Is Keir Starmer right to give any attention to Nigel Farage?

After Nigel Farage’s keynote speech, Reform’s policies have been dismissed by Keir Starmer as “Liz Truss all over again”. It shows Labour is taking the challenge from Reform UK more and more seriously, and that the main electoral threat to Labour hegemony right now comes not from Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives but from Farage’s latest vehicle for an “insurgency”.

Yet neither Labour nor the Tories seem to have the full measure of Farage.

It’s not as bad as that, because at least Farage recognises – as the former premier still does not – that her disastrous mistake wasn’t so much in her radical tax cuts (unrealistic as they turned out to be) but that she failed to balance them with credible plans to cut spending.

Farage explicitly said this, and offered up cuts in government spending on net zero (the bulk of the “savings”); migrant hostels and other accommodation; diversity, equity and inclusion; and general “waste” as the way to pay for his plans. These, he suggested, would pay for enhanced child benefit, incentives for people to marry and have families, restore the pensioners’ winter fuel payment, raise the threshold for the higher rate of income tax, and – most ambitious of all – take everyone with an income of less than £20,000 out of tax liability altogether.

Yes. Even though Farage’s plan does better than Truss’s mini-Budget in attempting to balance the books, independent experts say it would still blow a gigantic Truss-sized hole in the public finances. Truss scheduled about £45bn in unfunded tax cuts in September 2022, ie, extra borrowing; and the Farage plan implies something like a £50bn to £100bn increase in the budget deficit, which would be the largest in peacetime. Besides that, there is some doubt about whether the cuts to net zero would be as large as claimed, even allowing for the abandonment of the net zero target and the fate of the planet. At various points, Farage has also indicated or given the impression that he’d like to abolish inheritance tax and non-dom taxation, freeze council tax and fuel duty, and subsidise everything from the steel industry to farming. It really does not add up.

Yes. But because immigration has become so toxic, Starmer chose not to attack Reform’s other net zero” policy – no new net migration. The economic impact of that would be to exacerbate labour shortages, push wages higher, cut economic growth and reduce overall living standards.

Reversing the latest Brexit reset, as Farage implies, would also hurt exports and the economy, while the drive to take back all the UK’s fishing rights might well provoke a trade war with the EU, an even more damaging outcome. Farage’s plan to replace the NHS – broken by underfunding and understaffing made worse by Brexit – is underdeveloped, to put it mildly, and a huge vulnerability given his prime demographic of older, less-well-off voters. They, after all, rely on the NHS to keep them going.

For the most part, they couldn’t pay the private health premiums, and even if they could, they wouldn’t be covered for existing conditions, dementia or cancers. Ageing Fargeistes would find using the defunded rump “safety net” NHS and what passes for a Reform UK social care system an uncomfortable experience. There’s also the small matter of Brexit, his proudest boast, yet, paradoxically, regarded even by some of his own voters as a monumental flop. It’s also very much a one-man band: could Reform UK form a remotely competent government? Is the UK really ready for Lee Anderson to be home secretary?

Labour tried that, implying he was a cranky, if malign, irrelevance – and it failed. At 30 per cent or so in the polls and the stunning successes in the local elections and the Runcorn by-election, Farage can no longer be dismissed as a fringe irritation. Because the Tories are yet to recover, and the Lib Dems and Greens tend not to operate in “their” areas, Reform is certainly the fortunate and obvious receptacle for protest votes against a prematurely unpopular Labour government. As the election approaches – it is three to four years away – the government should regain some support if the economy recovers; the same goes for the Tories, as they claim that only they can defeat the Labour Party.

True as that is, it would also provide Reform with plenty of opportunities to build momentum and win power in more councils, as well as devolved administrations. Winning in more Labour strongholds would certainly be welcome to Farage, whose basic strategy would seem to be trying to recreate the coalition of voters that Boris Johnson persuaded to vote for him to “get Brexit done” in 2019.

The last prime minister who had to take on the Farage challenge was David Cameron, who thought an in/out referendum on EU membership would shut Farage up for good. Cameron’s complacency ended his career and helped destroy his party. The most painful irony was (and is) that Brexit so damaged the economy that it created multiple new grievances for Farage to exploit to his advantage, crippling Conservative and Labour administrations alike. Badenoch and Starmer can’t decide whether to ape Farage or attack him.

Like most populists, Farage is slippery. Facts and figures from experts are dismissed as “project fear” (as in the Brexit referendum), and he amplifies voters’ natural anti-political, anti-establishment tendencies to pose as an “outsider” fighting against some malign conspiracy. Even when he is exaggerating, he says “they are lying to you”, and because promises inevitably get broken when in government, it strikes a chord.

Responsible journalism is derided as “fake news” – he takes lots of lessons from the unlikely success of Trump in the US. He is not above using dog whistle tactics. Farage is indisputably good at campaigning, but he is eminently beatable, if only Labour and the Conservatives could regain their political touch.