The Budget was an enormous fudge. No10 should be grateful for the breathing space Healey has bought them. But workers facing higher taxes and young people losing another year to worklessness have fewer reasons to be cheerful. An election promising faster takeaways and dunkable biscuits might be the PM’s next trick.
The party that does so and speaks for the data analyst in Leeds as readily as the welder in Sheffield will have found the ground Labour has left behind. In doing so, we could speak for the jobs which most people do, and which contribute most to our economy.
Plans and targets alone will not deliver growth. Businesses need the freedom and confidence to invest, employ and expand.
No 10 North would inevitably reflect the instincts of its founder. I fear it would be statist, prioritising reducing regional inequality over aggregate growth, and it would be suspicious of technological innovation if this resulted in job losses. It would tend towards people pleasing nostalgic romanticism over hard-headed realities.
Having legislated and regulated ourselves into this stagnation, largely in a fit of absence of mind, we can legislate and deregulate ourselves out. But if we’re to do that effectively we first have to diagnose what’s gone wrong.
Burnham may be a full-on weather vane. But politics is full of weather vanes who win because the wind changes. If he rides a better phase, he will be hard to beat unless the Conservatives sound as if they understand the next phase better than he does.
A big reason we lost our way in government was too often we failed to remember that the private sector is where growth will come from. Some in business thought Labour would be on their side. Most can now see that this Labour Party has no understanding of how business works. We do.
Regardless of the churn at the top, the fundamentals remain the same. Labour will not secure our borders, they will not cut our ballooning welfare bill, and they will not do what’s necessary to keep our country safe. They are simply not dispositionally or ideologically capable of making the trade-offs that we need to make in order to fix any of these problems.
Right now the big question is how to tackle the poor performance of the British economy and the reasons behind it. Not all are Brexit related, but it’s important to address those that are. We aren’t going back in, but we should still investigate, for our own good, the Brexit effect.
The left of politics is seeking, and in some instances succeeding, to persuade voters that free markets have failed, and this failure is the cause of the very low growth in GDP per capita we have experienced. The reverse is true.
Since the global financial crisis, growth has been held up as the solution to all our problems: the answer to stagnant wages, creaking public services, and a rising cost of living. And it would be, if we had done any of the things necessary to allow it to happen.
The route back to government is not through more noise, more grievance or a narrower politics. It is through growth, competence and a proper understanding of what makes an economy work.
Significant parts of the political debate, on left and right, are based on official statistics which are wrong. And the wrongness more often seems to be in one direction – towards the gloomy, the pessimistic and the negative.
Realism requires backbone. This government has none. Winter fuel payments: U-turn. Welfare reform: U-turn. The two-child benefit cap: U-turn. Farm taxes, family business taxes, pubs – all U-turns. Whenever pressure mounts, this government folds.
The biggest losses for wealthy entrepreneurs in the UK were in the technology sector; the critical fulcrum on which the country is hoping to base its economic recovery. In the game of attracting wealthy international migrants, the losers are clearly the countries that have elected not to play.