Richard Tice: Reform UK leader says he wants to wipe Tories out at polls

Reform UK leader Richard Tice has said he is on a mission to ensure the Conservatives “never have a majority government again”.

Reform – the new name for the Brexit Party – is currently polling at about 7%, putting it neck-and-neck with the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.

At a New Year press conference in London, Mr Tice said Britain had been “broken” by 12 years of Tory rule.

And he claimed his party offered “bold, brave solutions”.

It came hours before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out his priorities for the year ahead, including cutting NHS waiting times and inflation, and making maths lessons compulsory until the age of 18 in England. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer will be making a speech on Thursday.

Reform UK, which currently has no MPs, says it plans to field candidates in every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales at the next election, which must take place by January 2025.

Mr Tice, who took over as leader from Nigel Farage, told the press conference both the Conservatives and Labour had run out of ideas to fix “broken Britain”.

And he ruled out any electoral pacts with the Tories, telling reporters he still had “scars on my back” from the Brexit Party’s 2019 decision not to field candidates against the Conservatives in 317 seats, after Boris Johnson promised to leave the EU by the end of 2020.

“I think the Tory Party… deserve to be smashed and destroyed given what they’ve done to the country,” he told reporters.

He said he was in regular contact with Nigel Farage, who he said was on “great form”, but sidestepped a question about whether the one-time UKIP leader would return to the political fray at the next election.

He also declined to say how many candidates Reform UK would be fielding at May’s local elections – or how many members the party has, although he claimed it was growing,

Asked if he was talking to any Conservative MPs about possible defections to his party, he told reporters: “I couldn’t possibly comment.”

Mr Tice conceded that his party’s hopes of gaining a foothold on power at Westminster depended on the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system being scrapped, something he claimed was “only three years away”.

He cited a recent vote in favour of proportional representation at the Labour party conference as evidence of this, although it has yet to be adopted as policy by leader Sir Keir Starmer.

Asked if that meant his party’s hopes effectively rested on the election of a Labour government, Mr Tice said: “The more people that vote for Reform, the more the pressure will be on getting proportional representation.”

He said Reform UK would be targeting Labour voters as well as disaffected Tories and former UKIP supporters at the next election.

But he added: “I genuinely think we are seeing the dying days of potentially the last majority Tory government in my lifetime. I am 58. And, frankly, that’s what I hope for.”

Asked if he was on a mission to destroy the Tory Party, he said: “I want to completely reshape politics in the UK.”

Reform’s policies include a plan to lift the starting rate of income tax to £20,000, to be paid for by “cutting government waste”.

Reform is also promising to cut NHS waiting lists to zero within two years, with greater use of private healthcare operations, at a cost of £30bn.

It says this can be paid for by stopping the Bank of England paying interest to commercial banks on reserves from its Quantitative Easing programme, among other financial moves.

The party also campaigns for a crackdown on legal and illegal immigration and wants to restart fracking and coal mining in the UK and increase North Sea oil and gas production.

Mr Tice denied his economic policies would be met with a similar reaction to Liz Truss’s ill-fated tax cutting plans, arguing that the short-lived Tory PM had not explained to the markets how her policies would be paid for.