3 days ago
Farage has copied the Corbyn playbook on tax and spend
Last week, Sir Keir Starmer rightly described Nigel Farage's policies as ' fantasy economics '.
It's a term I've used myself in recent weeks to characterise Reform's cavalier approach to the public finances – but calling it out isn't enough.
We must also confront where this recklessness leads and take responsibility for offering something better.
Reform's economic platform is not just implausible – it's dangerous. Their proposals combine sweeping tax cuts with huge new spending commitments. It simply doesn't add up.
Take their pledge to raise the personal allowance by £7,500. That alone would cost more than the entire defence budget.
Their manifesto also promised huge tax cuts for businesses on top, which they themselves said would cost £18 billion a year and the Institute for Fiscal Studies said would cost more than double that.
Farage claims these measures can be funded by scrapping net zero, citing figures from a report whose authors have rubbished Reform's interpretation of their analysis.
This isn't a plan – it's a Farage mirage.
Pursuing it would lead to higher borrowing, rising interest rates, and a collapse in the UK's credibility with global markets. That credibility underpins investment and financial stability for households up and down the country, as well as the government's ability to finance itself.
Once it's gone, it's very difficult to recover. It's something I warned about when I was chairman of the Treasury select committee just a few years ago.
Be in no doubt, what Reform is offering is a new version of the old Corbynist playbook. High rhetoric, no realism, and no viable path to delivery.
But while Reform's pitch to the country is fundamentally unserious, Labour's Government is falling into similar traps. Sir Keir may criticise Farage's economics, but his Chancellor's figures don't hold up either.
A Tin Foil Chancellor
Rachel Reeves changed her fiscal rules – something she previously said she wouldn't do – to allow her to borrow hundreds of billions more over the course of this parliament. Already in the last financial year, public borrowing came out more than 70 per cent higher than was planned in the last Conservative budget.
And after loosening her fiscal rules she is then constantly teetering on the edge of breaking them, which is why she was forced into an emergency Budget in March.
She left herself no space for manoeuvre and now her own cabinet colleagues, frustrated backbenchers and Labour's union paymasters are all circling like sharks. We know Labour looks set to reverse the two-child benefit cap – another U-turn, which would cost the taxpayer £3.5 billion in extra welfare spending.
The Chancellor is proving totally unable to keep a grip on the public finances while continuing to cosplay as an ' Iron Chancellor '. Our Tin Foil Chancellor cannot claim to have balanced the books and brought stability when she has set us on a path to substantially higher debt, with all the interest payments that go with it.
