Britain created the world we live in, but the future feels like it is being made elsewhere. From the fibreoptic cables that brought you this essay and the shipping container that brought you lunch, to the legal and cultural systems that govern populations, Britain has shaped the technologies and institutions that define our world. We were the laboratory of the modern age – a nation from which scientific, material, and social progress reverberated throughout the world. We must rediscover this national heritage to build the foundations of a social democratic Britain in the 21st century.
Today’s Britain is anxious and out of control of its economic destiny. A nation which once drove global events finds itself buffeted by change, at the mercy of foreign powers and fractured alliances, with a weakened defence base and diminished economic standing. We are gripped by the longest period of economic stagnation in 200 years. Populist waves lap at the shores of Western politics, threatening to topple once-reliable institutions. Climate change, novel technologies and great power conflict bring old and new threats. The latest revolution in artificial intelligence – which is largely happening elsewhere – creates new uncertainties for our economy, security and society.
The right has promised growth but delivered rent-seeking. Successive governments have failed to invest in our foundational infrastructure, and left Britain unprepared for the shocks of the past decade. Austerity left our public services on its knees on the eve of the pandemic. A lack of energy independence left us vulnerable to a fossil fuel price shock when Russia invaded Ukraine. The unforgivable inability to build – particularly housing, transport, and energy infrastructure – has choked productivity and opportunity. The modern right’s economic model has mainly privileged existing owners of assets, rather than sparking the creative productivity Britain needs.
The average British family is getting by with 19 per cent less than if our growth trajectory had continued on the same path as before 2008 – equivalent to just under £7,000 per household. We are also around 19 per cent poorer than if we had kept pace with the US. This isn’t just a matter of national pride, nor is it a macroeconomic blip. It’s an economic and moral failing.
Stagnation matters because ordinary families suffer most, robbed not only of economic means but of confidence in their futures. Britain’s decline isn’t just charted on graphs of GDP. It is etched onto the damp walls of neglected rental flats, shuttered shop fronts on bleak high streets and the crumbling concrete faces of our schools. It can be felt in the stomachs of the four million children who go without enough food each morning; in the long, anxious wait – now averaging 14.4 weeks – just to start NHS treatment; and in the hollowed-out lives of 326,000 people in temporary accommodation, most of them families with children, caught in limbo with nowhere to settle and no place to grow.
The left has treated growth with suspicion. Concern over inequality, and corporate excess, and environmental damage – while often legitimate – has too often led to a politics more comfortable with redistribution than with creating prosperity in the first place. The effect has been to harm the people whose interests we claim to defend. In times of prosperity, such as between 1997-2007, levers like redistribution and regulation worked reasonably well. But in an era of stagnation, we need new levers: our theory of change needs to include a theory of growth.
Social democrats ought to be the loudest champions of growth, because without growth the state struggles to deliver its basic functions. Public services become sites of triage that manage scarcity by rationing care. Politics become a battlefield of interest groups squabbling over meagre rations. Without growth, the best that we can hope to achieve is compensating the losers of an economic model which cannot sustain the good, productive jobs that are a source of dignity and meaning. Issues like climate change become zero-sum trade-offs between the present and the future – or between different communities – rather than challenges we can collectively surmount. Businesses lack the means or the reason to invest in our future productivity. Workers and households are constrained by the economy of daily survival, rather than liberated by the possibilities of abundance.
We are launching the Centre for British Progress to build a case for growth that is rooted in British identity and delivers human progress – lifting living standards, broadening opportunities and giving people the freedom to build better futures.
First, Britain must choose dynamism over conservatism. British firms spend less money on capital investment than their European and American peers, and British households are more likely to save money in bank accounts than invest it. When we do invest, our pension funds prefer safer bets, leaving us poorer. Britain appears to exhibit the general rule observed by historian Donald Cardwell: societies that once led the way on innovation can become resistant to new technologies, and ultimately cede technological leadership to others.
Second, we have to learn to build again. Britain is wealthy on paper but poor in practice. Much of our wealth is locked in unproductive assets, especially land and housing. The link between wealth and producing value to society has broken down, and rent-seeking is protected by legal structures which make it costly (and sometimes impossible) to build.
When steam powered the industrial revolution, the Victorians built for the future. They built some of our most beautiful and functional buildings. They laid railways, erected public buildings and created infrastructure that still serves us today. We need to rediscover that civic ambition.
Third, we should choose courage over impotence. Our institutions are too often paralysed by fear or competing vetoes. As demonstrated by recent fiascos over HS2, NHS IT contracts and the Hinkley C project, government policymaking can often become stakeholder management, where responsibility is diffused and decision-making is diluted by consensus. Policymakers lack both the power and accountability to deliver on their mandates. We cannot renew Britain without taking risks, challenging assumptions and asserting the legitimacy of democratic government to deliver change.
But we need to resist destructive regime change. The “burn it down” approach to government reform, exemplified by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), is no lasting path to progress. Our project needs to bring people along with us and build a broad consensus for reform. Destruction may provide temporary catharsis, but it will not deliver the reform and rebuilding of institutions.
In fighting for growth, we stand in a long tradition of British social reform. In 1942, a pivotal year of the greatest war Britain has ever fought, William Beveridge declared war not on fascism or a foreign power, but on the “Five Giant Evils” of poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor and unemployment. This was a time when politicians could be forgiven for prioritising foreign policy and national security, but Beveridge identified that after the war against fascist imperialism there would be a battle to rebuild Britain.
Today, as conflict and populist forces once again threaten the stability of the world Britain helped to build, Britain must find another path. Britain can be a place where anyone, whatever their background, is empowered to build their future on these islands, each generation more confident, creative and prosperous than that which went before.
[See more: What is school for?]
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