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. It’s worth remembering what he said at the last conference when asked whether the party was preparing for ‘big cuts’:
‘Well, we’ll be preparing cuts, obviously but I mean the other side of the equation is to produce some growth, you know, and we feel that given most of our economic… in terms of managing our economy, you know, when it comes to the legislative side of business, the British government has no bearing over that at all, whether you’re in financial services or a plumber, it’s pretty irrelevant when you have a Labour or Tory government now because the rules by which you have to operate, the costs that you have to incur were made somewhere else and our argument strongly is we can only deregulate the British economy, particularly the small companies, you know, give them some opt-outs on things if we’re free to do that and we’re not at the moment.’
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