By Alistair Smout
LONDON (Reuters) -Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that Nigel Farage would crash the economy if his Reform UK party ever won power, describing his tax and spending plans as a fantasy in a speech attacking the man who has become Labour’s chief threat in the polls.
Starmer’s Labour Party suffered a bruising set of local election results earlier this month after less than a year in power, losing ground to Reform, which also now leads national opinion polls.
Farage has pitched a right-wing agenda of lowering immigration and cutting taxes, while also courting workers who may have become disaffected with Labour over Starmer’s efforts to cut public spending.
But Starmer said Farage’s economic plan was similar to that of former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, who resigned in October 2022 after less than two months in power when her ‘mini budget’ of unfunded tax cuts sent markets into a tailspin.
“We were elected to fix that mess,” Starmer said of Truss’s economic legacy on Thursday.
“Now in government, we are once again fighting the same fantasy – this time from Farage. The same bet in the same casino: that you can spend tens of billions of pounds in tax cuts, without a proper way of paying for it.”
Farage, one of Britain’s most recognisable politicians, was only elected to parliament for the first time last year, when Reform won five seats.
But he has spent more than a decade campaigning from outside the mainstream of British politics, forcing successive governments to shift policies on Europe and immigration out of a fear his populist appeal could turn voters against them.
(Reporting by Alistair Smout, editing by William James)
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