Writing in the Daily Mail today, Reform Party chairman Zia Yusuf has blasted the high-spend Labour-run welfare state while estolling the virtues of his party’s vow to ‘put Briton’s first’ by rowing in international development and non-UK benefit splurges.

He wrote:

The welfare state is a runaway train to which the whole economy is attached.

Taxpayers have suffered enough. People who set their alarm clocks and go to work are being asked to pay record amounts in tax, accept appalling public services and pay for a record number of people to not work. The tax burden is set to rise to a staggering 38 per cent of GDP by 2030 – a post-war high.

‘Tough decisions must be made’ has become the refrain of a political class that insists British people tighten their belts, again and again, while they continue writing blank cheques to the rest of the world.

Legacy parties: the script never changes

Whether it was the Tories before, or Labour today, the script never changes: taxes go up, services get worse. What they never admit is that the only people ever asked to sacrifice are the British people themselves, while the state funnels ever-larger sums to foreign nationals.

Britain has been turned into a global food bank, funded by taxpayers who can barely keep up with their own mortgages and energy bills. It is immoral, economically illiterate and politically indefensible.

There is only one way to end this doom loop: reduce government spending, and let workers keep more of their wages.

Nigel Farage and I laid out £27billion of savings that could be made immediately, by putting Britons first. By making foreign nationals bear the brunt of the ‘difficult decisions’ that need to be made.

Charity begins at home. It is indefensible that while British children go without dental appointments and pensioners cannot get GP slots, the UK funds a £52million ‘road to nowhere’ in Guyana.

While Labour resisted a national inquiry into grooming gangs, Britain wired £19million to Pakistan for child exploitation prevention programmes.

Zia Yusuf’s promise

Reform will cap foreign aid at £1billion, enough to meet our core UN obligations, support Ukraine, provide emergency relief and promote British interests abroad. Everything else is an unaffordable luxury. This alone saves £10billion this year.

We would increase the fee foreign nationals must pay to access our NHS (raising £5billion), and reform PIP welfare to end payments for non-serious anxiety (saving £3.5billion this year).

We would end welfare payments to foreign nationals: they receive around £8billion a year in Universal Credit alone. Reform would also deport all foreign nationals in our jails, saving over £500million.

If Rachel Reeves had implemented our plans, she would have saved £27billion. Instead, she raised taxes by £26billion.

It is morally repugnant to ask Britons to make sacrifices and pay more tax while writing blank cheques to foreign nationals.

Reform will put British people first, cut spending, reduce taxes and get the economy growing. That’s how we will turn this country around, and make it prosperous again.