View this post on the web at [link removed]

‘For every Labour voter who has gone to Reform, at least two have gone to parties more pro-EU than Labour… If the idea behind the omerta was to stop people turning to Farage, it has failed totally.’ - Toby Helm
At last! Finally!
For years, the vast majority of Labour MPs and front-benchers have adopted pained looks when asked about their party’s refusal to talk about Brexit. “I know, I know. I wish I could but we are not allowed to go there,” has been the agonised message behind their silence. Desperation caused by the rise of Reform has now forced a rethink. The shackles are off, the omerta is at least partially lifted. Ahead of Rachel Reeves’s budget on November 26 the B word is back and the economic disaster of leaving the EU seems up for discussion.
Budgets are always political events, as well as fiscal ones. And this will be more political than most. Reform is miles ahead in the polls. Farage needs puncturing very soon to prevent Reform putting down roots that will cause lasting structural damage to Labour, threaten to dump them of office after one term, and will likely kill off the Tories for the foreseeable future.
For Rachel Reeves, the November Budget is a career defining moment. In her first year in office, she failed to give herself anything like enough fiscal headroom to cope with ill winds. It was a terrible error. The £10bn leeway initially built into her calculations, has proved nothing like enough. Higher than hoped-for borrowing costs, sluggish growth, stubborn inflation, and the cost of U-turns on welfare and other policy shifts have left her balance sheet in tatters. Somehow she needs to find up to £30bn more from tax rises and spending cuts to keep within her fiscal rules and give some spare room for manoeuvre down the line.
While some of this mess is of this government’s own making, the result of its own misreadings, Reeves desperately needs to highlight the other, more culpable actors, to share the blame. Reeves and her team have signaled she will cite Brexit in considerable measure for this country’s current economic woes on Budget day and name its champion Nigel Farage as responsible. That is a mighty big change.
Labour’s strategy, of not talking about Brexit as a significant factor in this country’s economic difficulties, was not completely lacking in political logic before they entered office. As Professor Robert Ford of Manchester University, who knows more about Brexit psephology than anyone, said, “They needed to do well in a lot of seats that were pretty Brexity, so you can see there was an argument for not stirring it up, for letting sleeping dogs lie.” The unintended result was that Labour’s vote suffered terribly in many Remain areas.
Since the election, the policy of pretending Brexit never happened and even suggesting (as Downing Street occasionally has) that it has been quite a good thing, has become increasingly mad. Labour has plummeted in public esteem. It has not only failed, but inflicted huge damage. Ford says that for every one Labour voter who has gone to Reform, at least two have gone to parties more pro EU than Labour, the Greens, the LibDems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru. If the idea behind the omerta was to stop people turning to Farage, it has failed totally.
By the day, the polls now show more people view Brexit as a terrible self-inflicted wound. New polling by YouGov commissioned by Best for Britain shows big majorities think it has damaged the economy. Crucially, the segments of voters vital to Labour’s electoral success want the issue addressed by getting closer to the EU again.
Ford also points to simple demographics and the fact many older Brexit voters have now departed, and new younger ones who hate Brexit are coming on stream. “The new young voters break three or four to one in favour of Remain,” Ford says. He can hardly stop when reeling off reasons why Labour is now right to start targeting Brexit and Farage as having done dreadful damage. “Brexit is not working, Leave voters are noticing it, Leave voters have been converting to Remain. It is not like it is a tattoo branded on your arm, you can change your mind,” he says.
And they are. Best for Britain’s polling shows that even among Tory voters, Brexit is overwhelmingly perceived as a failure. Among people planning to vote Reform, it is a pretty even three-way split between ‘Brexit was a failure’, ‘Brexit was a success’ and ‘don’t know’. Rather than shying away from it, by using Brexit as a political tool, Labour has a way to directly discredit the man himself.
For many voters Farage and his party are probably a passing fancy, a way to kick the system. It is surely no bad approach to remind them that he was the politician who, arguably more than any, contributed to the sky rocketing cost of the weekly shop, and the estimated 4% hit to the UK economy (the official view of the OBR).
Right now, the UK and EU are on course for what all sides believe will be a fairly limited review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement next year. But as Ford also points out, the logic of the blame Brexit strategy leads only one way. “If you say Brexit has been terrible for us, then people will begin to say ‘well why don’t you go and renegotiate it all then?’“ That really would be the mother of all U-turns.
Toby Helm is the former Political Editor of the Observer

Unsubscribe [link removed]?