“Growth is the engine that carries every one of our ambitions forward,” Rachel Reeves told the Commons yesterday afternoon. If that is the case, as we so often argue, Britain’s engine is stalling repeatedly, the car dashboard lit up by warning signs. The only thing that will be growing thanks to yesterday’s Budget is the tax burden.
Indeed, it was a package of stagnation and taxation so severe that it will hit everyone, everywhere. Taxes up, rules entrenched, and growth downgraded from an already debilitating low.
And let’s not forget: the Chancellor chose to continue this, the same tired set of ideas responsible for over a decade of stagnation and decline. It was the government’s choice to take these actions. They decided to prioritise Treasury orthodoxy and box-ticking over improving the lives of the millions across the country, many of whom have consistently voted for radical change. Their actions will not ease the cost of living: they have committed to increasing taxes by more than any predecessor from the last 50 years and will leave one in four paying more tax by the start of the next decade.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to accept more tinkering around the edges and a lack of vision and leadership. Every election, they have promised a better life for all. But they’ve broken our public services, shattered the social contract and led our country to more crime, grime, and decline. We can choose differently. The decline is so obvious, the institutional decay so clear, that we must choose differently.
We must build more houses and infrastructure. We must make our public services fit for purpose again. We must lower energy bills so they are no longer among the highest in the developed world.
But doing differently requires politicians who are prepared to upset their dinner parties and the narrow lobby groups whose influence permeates the corridors of Whitehall. If we don’t grow our economy by making it easier to invest in British start-ups and businesses, then we won’t create the jobs necessary to improve our standard of living. If we don’t fix the mismanagement and failure of so many of our public services, then our systems will continue to grind and public expenditure will continue to increase without any improvement to our most vital services, which will eventually become entirely dysfunctional.
Energy prices are another fundamental foundation: they must be reduced by making energy in this country, and making it cheaper, not simply subsidising sky-high costs and raising tax endlessly to compensate. With cheaper energy, household bills will fall, and British businesses and industry can do what this government wants: to start, scale and stay here. With lower bills, people will see their lives are improving, meaning they can spend more on themselves, on the people they love, and the products and places they enjoy. Lower energy costs ripple through supply chains, cut the overheads of every hospital, factory, construction site and high street shop, and make Britain a more attractive place to build the innovations of the future.
Accepting all 47 recommendations outlined in the Nuclear Regulatory Review, an independent report commissioned by the government, would make our energy cheaper. These reforms would streamline planning for nuclear power plants, simplify the remaining rules and responsibilities of regulators to avoid slow decision-making, and automatically approve reactor designs previously accepted for use in the UK.
Such changes would slash household and industrial energy bills across this country. But we must go further than the report: we must stop frivolous lawsuits that block the construction of key infrastructure. By ending the £10,000 cap on legal costs for blockers, we can stop vital resources going towards supporting impossible legal cases that delay and block the projects that would improve our living standards.
These cases are funded by public money even when the groups themselves recognise that their cases will not succeed. This isn’t right. It clogs our courts, delays important projects and rewards those who continually lodge complaints. All of us should not have to pay for the numerous lawsuits that raise the cost of living.
All together, these changes would begin to build a Britain that we are proud to leave to our children. After decades of indecision and incompetence by our political class, these choices would prioritise our quality of life in this country again.
Successive governments have failed. Yesterday, the government decided to continue a failed status quo. The Budget didn’t unleash our talented entrepreneurs and innovators – it backed so many of the large consultancies, lawyers, and blockers holding our country back. Instead of accepting the Nuclear Regulatory Review’s recommendations, Reeves said the government will present a “full implementation plan” once it has accounted for other considerations, including “planning, environmental and court processes”. Rather than making decisions that treat growth as her priority, the Chancellor reinforced a broken system that she knows doesn’t work.
We have so many talented people here, so many that want a chance to build a better life for themselves, their families and their community – but they are held back by crushing bills, a lack of jobs, and a country that increasingly ignores their needs. We cannot continue pursuing the same failed approach that we have for decades. If we are to have functioning public services, if wages are to start rising again, if we are to become a centre of expertise and innovation, we must have politicians who do what they say, and act like economic growth is their central priority. It is this principle that will allow us to lower the cost of living, and finally, for the first time in two decades, actually improve living standards across the country.
[Further reading: Did Jeremy Hunt write this Budget?]
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