Farage Discovers Gravity

Having spent the 2024 election campaign promising to defy it with £90 billion in tax cuts, he’s now back on Earth announcing that – astonishingly – gravity still applies. The same public finances that were “fine” when he was shaking his fist at “the establishment” have apparently turned “dire” now that he’s run out of slogans and has to look at a spreadsheet.

Nothing has changed since before the election except Farage’s self-interest. The debt is roughly the same, the deficit’s the same, growth remains flatter than a Norfolk fen, and the markets are still allergic to fantasy economics after Truss’s little pyromaniac episode in 2022. The only new discovery is that promising the impossible looks rather less clever once you’ve got MPs on the payroll and a lobby of journalists pointing out your arithmetic wouldn’t pass a GCSE.

Before the election, Reform’s plan was simple populist alchemy: spend less, tax less, and somehow end up with more of everything. Now Farage calls that “immature”. The man who built his career sneering at “career politicians” has completed his own metamorphosis into one – with the same slippery capacity to “clarify” that what he said before was merely “aspirational”. Translation: it was nonsense, but useful nonsense at the time.

He blames the “dire state of the public finances”, as though this condition has crept up unannounced in the last few months. It hasn’t. The economy is where it was – burdened by years of Tory mismanagement, Brexit-induced stagnation, and a tax base that can’t grow because productivity refuses to budge. Nothing new there, except that Farage has finally been forced to acknowledge it in public.

And yet, rather than own the deceit, he dresses it up as maturity. “We are being sensible,” he says. In other words, “We’ve been caught.” Having sold the fantasy of £90 billion in tax cuts funded by “efficiency savings”, he now assures us that “modest” changes will do. Modest, of course, being political code for “we’ll quietly drop everything that made you vote for us”.

It’s an old populist trick – talk like a rebel until responsibility looms, then pose as a statesman for recognising the obvious. Farage now lectures others about fiscal realism, while pretending he hasn’t spent a decade cultivating voters who believe budgets are written in fairy dust.

The truth is brutal and simple: the economy hasn’t changed, the maths hasn’t changed – only the sales pitch has. Farage’s U-turn isn’t about prudence; it’s about self-preservation. He’s not adjusting to a new reality. He’s just hoping you won’t notice he was lying all along.

Having retreated from his £90 billion fantasy, he’s reaching for a new prophecy – an “economic collapse” that will apparently bring about an election in 2027. It’s the same trick in different clothes: invent a crisis, then claim to be the only man who saw it coming.

But nothing of substance has changed since before the general election. The economy limps along much as it did – weak but stable, strained but not collapsing. The debt, the deficit, the gilt yields, the productivity malaise – all are old news. What has changed is Farage’s use for them. Yesterday they were problems he’d solve with tax cuts; today they’re excuses for why he can’t. Tomorrow they’ll be portents of doom.

He needs collapse like a vulture needs carrion. Without crisis, there’s no stage, no spotlight, no audience for his outrage. Yet Britain’s economy, dull and dogged as it is, refuses to oblige. It plods on, denying him his grand reckoning.

So he’s left forecasting disaster to stay in the headlines, pretending foresight while rehearsing hindsight. In truth, there’s no economic cataclysm coming – only the slow decline of a demagogue who mistook noise for policy and populism for governance.