Nigel Farage's pitch to the worst people in Britain

Nigel Farage says that he wants to cut the price of a pint by 5p, and pay for it by re-imposing economic sanctions on British children for the "crime" of having more than one sibling.

After almost two years of inexplicable and inexcusable delays, Labour are finally scrapping the diabolical Tory two-child economic sanctions on families, but Nigel Farage is furious about it.

He’s insisting that as soon as he gets his hands on power, he’s going to re-apply these poverty-spreading economic sanctions against children for the "crime" of having more than one sibling, and that he’ll use the money he’s taking from British kids to cut the price of a pub pint by 5p.

It’s an utterly depraved policy, designed to appeal the the most selfish and venal people in the country.

The average pint in the UK apparently costs £5.44, so knocking 5p off the cost amounts to less than a 1% reduction in price, meaning the demographic that Farage is pandering to is the kind of person that thinks driving hundreds of thousands more British kids back below the poverty line is a price worth paying to save less than a penny in the pound on the cost of their booze.

It’s not just the venality of openly pandering to the irredeemably selfish like this either. The policy isn’t just cruel, it’s economically stupid, and ideologically incoherent too.

Immorality

Britain has a diabolical child poverty problem. It’s an absolute scandal that 4.5 million kids are growing up in poverty in one of the richest countries in the world, and 72% of them are growing up in working families too.

It’s outrageous that we are a country that allows a small minority to hoard unimaginably vast amounts of wealth, whilst condemning millions of our own kids to destitution and stunted lives.

It’s morally obscene that the Tories implemented a policy designed to make child poverty worse; it’s a moral obscenity that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves took so long to reverse it; and it’s outright sickening that a man who pretends to be on the side of ordinary British people is dead set on bringing it back again, and trying to bribe the worst people in Britain with cheaper booze in order to achieve the higher child poverty rates he wants to see.

Long-term economic stupidity

It’s not just morally obscene, it’s economically stupid, because every child that grows up in poverty is a child that’s missing out on things like good nutrition; decent housing; opportunities; educational materials; after school classes …

The children of today are the workers of tomorrow. Forcing so many of them to grow up in poverty erodes their future potential, and by extension the future economic potential of the country as a whole.

It’s an established fact that under-nourished kids can’t concentrate and study as well as their well-fed peers, but Farage wants to actively increase the child poverty rate, and reduce Britain’s aggregate academic attainment in the process.

It’s glaringly obvious that kids that grow up malnourished in cold, damp houses are more likely to suffer ill health in later life, and put greater burdens on the health service too.

Given that the creative industries is one of the few economic sectors where Britain still truly punches above its weight, only a fool would implement policies to actively reduce the number of healthy, well-fed British kids getting opportunities to learn sports and creative activities.

Macroeconomic stupidity

It’s not just economic stupidity from the perspective of Britain’s long-term economic potential either, the whole idea of reallocating public spending like this is indicative of macroeconomic illiteracy.

I’d argue that there is actually a strong case to be made to help British pubs, especially in deprived communities and isolated villages, where they’re often one of the last remaining community spaces, and once they’re gone, they rarely if ever come back.

But the idea that you need to slash public spending in one department to fund another department is exactly the same kind of economically illiterate penny-pinching that the Westminster establishment order are so obsessed with, and that’s behind Britain’s seemingly inexorable economic decline.

A logical approach would be to consider policies on their social and economic merits, rather than pitting one thing against another as if keeping public investment as low as possible is somehow the highest priority of all.

If it’s economically beneficial to lift kids out of poverty, keep them healthy, and give them good opportunities, then the money spent on this isn’t wasted, it’s an investment that will pay off in the future.

If you can demonstrate that it’s socially and economically beneficial to support pubs (and the wider service industry) in order to keep money circulating in local communities, then this money isn’t wasted, it’s an investment that will pay off in the future.

So why not invest in both?

Because the entire Westminster establishment order has been infected with this radically right-wing delusion that all public spending is essentially "waste" that needs to be cut back through austerity penny-pinching.

And Farage is proving that he’s suffering exactly the same kind of economic brain rot as the clowns who have spent almost two decades salting the UK economic garden with austerity; wage repression; infrastructure under-investment; and ideologically driven spending cuts.

Ideological incoherence

One of the weirdest things about Farage’s love of child poverty is how ideologically incoherent it is for the far-right to actively disincentivise British families from having children.

The national birth rate has fallen so low that the economy is sitting on a demographic cliff edge, with a shrinking working age population, and ever more retirees to support.

Unless we just meekly accept declining living standards for workers and pensioners alike, there are only two solutions to the demographic ageing problem.

Incentivise British people into having more children with assurances that their kids won’t be forced to grow up in poverty. Or cover the shortfall in workers through mass immigration.

Farage’s support for a policy designed to actively repress the population reproduction rate (2.3 children per female to maintain a stable population) is a clear demonstration that he’s vehemently opposed to the idea of dealing with the demographic cliff edge by supporting families to raise the next generation of workers.

He’s also just hired Robert Jenrick, who was the Tory immigration minister who oversaw the massive post-Brexit immigration surge, which was the biggest immigration wave in British history.

It’s quite something to see a man who poses as an ultranationalist anti-immigration firebrand promising policies designed to actively increase Britain’s reliance on immigrant workers, and hiring one of the guys behind the biggest immigration surge this country has ever seen, knowing that his followers are so cognitively stunted and information averse that they’ll still vote for him regardless.

Conclusion

You wouldn’t just have to be incredibly venal and selfish to think that massively increasing child poverty is a price worth paying to pay for a sub 1% reduction in the cost of your pint; you’d also have to be economically illiterate; and downright blind to Farage’s ideological incoherence too.

But that’s Farage’s intended audience. The venal; the selfish; the economically illiterate; the low-information voter who doesn’t want to think; the type who doesn’t care about the economic idiocy or the ideological incoherence.

The kind of person who simply wouldn’t care even if you tried to explain any of it to them.

They want their marginally cheaper pints; they want more British kids growing up in poverty; they don’t care about the economic consequences; they’re too dumb to spot the ideological incoherence; and they’re going to vote for the Faragists purely because they like all the xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Farage doesn’t just know his target audience is a bunch of idiots, with this policy he’s openly banking on it.