General election 2024: with Nigel Farage and faulty figures, it's starting to feel like the Brexit referendum

Sunak doesn’t want to admit to the government’s botched job and push voters towards Reform, while Starmer fears angering Leavers who are putting their trust in Labour. Lord Heseltine described this as a “conspiracy of silence”.

But whisper it quietly, there’s more than a hint of the EU referendum to this general election campaign. Nigel Farage is patrolling left-behind seaside towns promising a “political revolt”. Top Tories are bandying around dodgy figures - which one day might make it onto the side of a bus. Eight years on it does rather feel as if we’ve gone back in time to the Brexit referendum.

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In particular, Sunak’s incessant repetition of Labour’s alleged £2,000 tax rise gave me flashbacks of the Vote Leave battle bus emblazoned with £350m to the NHS. Both figures have a very vague basis in truth, however have been concocted using questionable assumptions.

The tax costings have been criticised as having “little if any credibility” by the Treasury’s former permanent secretary, while the Resolution Foundation said “these should not be used in public discourse”. Even the Tory bible, the Spectator, has worked out that if you use the Conservatives’ calculations on their own plans, that would add £3,000 tax per household.

And if you look back to the EU referendum campaign, you can see the consequences of politicians being creative with the truth. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove parading around in front of the big sign promising £350 million to the NHS every week. Jacob Rees-Mogg swearing that food prices would come down and the country would “take back control” of our borders.

What’s happened since then? In the last couple of years we’ve seen record NHS waiting lists in England, the highest ever net migration and astonishing food inflation. Of course, this is not all down to Brexit - there’s been a global pandemic and an energy shock after the war in Ukraine - but it highlights the risk of promising an panacea that fails to materialise. 

That leads me to Nigel Farage. I watched on Monday as he announced his return to frontline politics as the new Reform UK leader. Farage is replaying the greatest hits of Brexit, namely that immigration is causing all of our country’s problems. He promised to stand up for the “little man” and lead a “political revolt”. More flashbacks to 2016.

Now with the advent of AI and deepfakes, the propensity for misinformation to influence our election only increases. But hopefully voters don’t forget what has happened over the last eight years. We need politicians who tell the truth and deliver, not sell a dream for more power. No one wants a repeat of 2016 again, although I fear Sunak may be about to slap £2,000 in taxes on a bus.

Ralph Blackburn is NationalWorld’s politics editor based in Westminster, where he gets special access to Parliament, MPs and government briefings. If you liked this article you can follow Ralph on X (Twitter) here and sign up to his free weekly newsletter Politics Uncovered, which brings you the latest analysis and gossip from Westminster every Sunday morning.