Brexit’s Nigel Farage has responded to the UK’s left-wing government conceding that action is needed on illegal immigration by immediately striking to pull the Overton Window further, stating that the huge levels of legal migration are what ultimately need to be tackled.

Anticipating the forthcoming budget of the UK’s Labour government due later this month in which it has been widely trailed that significant tax hikes are coming to fund the ballooning state, Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage called for huge levels of spending on foreigners to be cut before Britons are asked to bear more burden.

Following the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announcing plans to crack down on illegal migration on Monday — which represent only a tiny fraction of migrant arrivals every year, given how easy it is for most to come to open-borders Britain legally — Mr Farage immediately went further, saying tackling this problem is a key first step in fixing the economy. Saying “this budget will be an attack on aspiration” but a boon to “those who don’t want to work and who want to live on benefits”, Mr Farage predicted “putting up taxes is a choice, it’s a choice the chancellor is going to choose to make”.

He said at a press conference on Tuesday:

…it is legal migration that is doing enormous damage to the British economy and it’s been so difficult to even talk about this subject without being screamed down. Just look at the direct link between falls in productivity and the mass importation of unskilled labour.

That trend has been there now for the best part of 20 years. There are enormous costs to our benefit system of those not just illegally, but who legally have come into our country.

Farage introduced Reform UK head of policy Zia Yusuf who noted that while the government was scrabbling to make tax rises to cover a black hole in the national budget, it could instead find this money by simply spending less, and in a way that would have no impact on British citizens. “The British state exists to serve British citizens. That’s quite a radical idea these days”, Yusuf said, stating:

{snip} And here’s our perspective, it is foreign nationals who should first bear the brunt before we ask any British citizens to make sacrifices and that’s the fundamental fault line now in British politics… UK welfare should be for UK citizens. I think that’s an entirely reasonable position, and yet the fastest growing line item… is foreign nationals.

Yusuf said under a Reform government, the state would stop withholding data on the cost of foreign nationals in Britain and would save tens of billions by stopping paying out cash to foreigners. {snip}

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