Rachel Reeves's bright ideas have taken a matter of hours to crumble

OPINION

Nigel Farage and economist Liam Halligan took no time to attack Rachel Reeves’s first Spending Review on GB News. The Reform UK chief and Telegraph columnist discussed borrowing now reaching £150bn with taxes already falling short. Indeed, thanks to Labour's anti-business policies – building on the sublime work of the equally catastrophic Conservative Party – the UK is now experiencing an exodus of talent, wealth and entrepreneurs.

It was telling that Reeves devoted so much time to attacking Farage and Reform in her Commons speech. From bringing up his earlier support for former PM Liz Truss's mini-budget to claims that Reform would leave Britain with a £80bn black hole, it was telling how much Reform is living rent free in Labour heads.

Sir Keir Starmer's party and government may be economically illiterate, but they aren't blind. They can read the polls and see Reform galloping ahead for nearly two months now.

A major reason for this is Reform tearing up the 1980s Left-Right economic divide, now occupying a space straddling both, depending on which best serves the economy.

Hence Reeves's banging the drum for British Steel, insisting it wasn't Farage who saved it (NB, it was). The Reform chief was also this week in Wales vowing to defend the steel industry in another former Labour heartland.

With boosts to the NHS and housing – alongside cuts to foreign aid – this was clearly a pitch from Labour to those voters flirting with Reform as well as to those who already made the jump.

It also shows far how the Tories have fallen that the official opposition was nowhere near so directly attacked by the Chancellor. Coupled with spending commitments targeting Reform-sympathetic voters, Labour clearly now sees Farage and his party as the biggest threat.

But Reform cannot rest on this. The longer Tory poll numbers crash, the more tenuous leader Kemi Badenoch's position becomes. Her removal could prove a major threat to Reform if another leader manages to arrest Tory decline (a big if!).

In a nutshell, Labour's big spending plans evidence a party running scared of Reform UK while ignoring the increasingly irrelevant Conservatives.

That said, how long will the Tory benches suffer this decline and will they really wait until 2029 before ousting Badenoch?

Labour, on the other hand, may attack Reform's spending plans but Farage is not PM and Reform has time to firm up the numbers.

Sir Keir and Reeves are captaining the ship right now, and frankly the ship is heading towards an iceberg. If nothing changes between now and the next election, it will be the former "metal trader" – as Reeves dismissively called Farage – who will be in Number 10.