Nigel Farage will press Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey to cut interest rates during their first formal meeting at the Bank’s Threadneedle Street headquarters on Thursday. Mr Bailey reached out to arrange the meeting with Mr Farage and Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, reported The Times, a sign of how engaged senior figures in Whitehall and the City have become with the party’s economic platform.
Mr Farage intends to urge the monetary policy committee to loosen policy in order to stimulate growth after the committee this month voted to keep the base rate unchanged at 4%. The Reform UK leader has been a frequent critic of Mr Bailey, in the past accusing him of pursuing closer ties with the EU and being part of the “same old failed establishment” that is “still in charge and the country gets poorer.” He has argued that lower borrowing costs would help households and businesses and lift anaemic growth.
The Clacton MP is also expected to press Mr Bailey on cryptocurrency policy. According to the material supplied, he believes the Bank is behaving like “dinosaurs” over what he has described as the “crypto-revolution” and has urged it to store bitcoin in a strategic reserve.
Mr Tice, a property developer by background and Reform UK’s deputy leader, is set to challenge the Bank over its quantitative-easing programme and related market interventions. He has previously claimed publicly about the effects of QE and central bank balance-sheet policies.
Mr Bailey has signalled that the economy has weakened because consumers are spending less.
He said: “People are being quite cautious at the moment. Of course, that affects spending, so that has an effect on the state of the economy because there isn’t as much.
“People aren’t going out as much; they’re not shopping as much; they’re not going out to restaurants and so on as much; that affects the overall state [of the] economy.”
Official figures have underlined the challenge: retail sales remain below pre-pandemic levels, with the Office for National Statistics reporting sales last month were 2.1% below February 2020 — a reminder of the fragility behind the political rows.
Reform UK has led most national polls since April and is being taken increasingly seriously by the City, while senior Whitehall figures have begun to engage directly.
Markets, meanwhile, expect the Bank to keep the base rate on hold through the remainder of the year as it wrestles with persistent inflation and fragile demand.
