Britain 'needs its own Javier Milei' to save UK economy from collapse, says Steve Baker

Britain needs its own Javier Milei because it is "on the edge of fiscal collapse", Brexiteer Steve Baker has warned. The Tory former MP has launched a new campaign to put pressure on the Government to be truthful about the perilous state of the UK's finances.

He claims it is lying to voters about the state of the economy and also blamed the Tories for having "no answers to the long-term fiscal issues facing the UK". He believes having a tax-cutting figure similar to Argentine president Mr Milei is the answer. Blasting "decades of unaffordable state overreach", he said: "Our welfare state, including pensions, is on track for default within about 20 years unless we drastically change course.

"This is not a crisis of capitalism - it's a crisis of an overgrown and overreaching state.

"Can anyone really say that the problem over the past 20-plus years has been that taxes have been too low, that the government has been too small, that the state has had too little power? Too little borrowing and debt? Interest rates too high?

"It's time for our brilliant freedom-oriented think tanks to have far more impact in the public debate and for a new generation of leaders to take up the torch for freedom."

He warns that Britons are currently "living in the Truman Show run by Whitehall", with the Government "pretending everything is okay when it isn't". He added: "It creates housing targets and misses them. It keeps saying that it is for working people, then raises taxes on them.

"It pretends the answer is to pump more money that we do not have into our public services. The Government pretends we can afford the current welfare state when its own projections show we can't. We need a radical overhaul of everything the state does."

The new campaign, Fighting For A Free Future, will bring together leading advocates of freedom and lower government spending to push for an improvement in the quality of public debate about tax and spend.

It is being supported by a number of existing think tanks on the Right as they attempt to set the stage for the next General Election.