The Ukip spring conference is underway in Margate today, with the party starting the two days of speeches and fringes with a pledge that it will match the Tory plan to eliminate the deficit by 2017/18. Nigel Farage has said that this support is conditional on the Tories keeping their promises, but it will be interesting, once he has arrived at the conference from the US, to see how he articulates a Ukip vision for cutting the deficit.
Given the party has spent a fair while talking about what it wouldn’t cut, for example the ‘Bedroom Tax’, it may find it less enjoyable to talk about what it would cut. Given George Osborne’s spending plans were quickly mired in a row about Wigan Pier and given Labour thought those spending plans were sufficiently scary enough to start openly rejecting them as a campaign strategy, Ukip will need to be careful.
Farage has already been careful in his language about cuts.
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