Chancellor Rachel Reeves has accused Reform UK leader Nigel Farage of wanting to keep children in poverty based on their skin colour, after he opposed lifting the two-child benefit cap for families not born in the UK. Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Reeves said Farage's comments made her 'pretty angry' and questioned what kind of country he thinks Britain is.
Farage told a press conference on Wednesday that his party would vote against scrapping the two-child limit, having previously suggested he could back the change. He said he was concerned it would 'benefit huge numbers of foreign-born people'. Reeves responded by saying the comments implied some families deserved to have children in poverty based on ethnicity.
'Does Nigel Farage want to go around and say: White? Yeah, you can have the money. Black? No, I'm sorry, it's not for you,' Reeves said. She added that a mother who works in the NHS and has lived in the UK all her life but was born elsewhere should not be treated differently from a neighbour born in the UK.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer will champion the lifting of the cap on a visit to Bedfordshire on Thursday, calling the opposition from Reform and the Conservatives a 'child poverty pact'. Labour analysis suggests Farage's proposal to only give additional benefits to households with two working parents born in the UK would help just 3,700 families – less than 1% of those affected by the two-child limit.
Reeves said the government would not shy away from using the measure to win back progressive voters. 'There's 550,000 kids at the end of this parliament who are going to be growing up in a house without mould, where the mum and the kids are going to be able to afford to eat,' she said. 'If anyone thinks that that is not worth voting for then I don't know what is.'
