It’s time to call out Farage on his vague, uncosted pledges

Apparently, there’s a debate going on in the upper echelons of the Labour government about what to do about Nigel Farage. Not a moment too soon, you might say.

- SEAN O'GRADY

The choice, as it's been posited by Labour insiders, is whether to “confront” or “deflect” Reform UK. Farage's populist insurgency has picked up lots of local councils, won a by-election - just - and settled in the opinion polls around 25 to 30 per cent ahead of Labour. Not so long ago, it was an unthinkable situation.

Something similar has been going on in the Conservative camp since they lost the general election, and, as we see, it seems the immediate answer to their version of the Farage-ist challenge is to reshuffle the shadow cabinet, bring back James Cleverly, and let Kemi Badenoch have some more time. They can't work out if they want to collaborate with Farage or confront him.

Both parties actually show signs of appeasing him and aping his policies, from welfare to refugees. It's not good.

It's worth reminding the mainstream parties what happened last time they were too fastidious to take an ascendant Farage down, which was the Brexit referendum campaign. It was, as it still is, incredibly time-consuming and tiresome to have to fact-check every vague promise and extravagant claim Farage comes out with, and the easiest thing is just to call him an extremist/populist/fascist/xenophobe/racist or whatever and try to ignore him. Well, we all know what happens. As Farage himself might say: “They're not laughing now!”

Much the same less forgivably - goes for the media. Not that it's an easy job trying to verify whatever casual claims Farage comes out with in real time, but it means he tends to go unchallenged.

Take his appearance on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show. He claimed, off the top of his head, that cancelling net zero an amorphous concept, in any case would save some £30bn a year, and said that “even” the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), “a tool of the establishment”, said so.