Nigel Farage is a British politician and broadcaster who has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton and the Leader of Reform UK since 2024, having previously been its leader from 2019 to 2021 when it was called the Brexit Party. He also was the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 to 2009, and 2010 to 2016. Farage served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 until the UK's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) in 2020.

A prominent Eurosceptic since the early 1990s, Farage's right-wing views on issues such as immigration have attracted significant media attention throughout his political career. He is known for his distinctive character and style, including his personality, fashion, and social media presence, as well as his form of British right-wing populism. In foreign policy, Farage is an outspoken supporter of US President Donald Trump. In 2014 he spoke of admiring Vladimir Putin while later disliking him personally amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine which Farage condemned as "immoral, outrageous and indefensible".

In the 2024 United Kingdom election, Farage aunched the Reform UK manifesto, which they called a "contract" (Our Contract with You). It pledged to lower taxes, lower immigration, increase funding for public services, reform the NHS and decrease its waiting lists to 'zero', bring utilities and critical national infrastructure under 50% public ownership (the other 50% owned by pension funds), replace the House of Lords with a more democratic second chamber, and to replace first-past-the-post voting with a system of proportional representation. It also pledged to accelerate transport infrastructure in coastal regions, Wales, the North, and the Midlands. The party also wants to freeze non-essential immigration and recruit 40,000 new police officers. Reform UK oppose the UK government's current net zero target. Instead, it pledged to support the environment with more tree planting, more recycling and less single-use plastics.

Economy

After taking office as a UKIP MEP in 1999, Farage has often voiced opposition to the "euro project". His argument is that "a one-size-fits-all interest rate" cannot work for countries with structurally different economies, often using the example of Greece and Germany to emphasise contrast. In 2011, Farage opposed the use of bailouts and says that "buying your own debt with taxpayers' money" will not solve the problem and that, "if we do, the next debt crisis won't be a country ... it will be the European Central Bank itself". On the issue of welfare, Farage said in 2014 he wanted migrants to live in the UK for five years before being able to claim benefits, and for them to be ineligible for tax credits. Farage has referred to the Financial Conduct Authority as a "disaster" for the British banking sector and called for its abolition. He supports restoring regulatory power back to the Bank of England. Farage has also supported ending interest payments on Bank of England reserves.

During the 1990s and 2010s, Farage supported economic liberalism and has praised the policies of Margaret Thatcher for reforming the British economy, stating in 2018 "It was painful for some people, but it had to happen."

More recently, Farage has shifted to call for a policy of reindustrialisation, including the reintroduction of coal mining in Britain, and nationalisation of UK steel producing companies. In 2025, Farage called for the re-opening of the blast furnaces of the Port Talbot Steelworks which had been closed down in September 2024 costing around 2,000 people in Port Talbot their jobs. Farage also supports the renationalisation of British Steel describing it as a "vital strategic asset" and has opposed British Steel's sale to the Chinese company Jingye Group. During an appearance at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference, Farage said he would cut the capital gains tax on cryptocurrency from 24% to 10% and create a "Bitcoin digital reserve" within the Bank of England. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent economic thinktank, criticised the planned economic policies set out in Our Contract with You, Reform UK's manifesto before the 2024 UK general election. They said the costs of tax cuts and spending increases and savings proposed "do not add up" and were based on "extremely optimistic assumptions".

Taxation

In 2015 he suggested that tax avoidance was caused by "punitive tax rates".

In Our Contract with You, the party pledged to increase the starting income tax threshold from to , which the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated would cost between and billion each year. It also committed to cutting corporation tax from 25% to 20%, to subsequently drop even further to 15%, as well as to increase the Value-Added Tax (VAT) threshold for businesses from to . In 2025, Farage called for the abolition of inheritance tax describing it as a "really nasty tax and it hits people at the most unpleasant part of their lives." As leader of Reform UK, Farage called for the introduction of a Britannia Card initiative in which those with Non-domiciled status can pay an annual £250,000 fee with proceeds going to British citizens on lower incomes in exchange for avoiding certain wealth taxes.

Electoral reform During the campaigning before the UK voting system referendum of May 2011, which offered the two options of a continuation of first-past-the-post voting or an alternative vote system, Farage declared himself in favour of the latter, saying that a continuation of first-past-the-post would be a "nightmare" for UKIP, although he also said that AV would make little difference to UKIP's fortunes. The party's stance was decided by its central policy-making committee, although Farage expressed a preference for the AV+ system as it "would retain the constituency link and then also the second ballot ensured there were no wasted votes".

