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Reform UK has begun accepting donations in cryptocurrency, as the rightwing party announced plans to allow virtual currencies to be used as a form of tax payment.
“Over the next few decades, we’re going to get HM Revenue & Customs to allow people to pay their taxes in crypto,” party chair Zia Yusuf said on Friday.
Speaking at breakfast hosted at the Shard building in central London, he vowed that a future Reform government would aim to set up a sovereign wealth fund comprised of crypto assets.
Yusuf said the party’s plan to normalise the use of bitcoin was part of a wider strategy to attract younger voters. “We don’t see anything to suggest that bitcoin isn’t moving towards parity with gold in the eyes of particularly younger generations,” he said.
Addressing a cryptocurrency conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, Reform leader Nigel Farage said his party would lower the capital gains tax rate for crypto assets from 24 per cent today to 10 per cent, while creating a national bitcoin reserve at the Bank of England to stockpile crypto assets.
Farage’s highly publicised endorsement of cryptocurrencies will be widely seen as an effort to style himself in the image of US President Donald Trump in a field where there are few high-profile figureheads in Britain.
Ahead of the US election in November, Trump had promised to preserve US Treasury reserves of crypto and protect digital currency and exchange companies from unfair penalisation, positioning himself as the champion of the industry.
“Whatever your views on President Trump, he is president of the mightiest economy in the world, and where the US goes, others generally follow,” Yusuf said.
He claimed that the party’s plan to slash capital gains tax on crypto assets by more than half would increase the tax revenue to the Treasury by nearly 400 per cent, from about £220mn today to up to £1bn.
This would be achieved by incentivising more assets to be brought into the UK and because of increased compliance with the tax regime, he noted.
Yusuf added that a Reform government would “like to cut corporation tax” but that this would be done “in the right sequential order”. He said the party would eliminate the budget for foreign aid, which “still sits at £15bn”.
“I think the country should aspire to do foreign aid but it’s impossible to justify sending money to India . . . while many Welsh children still live in poverty and the educational attainment of Welsh 13-year-olds is below the OECD average. I think that’s unconscionable,” he said.
He also defended a speech made by Farage on Tuesday that outlined policies to make savings that would pay for huge tax cuts, which critics said had been exaggerated.
One of Farage’s most contested claims was that he would cut about £45bn in spending on net zero to fund his pledge to raise the income tax allowance from £12,570 to £20,000, at a cost of between £50bn and £80bn.
Yusuf said about the cuts to net zero spending: “You can argue about the numbers, is it 15, is it 30, is it 45, but it will save billions of pounds and it will cut our energy prices.”
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer of the Labour party has already pledged to cut about £6bn from the aid budget from 2027, taking it to £9bn, and there is no evidence to suggest the UK government is spending £45bn on net zero.
Yusuf said Reform’s proposed package of spending cuts amounted to £78bn, which included eliminating the UK’s foreign aid budget.
