Nigel Farage was on Question Time again last night. This was hardly unusual, but what was interesting was that the UKIP leader U-turned on one of his flagship policies.
When he spoke at a press lunch on Tuesday, Farage accepted that UKIP’s flat tax policy was ‘incomplete’, but that UKIP’s aspiration was to have taxes as low as possible. Last night, asked whether he still wanted a flat tax, he said:
‘It was in 2010, but it isn’t now, and don’t tell me about manifestos: you haven’t even got one!’
Simon Hughes pressed him on what his tax policy was, to which he replied:
‘We will have no tax on the minimum wage and a mass simplification of the tax policy, with a lower rate. We will abolish National Insurance, roll it into tax because all it is is tax anyway.’
He added that higher earners would pay ’40 per cent or something like that’, adding:
‘Every party changes their policies between general elections… Just because we stood under a different leader in a different general election with a policy of 31 per cent, doesn’t mean that’ll be our policy next time round: it won’t.
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