Nigel Farage skipped the chancellor’s first budget because he was worried he would get in a “physical altercation” with another MP in a row over seating arrangements.
The Reform UK leader admitted he was not present in the House of Commons but gave a press conference afterwards in which he said he was “shocked” by the £10bn going to support Ukraine and doubled down on his party’s policies on cutting tax for crypto investors.
In a joint event with Robert Jenrick, his party’s Treasury spokesperson, Farage said he had decided to give parliament a “wide berth” as he was concerned he would get into a fight because another MP had removed a green paper slip saving him a seat. He said this had turned physical on a previous occasion.
“At the state opening of parliament, I got involved in, I didn’t want to, but I got involved in a physical altercation with an MP in the chamber,” he said.
“I didn’t make a fuss about it. I didn’t complain. But I could see, given that my prayer card had been removed, I was heading towards another physical altercation, and just sometimes, it’s better to avoid conflict, is one reason. Second reason is, actually, I sat going through the budget with the economists in the office line by line.”
In his budget response, Farage said John Healey’s small giveaways suggested there would be a general election in May next year and added that Reform would be ready for one as early as December.
In terms of the budget’s measures, he criticised the extra taxation on gambling shops through higher machine-games duty, saying it would be bad for the horse-racing industry and drive gambling offshore and through crypto.
Asked whether Reform still had a policy of cutting capital gains tax on cryptocurrency, which could benefit its big donors, Farage said his plans still stood and would not benefit his backers overall.
He said his policy was trying to “bring crypto in from the cold … A 10% tax rate on crypto gains is a way of incentivising people to come into the system, to go straight in a new regulated industry.”
On Ukraine, Farage said he was “surprised by the amount” of promised economic and military aid but that he did not “mind the amount, provided I can be absolutely assured it’s not going to get swallowed up in corruption and making Ukrainian officials richer than they already are”.
He claimed to be more worried about Vladimir Putin’s “rationality” than at any point before in the conflict, but said he was “shocked by the size of [the aid package]” and was “really concerned the money’s going to get used properly and spent well”.
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Farage has previously expressed admiration for the Russian president and in 2024 suggested the west “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, although he has supported the UK’s position in the war and declined to repeat Donald Trump’s harsher criticisms of Kyiv.
Asked whether he preferred Healey’s budget or the disastrous one given under Liz Truss in 2022, which he previously praised but led to Truss’s demise as prime minister, Farage said he had liked the top lines of the Truss budget but “what I hadn’t understood was they didn’t cut spending”.
He added: “That was their mistake … If they cut spending radically, they could have cut taxes, and that was the big lesson that came from it.”
The Reform leader also gave his response to Tommy Robinson’s conviction for harassing journalists, saying the far-right agitator’s behaviour had obviously been “very wrong”. But he repeated suggestions that his party’s members would not be penalised for admiring Robinson, saying just because they liked a social media message “doesn’t make them full-blown marchers in support of their cause”.
