At last they have found it. Or, at least, they think they have. Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have been hunting around for months trying to find Nigel Farage’s Achilles’ heel. While they have been searching, the popularity of the Reform party has soared ahead of that of their own parties. But now, finally, they reckon to have identified the weak spot.
In their shared enthusiasm, they both described Reform’s emerging tax plans as ‘fantasy economics’. Starmer gave the bemused workers at a glass factory a seven-minute harangue about it, declaring Reform’s plans a ‘mad experiment’. Badenoch fumed that ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s “magic money tree” is back’ with a Reform sticker on it.
It is true that Reform has been promising tax cuts galore without appearing to offer commensurate spending reductions. So it is legitimate to ask whether they can be afforded. Is there such a thing as ‘Nigenomics’ and, if so, what does it consist of? Is it a good thing or a dangerous gamble?
City firm Panmure Liberum recently put the size of the gap between the spending commitments and the spending cuts – if they were put in place at the same time – at £80 billion a year.
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