If Bailey won’t call for radical growth reforms, no one will

It was hardly the message Chancellor Rachel Reeves would have been looking for a day before a Spring Statement which could well make or break her political career. The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, delivered a speech yesterday warning that growth was going to prove very hard over the next five years. The Governor is completely right to emphasise how hard it will be to expand the economy. But he should be making the case for far more radical reforms. If he won’t, no one else will.

To paraphrase PG Wodehouse on Scotsmen, ‘the difference between the Governor and a ray of sunshine is not hard to detect’. In a speech at the University of Leicester, Bailey argued that the UK was going to struggle to grow significantly over the rest of this decade. A combination of tariffs, wars, and an ageing population will make any expansion very difficult.