Reform UK leader hits out at Brussels for “50 years of endless red tape”
Nigel Farage vowed to use Brexit freedoms to make life easier for Britain’s small businesses as he hit out at EU red tape. The Reform UK leader pledged to cut rules and regulations as he made his pitch to small and medium-sized business owners.
Speaking at a press conference in central London today, Mr Farage said the UK had faced “50 years of endless red tape” from Brussels. The Brexiteer said: “Some of it would have been regulations, rules, we sensibly might have put in place ourselves.
“But it’s actually a double problem. It isn’t just the EU rulebook, big problem though that is, it is the massive overinterpretation of that rulebook by regulators, by quangos, by bureaucrats in this country.
“And you speak to people out there working in all sorts of businesses and the regulators aren’t there to work with business, their culture is to work against business.
“I do think that the EU, its rules and regs, but I also think the way Tony Blair fundamentally changed the way the country’s run by taking enormous power away from elected ministers and politicians and handing it over to quangos and regulators, has made the life of small businesses much, much harder.”
The Clacton MP made the comments as he launched the insurgent party’s new group, Small Business for Reform.
Mr Farage said: “We get it. I’ve been in business, I’ve run my own businesses, as many of my colleagues have, as thousands of our members have.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage (Image: Getty)
He said Labour has “absolutely no comprehension of what it’s like” to set up and run a small business and warned the Government “only listens to big business”
The Reform leader said: “Some on the left will tell you ‘the economy is failing because capitalism is failing’.
“No. We’re not living in capitalism, we’re living in an age of global corporatism. We’re living in an age where the big businesses virtually control and own the political arena.”
A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Nigel Farage will say anything to get a headline, but Reform’s current plans would be a disaster for small businesses.
“Farage would rip up Labour’s deal with the EU leaving small businesses drowning in red tape, and his war on clean energy jobs would see SMEs in the energy sector and wider supply chain shut down across the country. Reform are not on the side of business or ordinary working people.”
