Richard Tice spent this morning fulfilling a role well-known to leaders of smaller parties: defending their vetting procedures amid criticism of unsuitable candidates. The Reform leader was grilled by journalists at a Westminster briefing over the suspension or ditching of at least a dozen election candidates over their social media posts. ‘If you’re going to have a glass on a Friday night, don’t use Twitter,’ Tice told his party’s electoral hopefuls.
Voters want more NHS funding; they just don’t want to fund private tax breaks to do this
The main topic of the briefing was about health and Reform’s plans to redirect net zero funds to improve the NHS. Tice said that his party aims to get the waiting lists down to zero in two years, insisting that ‘it is going to take a bit of extra money but we are not going to give it to bungling NHS bureaucrats’. Reform’s plans will instead require an additional £17 billion in NHS funding annually, with the party estimating that the cost of net zero is about £30 billion a year. That spending will be used to fund a huge expansion of private healthcare provision, with 20 per cent tax breaks for people who take out private healthcare and who ‘self-pay’.
Tice’s pitch was almost entirely concentrated on Labour, following Wes Streeting’s earlier criticism of ‘middle-class lefties’ opposed to his party’s plans for the NHS. Tice dismissed the shadow health secretary’s comments, suggesting that the ‘clear choice’ was between Reform’s policy of ‘zero waiting lists in two years’ or Labour’s goal of ‘net zero CO2 emissions in 25 years’. Reform’s goal of putting more money into the NHS will undoubtedly find favour with the four in five voters who believe it is underfunded. But Tice’s plans to expand private healthcare capacity could spark the old fears of privatisation among their key target audience. Polls suggest there is a bigger constituency for a big-spending, left-leaning approach on the economy and public services, twinned with migration scepticism. Voters want more NHS funding; they just don’t want to fund private tax breaks to do this.
A decade ago, Nigel Farage and Ukip worked this out. Both shed their libertarian image and dropped talk of replacing the NHS with an ‘insurance-based model’. The result was a series of impressive 20-point finishes in Labour’s northern heartlands such as South Shields and Heywood and Middleton. Richard Tice is a proud capitalist and unabashed free-marketeer. But if he wants his party to match Ukip’s success, he will likely have to choose between his head and his heart.
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