” mantra. “They can always apply for British citizenship,” he said of the foreigners, before adding with a smile that Reform would make that harder too.
But what about the Irish, who are entitled to British benefits (as well as work, education and health services) not by dint of the EU deal now under threat, but under the 104-year-old Common Travel Area that gives citizens of both countries full reciprocal rights?
As well as the EU deal, was Reform now also threatening to rip up the CTA?
“For the purposes of this policy, Irish people are treated the same as British citizens,” Tice told The Irish Times afterwards.
So the Irish would be exempted from having their benefits being cut off due to the CTA?
“Yes,” he said. “I believe it does say that in the policy document.”
A scour of all 56 pages reveals that, in fact, the document doesn’t say this at all. That may be just an oversight. The Republic’s Government, as it eyes up the UK’s potential future one, may be hoping so.
