The BNP has promised a hugely expensive program. They plan to abolish student loans; halve council tax; abolish income tax; boost NHS staff by 100,000;  reopen grammar schools; build new high speed railways; abolish BBC license fee; abolish car tax…

Over the last few years, the BNP have launched a massive shopping list of promises. They’ll build new schools, hire more doctors (and pay them better too), revolutionise our transport infrastructure, create a new English parliament, secure our borders, invent new energy sources and up the spending on drug rehabilitation a thousand times. Taxes would go plummeting down: no more income tax, council tax halved, the licence fee and car tax scrapped.

In a world where Britain has a £125 bn structural deficit, how is this all to be paid for?

In the BNP’s world, there are no hard choices. No prioritisation. Everything can be paid for by ending foreign aid or removing immigrants. The looming fiscal crisis of little important.

The BNP haven’t had to worry how to afford this, as they haven’t bothered to add up the cost.

Luckily, we’ve done it for them[1]:

-          One off spending commitments. To start with, the BNP plans to build a high speed railway and bring back grammar schools will cost together at least £50 bn. Those costs are likely to be dwarfed however by their commitment, to buy back utilities and foreign companies in Britain. This figure is likely to run into the hundreds of billions.

-          Annual spending increases. The BNP has proposed at last another £30 bn of spending increases every year. The vast majority of that will go on the BNP’s anti immigration agenda, increasing the spending on border controls and creating a massive system of resettlement grants.

-          Tax cuts. The BNP’s twin tax breaks for the rich, raising the income and inheritance tax thresholds, will cost £28 bn. On top of this, the BNP has promised a further £25 bn of populist tax cuts – halving council tax, abolishing the BBC licence fee and car tax discs and getting rid of tuition fees.

-          Spending cuts. The BNP has proposed no new policies to close the deficit in the wake of the financial crisis. Instead they insist their old policies, mostly concentrated on stopping foreign aid, leaving the EU and ending the war in Afghanistan will be enough. We work out their savings at about £37 bn.

-          Tax raises. So how do the BNP plan to regain revenue? By increasing taxes on the poor – around £100 bn’s worth, the lion’s share being taken up by an £80 bn tariff.

-          The loss of Britain’s world leading industries. As we’ve previously discussed, the BNP’s plans to shut down our borders, make Britain’s minorities second class citizens and increase regulation and tariffs would send British industries fleeing from our economy. The results would be devastating to our economy: a massive drop in tax revenue, and increase in the welfare bill as more people signed onto the dole. Losing the financial services industry alone would cost £34 bn.

It’s not so much that there’s a black hole in the BNP’s spending plans, as massive uncertainty. Even if we ignored their one off spending commitments and the loss of British companies, their policies would only make up for half the deficit. That they raise that much is only possible due to their massive £80 bn tariff that would hit ordinary families hardest – but the real amount raised could easily be far, far less.

With no attempt to cost their policies, the BNP has no credibility on the economy and with no credibility on the economy, they have no credibility on any other policy either.

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[1] While due to the BNP’s own lack of precision in their policy these should be considered back of the envelope figures, there’ll be full details of our costing in our forthcoming report Britain Under the BNP

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The BNP wishes Britain to withdraw from all international institutions. We would leave the European Union, NATO and the World Trade Organisation, end foreign aid and retreat to a new era of isolationism (source, source).

There is nothing wrong with believing in national sovereignty. Nevertheless, the wider world is not just going to go away. Neither is every country outside British solely a threat, as the BNP seems to believe. By leaving Britain deserted in extreme isolationism they would succeed only in making us more vulnerable.

-          Leave Britain defenceless. Without NATO, America or Europe, the BNP’s policy would leave Britain without allies in an increasingly chaotic world.   We can’t ignore terrorism and hope it goes away. We can’t just close our eyes as other authoritarian regimes grow increasingly powerful.

-          Leave Britain voiceless. In today’s globalised world, issues such as the economy, environment and terror cross all national barriers. While the BNP plays on real worries about lost sovereignty in the EU, this doesn’t mean we can retreat from the world stage altogether. Britain would have no say over global trade deals or environmental regulation, no lender of last resort in the IMF, no means of fighting global crime. Instead, we would likely see a wave of retaliatory trade barriers, destroying our economy and any hope the BNP might have of restoring British manufacturing

-          Destroy Britain’s reputation. Britain’s reputation would be destroyed in the wake of a BNP government. The world would not look on kindly as we turned back on it, and the consequences would not just be loss of esteem. Our tourism trade would plummet, and few companies would want to do business here. There result would be a real loss of wealth and jobs in our country

-          Abandon our responsibility to the world. The BNP would abandon Afghanistan & Iraq to terror, end all foreign aid and forsake all international responsibilities. Unlike the BNP, normal Britons compassion extends beyond these borders.

Britain has a proud history, of promoting freedom and democracy in the world. An isolationist Britain would not have ended slavery, defeated Hitler or stopped the genocide in Kosovo.
The BNP claim to be patriotic, and yet seem both ashamed of our record as a world leader and afraid that we could not compete against other nations.

The truth is that our country is much stronger than the BNP give it credit for.

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The BNP’s would end all further immigration, expel all illegal immigrants, and encourage Britons of other ethnicities to migrate through a generous system of repatriation grants partially paid for by abolishing all foreign aid (source).

While the BNP’s policies would be disastrous for the whole of Britain, the worst victims of all would be Britain’s minorities.

The BNP claims that Britain’s new arrivals are the cause of all Britain’s problems, both economic and cultural.

Here’s why the BNP are wrong:

-          Immigration is one of the best ways we know to end poverty. Immigration the most direct way we know to raise the incomes of the world’s poor, and allow the ambitious and hard working in our world to make a better life for themselves.  A recent study estimated that immigrants to the US ended up $20,000 better off ^[1]. Moreover, migrations helps home countries too.  Remittances from migrants to their native countries total at least $200 billion, more than double the level of official government aid. According to the World Bank it can in some cases reduce the poverty rate by as much as a third.

-          Britain’s compassion doesn’t stop at the edge of its borders. While the BNP believes that anyone not born in Britain is worthless, the British people are one of the most generous on Earth. A country that in its millions supports Children in Need and Comic Relief is not going to want to abandon the poor in our world or shut down ourborders. While Britain has its own problems, we remain a rich country with an average income of £20,000, while a billion of the world’s peoples remain on less than a dollar a day.

-          Most of the BNP’s economic claims about immigration are myths. Empirical evidence shows that immigrants don’t take jobs, they don’t cut wages and they’re not a drain on our benefit system. In reality immigrants can be a complement to British workers, not a substitute, doing the jobs that there simply aren’t enough British people who can or want to do. Most new residents are not entitled to any benefits, and those that do travel here tend to be young, hard working, without dependents and past the age of education.

-          The BNP would make life for minorities a living hell. For those ethnic minorities who remained in Britain, there’d be the constant knowledge of who their government was and the uncertainty when they’d be kicked out. Their children would be sent to schools where their friends were brainwashed into believing racial tolerance was wrong. They’d be pushed to the back of queue for public services, and branded as second class citizens.

Britain is an open, welcoming country that has always lead the world in the fight against bigotry and racism.  The BNP’s apartheid regime would be a betrayal of everything we stand for.

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[1] http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR854/

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