Nigel Farage is an economic car-crash waiting to happen

The Reform leader makes Liz Truss seem like a fiscal genius.

Nigel Farage likes to portray himself as a man of common sense. A proper bloke.

I’ve always thought this was pretty offensive towards the people he was trying to associate with. After all, ‘common sense’ in the lexicon of Nigel Farage has always been a synonym for ignorant, narrow-minded, and xenophobic.

So it was again proven yesterday, when the Reform leader made a big speech on the economy. Returning from (another) week abroad, Farage presented his plan: £80 billion worth of tax cuts and spending hikes.

Someone should tell Farage that calculators and Châteauneuf-du-Pape don’t mix, because his sums are clearly drunk.

He claimed that his New Deal could be funded by cancelling climate policies, scrapping government diversity schemes, and bulldozing ‘Quangos’ (as though no right-wing government has ever thought of that before).

Farage’s plan is bad – so bad that it’s arguable whether burning down the Bank of England would actually make more economic sense.

To take just one example, the net zero industry (that Farage wants to dismantle) is growing at three times the rate of the rest of the economy. Our fossil fuel reserves are dwindling, and being exposed to energy imports that can be switched-off by mad dictators is never a good idea – as the last few years have demonstrated.

But even more disturbing is that Farage tried to justify his incoherent economics by appealing, once again, to ‘common sense’. No government ever gets its sums right, he claimed, so why should he even maintain the pretence?

“You could probably argue that at no point in the history of any government has anybody thought that their numbers added up,” he claimed – a completely bonkers statement when you see it written down.

To put it more politely, Farage showed a fatal misunderstanding of how the economy works – on both a practical and a ‘common sense’ level. (Although coming from the man who orchestrated Brexit, I suppose that’s no surprise).

I’m an investigative journalist and current affairs writer who specialises in exposing dark money and radical right-wing ecosystems.

Carole Cadwalladr: “I’ve been really impressed by Sam’s work – persistently finding story after story exposing wrongdoing and hypocrisy at the highest level. A name to watch!”

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Ordinary people understand that your sums have to add up. You can’t invent an alternate economic reality simply through the power of your own ego. Even Donald Trump can attest to that.

That’s why Margaret Thatcher’s appeals to ‘credit card economics’ were so successful – despite also being couched on flimsy economics. People know from their own bitter experience what can happen when their finances spiral out of control.

People want good public services – they want to see infrastructure investment and the renationalisation of utility companies that have ripped off the taxpayers for too long. But – crucially – they want to see a convincing argument for how it’s all going to be paid for, preferably involving the taxation of the super-ruch.

And while Farage’s pitch will seem unconvincing to ordinary voters, it will seem totally deluded to the people who (for better or worse) run the economy.

Farage’s fag-packet arithmetic will be reduced to ash when it’s digested by the market. His City background won’t save him from the hedge fund hounds who will maul the British economy as soon as he enters Downing Street. Someone who’s received advice from Liz Truss should surely know that. Her economic black hole, a paltry £45 billion, looks like an accounting error compared to Farage’s fiscal oblivion.

In many ways I don’t like this state of affairs. I don’t like how a bunch of pinstriped pirates in the City of London can torpedo a government because it doesn’t follow their economic consensus. Any left-wing administration hoping to rewire the economy in favour of greater redistribution and public investment would likely suffer a similar fate to Truss and Farage.

But fundamentally the market would be correct to bet against Farage’s reckless agenda. He’s not following an ideology or even the fragments of a sane economic hypothesis. He’s just randomly throwing money at key demographics in the hope that he can buy their ballot at the next election – regardless of the damage wrought after the vote.

As I’ve written recently, Farage is more similar to Boris Johnson than a lot of people (Farage included) would like to admit. They both pursue political fame but detest the hard work that accompanies actual policy-making. They are personalities, not politicians.

Farage will be hoping that he can be carried to Number 10 using the same bad maths that spewed out the Leave campaign’s £350 million-a-week nonsense. The problem is – as in the case of Boris Johnson – the media may very well let him.

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About me

I’m an investigative journalist and current affairs writer who has worked with the New York Times, the Guardian, the Mirror, the New European, Novara Media, New Statesman, Led By Donkeys, and others.

I specialise in exposing dark money and radical right-wing ecosystems, and I’m probably best known for my stories revealing the billions in PPE contracts awarded to Tory friends and donors during the pandemic. I was the first journalist to expose the £100 million+ contracts awarded to Michelle Mone’s firm, PPE Medpro.

I’m the author of two books: Fortress London, and Bullingdon Club Britain.

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