A veteran financial journalist argues that as the damage of Brexit becomes more manifest, British politics and society will be in for a turbulent decade

In my career as a reporter and commentator on the economy I have covered many a crisis and many a government’s economic policies. I have agreed sometimes and disagreed more often with what Conservative, Labour and the coalition government of 2010-15 have tried to do; but I have never doubted that they believed in what they were trying to achieve for the economy, even if I thought their policies were flawed.

As a broad generalisation Conservatives tend to favour low taxes and low public spending, whereas Labour is associated with the reverse – hence successful poster campaigns such as “Labour’s Tax Bombshell”, which turned out to be fatal to Labour’s election campaign in 1992.

Its loss that year led to a determined effort by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997 to conceal what they really wanted to do, in order to counteract Labour’s image as the “tax and spend party”. So when they were elected by a landslide, I found myself opposing what I regarded as Gordon Brown’s lame acceptance of the two-year freeze on most areas of public spending that the Tories had promised, if they had been re-elected.