Rachel Reeves is right to "highlight the severity and long-term damage of Brexit", in her comments ahead of the Budget, campaigners have said.
Speaking to Sky News, the Chancellor said: "Austerity, Brexit, and the ongoing impact of Liz Truss's mini-budget, all of those things have weighed heavily on the UK economy. Already, people thought that the UK economy would be 4% smaller because of Brexit."
She added: "Now, of course, we are undoing some of that damage by the deal that we did with the EU earlier this year on food and farming, goods moving between us and the continent, on energy and electricity trading, on an ambitious youth mobility scheme, but there is no doubting that the impact of Brexit is severe and long-lasting."
Her comments come after health secretary Wes Streeting said earlier this week that he was "glad that Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak". It also came after a report in the Times that Reeves and Prime Minister Keir Starmer would seek to blame Nigel Farage and Brexit for a major downgrade in productivity by the UK budget watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) which they will reportedly argue would not have been needed if not for Brexit.
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Naomi Smith, Chief Executive of Best for Britain, who have led the campaign for closer UK-EU ties, said:
“Rachel Reeves is completely correct to highlight the severity and long-term damage of Brexit - which slashed UK GDP by 4% and wiped £40bn from the Treasury's annual budget - but more importantly has been a calamity for Brits facing spiralling supermarket prices and rocketing energy bills.
"Our polling shows a majority of voters - including Labour's own winning coalition - increasingly view Brexit as a failure for the country, and rightly expect ministers to urgently work with the EU to find a pragmatic way to fix the damage."