After the 2015 general election, in which UKIP took a much lower proportion of seats than votes, Farage called the first-past-the-post voting system (FPTP) "totally bankrupt". He had said in 2011: "I completely lost faith in [FPTP] in 2005 when Blair was returned with a 60 seat majority on 36 per cent of the vote, or 22 per cent if you factor in low turnout." In 2019, Farage was a signatory to a cross-party declaration alongside the Liberal Democrats, Green Party of England and Wales and the Scottish National Party which called for electoral reform.

During a 2022 phone-in discussion on GB News, Farage said that he favoured abolishing the House of Lords stating "it's bloated, it's ludicrous, it's packed with hundreds and hundreds of David Cameron's mates and Blair's mates" and acknowledged that while the hereditary system had flaws, hereditary peers had represented geographical diversity across the United Kingdom while saying that the current appointed peers are "all living in the same postcodes in central London." Despite his calls to abolish the House of Lords, Farage wrote to Keir Starmer in August 2025 to request that Reform UK be allowed to nominate peers into the upper chamber, arguing this was needed to address "the democratic disparity" in the Lords.

Farage opposed lowering the voting age to 16, arguing that the voting age should be kept at an age where people are allowed to run as political candidates. Despite this, some political analysts have argued that Reform UK could benefit from lowering the voting age. Farage has also called for the abolition of postal voting, often arguing that it has been a source of electoral fraud. Data from the 2024 UK general election showed no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud. Of the 445 allegations of electoral fraud in 2024, 94% "resulted in the police taking no further action or were locally resolved through words of advice to those involved" according to The Electoral Commission. In their 2024 manifesto, Reform UK pledged to hold a referendum on establishing proportional representation within the House of Commons.

Environment

Farage has been sceptical regarding the scientific consensus on climate change and has opposed measures designed to tackle global warming. In 2013, Farage criticised David Cameron's policy on wind turbines, describing it as covering "Britain in ugly disgusting ghastly windmills". An official energy policy document produced by UKIP while Farage was leader of the party stated that "UKIP strongly supports a clean environment and clean air", stressing that "coal-fired power stations must use clean technology to remove sulphur and nitrogen oxides, particulates and other pollutants". In a speech made to the European parliament on 11 September 2013, Farage cited a news story that the Arctic Sea ice cap had apparently grown from 2012 to 2013, saying that this was evidence of decades "of Euro-federalism combined with an increasing Green obsession", despite this being a minor milestone in a larger trend of sea ice decline.

In a 2015 interview with Spiked magazine, Farage said: "I haven't got a clue whether climate change is being driven by carbon-dioxide emissions." He also stated that climate change "is like a religion. And you're demonised if you question it. Ostracised completely."

A 2024 commentary piece by London School of Economics scholars Bob Ward and Pallavi Sethi noted that Farage had moderated his views on climate change by acknowledging it as an issue in the Reform UK manifesto for the 2024 United Kingdom general election. During an interview with Nick Robinson on the BBC's Panorama, Farage disputed claims that he did not accept that there was a climate crisis, saying "I'm not arguing the science" on climate change but stated: "I do think that ever since the late 1980s that perhaps there has been a bit of hype around this, and that perhaps is wrong." Farage and Reform have campaigned to scrap net zero targets and focus on fast-tracking clean nuclear energy with new Small Modular Reactors and North Sea gas and oil licences.

In February 2025, Farage said that it was "absolute nuts" to call carbon dioxide a pollutant. He said that man-made emissions account for about 3% of the world's annual CO2 emissions. BBC Verify said that is misleading given that without human emissions, the amount of CO2 created would be broadly equal to the amount absorbed and so CO2 levels would remain constant. Nasa say that human activity has been responsible for about 33% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere.

Farage has been a vocal critic of net zero and the policies undertaken by Labour Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband in particular. In 2025, he stated that Labour net zero policies had caused higher energy prices and impacted on the UK's steel industry, arguing "We think closing down the steel industry is good because it means our national CO2 output is down – and all that happens is the plant closes in Redcar. The plant closes in south Wales. It reopens in India under lower environmental standards and then the steel is shipped back to us." He has also referred to Labour's policies in government as "net-zero lunacy."

Drugs and healthcare

Drugs