Snog, marry, avoid... how best to handle the populists

After Nigel Farage’s keynote speech, Reform’s policies have been dismissed by Keir Starmer as “Liz Truss all over again”.

- SEAN O'GRADY

It shows Labour is taking the challenge from Reform UK more and more seriously, and that the main electoral threat to Labour hegemony right now comes not from Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives but from Farage’s latest vehicle for an “insurgency”.

Yet neither Labour nor the Tories seem to have the full measure of Farage.

Is Reform UK just ‘Liz Truss all over again’?

It’s not as bad as that, because at least Farage recognises – as the former premier still does not – that her disastrous mistake wasn’t so much in her radical tax cuts (unrealistic as they turned out to be) but that she failed to balance them with credible plans to cut spending.

Farage explicitly said this, and offered up cuts in government spending on net zero (the bulk of the “savings”); migrant hostels and other accommodation; diversity, equity and inclusion; and general “waste” as the way to pay for his plans. These, he suggested, would pay for enhanced child benefit, incentives for people to marry and have families, restore the pensioners’ winter fuel payment, raise the threshold for the higher rate of income tax, and – most ambitious of all – take everyone with an income of less than £20,000 out of tax liability altogether.

So, is Starmer right?