Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Andy Burnham of talking about rejoining the EU to distract from domestic problems.

Speaking on GB News, he said: “You know when politicians are in trouble. It’s when they say, “I don’t recognise the figure.” It means that the figure is pretty accurate, but it’s not absolutely spot on.

“£200 billion or thereabouts of extra expenditure when we are already running a deficit of about £120 billion a year. The economy is running out of money.

“The very simple point is that government expenditure is running at about 45% of GDP, while taxation is at 38% of GDP. And however you cut taxation, however you squeeze people, whether it’s window taxes, 98% income tax, this country is never willing to pay more than 38% of GDP.

“So you have a settled, stuck, 7% deficit. You get a little bit in fees, you get a little bit from asset sales, but you’ve still got around 5% built-in deficit. The only way to reduce it is by cutting expenditure.

“Instead, Andy Burnham wants to spend a lot more of your money by nationalisation, by deciding that the state runs things better than the private sector does. Now, which of you would like your supermarket to be run by His Majesty’s Government? Or would you prefer it, in fact, to be run by competitive private companies?

“Once you’ve answered that question, you know why the profit motive, the private sector, is better at running things.

“But this is also uncovering the humbug of Burnham because he said in the Times in May that our relentless focus now should be on domestic issues and fixing our own underlying problems rather than on rerunning divisive arguments about rejoining the European Union, and so he tore all that up.

“He now wants to talk about rejoining the European Union to try and hide the domestic problems which are ultimately going to overwhelm this government. As Margaret Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”