Can Reform UK really get Britain growing again? Nigel Farage’s insurgents may be leading in the polls, but on the evidence of this week, they have a long way to go when it comes to policy detail. Reform unveiled its ‘Britannia Card’ on Monday, promising it would lure wealthy individuals to the UK – only for the tax expert Dan Neidle to argue that errors in Reform’s analysis meant that, rather than raising up to £2.5 billion annually, the cards would cost around £34 billion over five years.
The worst sign was not Reform’s questionable maths, but the reaction of their senior officials to Neidle’s criticism: immediately attacking his motivations and his credibility. The party’s deputy leader Richard Tice posted on X: ‘Neidle is not a tax expert but just another activist Labour lawyer’.
Yet Neidle is a widely-respected commentator on tax, whose analysis is taken seriously across the political spectrum. If Reform intend to make policy by sticking their fingers in their ears to any dissenting voices, we should all be worried. Britain is broke enough already. Following the example of the other major parties by brushing off inconvenient economic facts won’t help us climb out of the hole we’re in.
For the sad truth is that Reform are hardly alone in thinking that the future of politics lies in setting economic reality aside. Politicians on all sides and around the world are getting on the act. In America, President Trump’s tariff policy is a return to the delusions of mercantilism, while in New York, the Democrats have just selected an open socialist, Zohran Mamdani, as their mayoral candidate. His policies include doubling the minimum wage and expanding rent control: acts of economic self-sabotage. Here in the UK, meanwhile, the latest chaotic attempts at welfare reform have revealed both Tories and Labour as unwilling to talk to voters honestly about the unaffordability of current levels of spending.
Perhaps that’s because voters are now more interested in subjects that seem divorced from economic logic. We are in the midst of a great political realignment, in which issues of identity take precedence over arguments about the size of the state. Just today, figures from the British Social Attitudes survey showed that the big political divide is no longer an economic one that follows class lines, but between social conservatives and social liberals, in which questions of immigration, culture and integration are the defining issues.
It is fashionable, as a result, to argue that thinking in economic terms can be set aside – and indeed, that the fiasco of Britain’s immigration policy is the product of relying on economic arguments before all else.
Yet that is a myth. As my colleague at the Centre for Policy Studies Karl Williams has argued on CapX, while it is true that since the Blair era arguments framed around the alleged economic benefits have certainly often been offered to sell relatively unrestricted immigration to the public, this was a convenient fig leaf. The real driver of higher levels of immigration was ‘elites’ foreign policy preoccupations’.
Indeed, the 2001 paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit that in many ways began the Blairite revolution in immigration is notable for its denial of one of the key insights of an economic way of thinking. ‘Migration: an economic and social analysis’ proposed revisiting the Home Office’s Aim 6 – ‘Regulation of entry to and settlement in the United Kingdom in the interests of social stability and economic growth’ – on the grounds that there was no ‘trade-off between economic growth and social stability’: with the right policies, you could get both at once. Yet economists know, as Thomas Sowell put it, ‘There are no solutions, only trade-offs’. Policymaking that refuses to accept that fact has not placed economic considerations above all else – it has deliberately set them aside.
Perhaps the great error, in communicating the importance of economic analysis to the public, has been to present it as a source of mysterious, counterintuitive, expert judgements. That has allowed Donald Trump to sell his protectionist turn as a populist masterstroke, just as it saw British politicians exploit economic language as the face of an immigration policy in fact driven by deeply political considerations.
Yet there is another tradition – economics as refined common sense. Exemplified by Frederic Bastiat, and more recently championed by Bryan Caplan, this presents arguments for free trade or against excessive market regulation in terms that make intuitive sense. It is the sort of economic thinking that the public already embraces in the form of fantasy football: understanding not just the necessity of trade-offs, but the power of ideas like opportunity cost, decentralised decision-making and the power of incentives.
With the public increasingly in open revolt against elite opinion and expert judgement, we badly need to recover this more grounded way of communicating economic realities. Without the insights that economics offers, policymakers will be working in the dark, with little hope of arresting our national decline. If Reform really want to set themselves apart from the rest of the political pack, they should embrace the valuable truths of common sense economics, not just shoot the messenger.
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