“The impact of Brexit is severe and long lasting,” said Chancellor Rachel Reeves yesterday. The economic fallout from Britain’s decision to leave the EU is, she indicated, one of the main reasons that tax rises and spending cuts are on the table for next month’s Budget.
This is a clear shift in strategy from a government that has long tiptoed round Brexit, for fear of losing its Red Wall supporters. Putting the issue front and centre of its economic analysis, and using it to attack Nigel Farage and Reform, has been welcomed by many in the Labour Party, including cabinet ministers. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “I’m glad Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak”.
“Economically, Brexit has not been good for us,” Jonathan Brash, MP for Leave-voting Hartlepool told Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. We should “look at the facts”. The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that Brexit has reduced “long-term productivity” in the UK economy by 4%.
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As Reeves talks of “undoing some of that damage”, the marked shift in messaging from fellow government figures is “part of a larger Labour strategy to take on Reform” over Farage’s role in Brexit, said The Spectator’s Steerpike column. Keir Starmer wants to argue that “Farage used ‘easy sloganeering’” during the referendum campaign but “didn’t have a plan” for afterwards. With this “attack line”, he can say Reform offers “quick fixes rather than thought-through policy proposals” and, he hopes, “persuade voters to come back to the reds”.
“Farage is as guilty as fellow Leaver Boris Johnson,” said The Mirror’s associate editor Kevin Maguire. He and Reform “these days rarely talk about Brexit” because he “mis-sold” it “as El Dorado”, and “no Brexit champion, particularly Farage, is worthy of high office after proving so conclusively wrong on such a seismic issue”.
Blaming Farage is “effectively attacking the largest democratic decision ever made by the British electorate”, said former Tory MP and Reform supporter Jacob Rees-Mogg in The Telegraph. “Too scared to accuse the voters themselves of getting it wrong, Labour attacks one of Brexit’s main protagonists, implying that he gulled foolish voters into doing something that was not in their interest.”
Pointing the finger at Farage “also risks re-energising the two-fingers to Westminster attitude that swung the Leave vote in 2016”, said The i Paper’s Donaldson. Reform will say that Farage may have campaigned for Brexit “but it was the Tories who implemented it” and it’s now Labour seeking to undermine it. “I don’t think voters in places like mine see Brexit as a mistake at all; they see it as unfinished business,” Reform’s deputy leader of Durham County Council Darren Grimes told Donaldson.
What next?
“Brexit was only ever going to be a blank canvas,” said Ross Clark in The Sun. “Of itself, it promised neither economic success or failure” but simply gave Britain the chance to “make its own economic policies and negotiate its own trade deals”.
But the Brexit benefits are hard to see, and increased export costs and new EU border checks for travellers mean that even those without an “emotional connection” to the European project “experience a sense of irritation at barriers to their pleasures or their profits having been erected against their will”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times.
The latest YouGov poll on Brexit shows that just 31% of the public now believe it was the right decision to leave the EU.
