The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is currently rolling the pitch, ready for her widely anticipated statement in November, which will explicitly blame Farage and Brexit for the coming tax rises that break Labour's pre-election pledges. She told Sky News this week that the Office of Budget Responsibility have “consistently overestimated” the UK’s productivity, pointing to the impact of “austerity, Brexit and the ongoing impact of Liz Truss’s mini budget.” Nobody should be shocked, so it's hard to see what the government is worried about and why it has been so tentative. Of the three reasons she is using to excuse the tax increases, one is absolutely central to reversing the other two.
This is the key part of her Sky interview:
Brexit has been destructive to our economy, and has cost us £140 BILLIONS already. Rachel Reeves: "The impact of Brexit is severe and long lasting." Check out our Brexit cost tracker: https://www.bestforbritain.org/brexit_impact— Best for Britain (@bestforbritain.org) 15 October 2025 at 10:30
When Reeves heaps the blame on Brexit, the very next and quite obvious question is going to be this one, as the Sky Politics Hub presenter Darren McCaffrey says:
Sky News, "If the government agrees, with everyone from the Bank of England, to the OBR, to their own treasury research, that Brexit is a drag on economic growth" "And that Labour's number one priority is that very growth itself" "Why not do something about it?" #RejoinEU— Farrukh (@implausibleblog.bsky.social) 15 October 2025 at 21:50
The current rather pathetic answer is that Britain is doing something, signing trade deals around the world. But as everyone knows, deals with India, the CPTPP and Australia will only skim the surface of what is needed. They are no substitute for the trade barriers erected by Brexit. The position is just not credible.
Austerity, or swingeing cuts to public services, and the impacts of Liz Truss's disastrous budget can be reversed, but not before Brexit. That must be reversed first. Only by rejoining the EU can trade and tax revenues start to rise, and public services be restored to something like what we should expect.
The former Tory chancellor, Phillip Hammond, was on Sky News later talking about the major problem that Reeves faces. She can’t kickstart economic growth; the gap between tax revenues and spending is stubbornly high and rising. There is nothing left to cut. If she does raise tax to compensate, growth will slow even further, and the budget deficit will increase yet again, implying more borrowing and sending a terrible message to the financial markets. Lenders will demand higher interest rates because of the increased risk of a default, and spending on servicing the government’s mountain of debt will go up. We risk entering a vicious circle.
Hammond was very logical and measured in his comments, and he didn’t suggest we should rejoin the EU, although he did say it was a mistake to leave. The world has changed significantly since 2016, he said, Brexiteers expected the open, global trading system would continue under US protection and with the WTO providing oversight and enforcement of the rules. But Trump has upended all of that, and we are now out of the major European bloc in a high-tariff, protectionist world, and we’re struggling.
Graham Stringer the Labour MP for Blackley and Middleton South, followed Hammond on Sky and breezily denied Brexit had any connection to Britain’s economic woes. Stringer is a longtime Eurosceptic, a climate change denier and has recently called for the United Kingdom to leave the ECHR. He sounded much further to the right than Hammond. What he's doing in the Labour party I'm not sure. I assume Reform UK are interested in him.
Stringer's position is perhaps even worse than Farage, who has at least admitted that Brexit has been a disaster. Stringer wouldn’t even accept that.
Before the referendum, virtually every serious, reputable economist said leaving the EU would negatively affect trade and therefore GDP. And by lowering GDP, it would reduce the tax take. They have been conclusively proved right, and the OBR have confirmed it on multiple occasions. There may be an argument about how much trade has been affected (some say it’s even worse than official figures suggest), but hardly anyone now questions that Brexit has been a major factor.
So, Stringer’s position is that yes, the experts did forecast a reduction in trade and Brexiteers like him dismissed their warnings as scaremongering. As trade fell, their response was to perversely deny it had anything to do with Brexit! It’s not very convincing, is it?
I genuinely think that the majority of voters in Britain are ready to accept the message officially. There is a growing acceptance that Brexit has been a mistake. The last YouGov poll in mid-September asking if the UK should rejoin or stay out, was at 62-38%. It's not even close. I think just about everyone has read, seen or heard plenty of commentators blaming Brexit, but up to now, no government politician - from Labour or the Tories - has said officially that Brexit has made us poorer. Reeves will be the first and she is right to do so..
It is an important step, but she should go further. She needs to draw the battle lines for the next election now. The evidence is overwhelming. The government won't be telling voters things they don't already know. They are ready to hear the message. If the government waits until 2028 before blaming Brexit it will look like desperate political opportunism.
The government's fortunes are at a low ebb, Labour has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The time has come.
