3 days ago
Farage and the prophets of doom have got Britain wrong
There's not much that unites Nigel Farage and Rachel Reeves, but on one thing the leader of Reform UK and Labour's Chancellor of the Exchequer do seem to agree on is that Britain is in the most ghastly, possibly even existential, mess.
Farage talks of 'societal collapse' while Reeves complains of the 'worst economic inheritance' since the Second World War.
Not that they are talking from the same page. These two doom-laden narratives are obviously instructed by very different motives.
For Farage, it's about playing on voter discontent to cement his party's surge in the polls. He's got plenty of material to draw on – seemingly broken public services, failure to address popular concerns on immigration, spiralling public debt, and more than a decade of stagnant living standards, to name but some of them.
For Reeves, it's about getting her excuses in early, and seeking to blame the previous government for any disappointment there might be in her own. Already it's wearing a bit thin. A year into government, and it's pretty clear that she has made matters worse, not better.
The public seems to agree. In a recent Ipsos poll, some 68pc of respondents said they thought economic conditions would get worse over the next 12 months, against just 12pc who thought they would improve.
This is the most downbeat such finding one year after the election of a new government Ipsos has ever recorded.
You have to go all the way back to Mrs Thatcher's first government in 1980 – when unemployment was soaring and vast swathes of British industry were being closed down – to find anything remotely comparable.
Rarely have people felt so pessimistic. Britain is widely said to be a 'tinderbox' awaiting its final inferno. It is common to talk of some fast approaching societal and economic apocalypse, a deadly reckoning in which the true awfulness of the nation's circumstances will be violently exposed.
Is this perception well founded? No it is not, though it is certainly true that it might become so without corrective action. But the doomsters are disingenuously overegging it.
That the British economy is in a particularly tight spot is not in doubt. Inflation is proving more persistent in the UK than the US and much of the rest of Europe, and after years of abundance, the labour market is plainly stalling.
