Why blaming Farage for tax hike may backfire on Starmer

The real reason, though, is probably that people in Downing Street and the Treasury are desperate.

- JOHN RENTOUL

They know that the Budget is going to be bad - and possibly career-ending for the chancellor. Maybe even the prime minister, too. So they are floating all kinds of unlikely ideas in the hope that one of them might work in making next month's medicine more palatable to the voters.

Starmer and Rachel Reeves are “expected to argue” that Nigel Farage and Brexit are to blame for the tax rises in the Budget, according to The Times. The reasoning goes that a large part of the shortfall in the public finances comes from a downgrade in the forecast productivity of the British economy, and that this is because the negative effects of leaving the EU single market are greater than previously thought.

Therefore, as The Times puts it, Farage is responsible for putting up your taxes “as the man who delivered Brexit with ‘easy sloganeering’ then walked away from the aftermath”.

That is not going to work. It may be a form of wish-fulfilment for some passionate Remainers who want Farage to pay for what they regard as the disaster of Brexit, but even they, if they are honest about it, would have to admit that the logic is faulty.