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Nigel Farage has been making headlines recently by calling for the two-child benefits cap to be scrapped.
The limit, introduced by the Conservative Government under David Cameron in 2017, restricts support in Universal Credit and tax credits to two children in a family. Once families grow above this level, they get no additional support.
It effectively penalises children for coming from larger families, and has been blamed for pushing hundreds of thousands of them into poverty. PM Keir Starmer is under major pressure from his own MPs to ditch the limit.
But Cameron’s policy didn’t emerge in a vacuum. In 2015, one party demanded benefits be limited to two children.
It proposed “supporting a lower cap on benefits” and more specifically: “Limiting child benefit to two children for new claimants.”
The party was the UK Independence Party, led by one Nigel Farage.
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The idea had been promoted in 2014 by the right-wing Policy Exchange think tank, which called for a stop to extra benefits at four children, and boasted at the time: “Many proposals by Policy Exchange, founded by a group including ministers Michael Gove, Francis Maude and Nick Boles, have found their way into Conservative manifestos in the past.”
The electoral pressure of UKIP on David Cameron (as well as the deep blue roots of Policy Exchange) was, for all the hug-a-hoodie rhetoric, very significant. UKIP were polling around 12%, enough to block Conservative chances in dozens of seats.
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Cameron also, in that same election, adopted the UKIP policy of pledging a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. As my colleague Adam Bienkov has noted, it was barely picked up on at the time, but led to the most profound and likely-permanent change to Britain’s constitution in half a century.
That 2015 Conservative manifesto pledged to “work to eliminate child poverty” while also cutting or freezing certain benefits.
The two aims were contradictory, and by the end of Cameron’s term, in 2019, the Child Poverty Action Group found that in the space of two years, “an estimated 160,000 families have been affected by the two-child limit to date…the majority are working families and the majority have just three children.”
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Reform’s leader, now an MP trying to dig the boot into a Labour Government, says he wants to make it easier for people to have children, having seemingly had a change of heart on what is – effectively – his own policy.
But Farage’s arguably pivotal backing for a two-child limit in 2015 is now mostly forgotten in political coverage (though Farage did tell Sky News that what’s changed his mind on the policy since 2014 is the ‘cost of living’ and the need for more ‘British-born babies’, and not, as the interviewer suggested, mere ‘shameless opportunism’).
Paul Nowak, TUC General Secretary, told Byline Times the about-turn was “yet more proof Nigel Farage is a political fraud.”
“Farage cosplays as a champion of the working class, but was the architect of a policy that pushed hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.”
The union confederation chief added: “Make no mistake – Farage is not on the side of working people, or of families struggling to put food on the table for their children. He’s on the side of billionaires and bad bosses.”
With thanks to our readers as ever for story tips. Do you live in a Reform-run council area? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com
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Josiah Mortimer also writes the On the Ground column, exclusive to the print edition of Byline Times.
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