Starmer has found Farage’s weak spot — and it is Trussonomics

Is Keir Starmer rattled? Labour’s high command has been openly saying for some time now that they see Nigel Farage as their main enemy. The prime minister’s speech in St Helens on Thursday was only the latest salvo in what he sees as a presidential contest between him and the leader of Reform. I have argued before that there are dangers for Starmer in being quite so explicit about the strategy.

It makes it look as if he is “running scared”, as Farage says. It looks as if Farage is dictating the agenda. But worse than that, it makes it look as if some of Starmer’s policies are not sincere. It looks as if his tough talk on immigration is simply designed to position himself against the Farage onslaught.

Feeding the perception among Labour MPs and party members that Starmer is moving to the right in order to fend off the threat from a politician they despise does nothing to quell the rebelliousness.

Most of Starmer’s policy decisions may be right in their own terms, but because the prime minister has travelled all the way to northwest England to make a speech responding to Farage’s news conference on Tuesday, it looks as if Labour is being pushed around by a party that has only five MPs. Starmer may be right to want to reduce immigration from the 739,000 a year he inherited from Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. He may be right to want to restore the winter fuel payment to some hard-pressed pensioners.

He may even be right to consider lifting the two-child benefit cap — although today all that he would say was that he was “determined that we are going to drive down child poverty”. But in each case, he risks looking as if he is trying to appease Farage.

Still, if you are going to take on Farage, you might as well do it effectively. Labour’s initial response to the Reform leader’s news conference calling for the lifting of the two-child limit struck the wrong note. It called him a privately educated stockbroker, as if either aspect of his personal history should automatically disqualify him from seeking working-class votes. Starmer repeated that mistake in his speech on Thursday, saying that, “unlike Nigel Farage, I know what it is like” to not know if the bills can be paid. The prime minister said that his father went to work in a factory every day of his life. None of that matters. The voters think that Sir Keir KC is posh and that Farage, who goes shooting and owns a fishing boat, is a man of the people. But Starmer devoted most of his speech to the correct attack on Farage: one that will make the voters stop and think. He pointed out that Farage’s policies are a more extreme form of Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. Raising the income tax threshold to £20,000 a year is a huge unfunded tax cut.

“Liz Truss’s fantasy economics crashed the economy. My government was elected to fix the mess,” he said. This is not true: Truss herself appointed Jeremy Hunt as chancellor to fix the mess, which he did. The Labour government was elected on impossible promises to make life better without raising taxes. But everyone knows what he means. “Now Nigel Farage wants to repeat her mistake. You can’t trust him with your job, your mortgage, your pension, your bills, or your future.”

He is right about that, and if he is going to take Farage head-on, that is the way to do it. Many voters rate Farage higher than Starmer on many qualities, but they do not think that Farage is prime ministerial. His appearance at a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas on Thursday will not help him in that respect. His ally Donald Trump might get away with his crypto scam in America, but that is not the kind of thing that goes down well in working men’s clubs in the North and Midlands. Starmer is on to something with the Truss comparison. Farage praised the mini-Budget as the “best Conservative Budget since 1986” (he may have meant Nigel Lawson’s 1988 Budget, which cut taxes for the rich), and Truss has clearly explored the possibility of defecting to Reform, even if Farage would not be foolish enough to accept her application.

Everyone knows that Farage’s numbers do not add up. On Tuesday he read out a list of measures that a Reform government would take to raise vast sums of money. The first and biggest was £45bn a year from abolishing the net zero target, a figure that he attributed to the Institute for Government, the earnest think tank devoted to better administration. This was nonsense. Climate change policies cost about £6bn a year, according to the Climate Change Committee, whose work has been quoted by the Institute for Government. Farage tried to say in his defence, “At no point in the history of any form of government has anybody ever thought the numbers added up,” but his numbers are in a different league – the Truss premier league – of not adding up. And the country did receive a sharp reminder in September 2022 of what happens when the markets take fright. Is Starmer rattled? Undoubtedly. But is this the best way for him to fight back? Again the answer is yes.