Robert Hutton

We are about to have our seventh prime minister in a decade. Has Britain become the new Italy? What is going on? The truth is that we are in denial about what we have done to our economy. We have become poorer through excessive taxation, spending, borrowing, regulation and money-printing. But we don’t like to admit it. A recent survey by @IEALondon found that we think of ourselves as a wealthy country, comparable to Singapore or Switzerland. In fact, Singaporeans and Swiss are roughly twice as rich as us, and we are about to be overtaken by Poland and Slovenia. How did it happen? There is no mystery. Under Tony Blair, the state was spending one pound in three; now it is closer to one in two. We say we want growth, but we don’t want it if it means cutting welfare, allowing more private healthcare, reducing taxes for entrepreneurs, liberalising employment law, raising the state pension age, sacking government employees, admitting skilled immigrants, ending the triple lock or allowing new houses near us. In other words, we don’t really want growth at all. Rather that acknowledging that contradiction, we blame our politicians. But as long as we make it politically impossible to cut spending (see the attached story as just the most recent example, one of a hundred I might have picked), we condemn ourselves to penury. It will carry on until we have leaders prepared to deliver growth, as opposed to intoning the word. And that will happen only when we accept that we were living beyond our means even before the lockdown, that we have become utterly bloated since and that, like an obese person who wants to become fit, we face some short-term pain. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…