Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries.
Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have pretty much stopped growing – especially if we ignore the impact of immigration and calculate GDP per head. Reversing this slowdown should be the top issue at every election, but it is surprisingly under-discussed. In theory, almost all our politicians want growth. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves keep describing it, nasally and tautologically, as their ‘number one priority’. Yet so far they have doled out more of the medicine that sickened the patient under the last government.
What medicine? Jon Moynihan spells it out in pitiless detail. We became poor because we enlarged the government, raised taxes and over-regulated. Well duh, you might say: there needs no ghost, my Lord, come from the grave to tell us this. But, although the diagnosis might strike you as obvious, the treatment is so unpalatable that many turn in desperation to quack cures. Rather than cutting spending, freeing markets, abolishing quangos, scrapping monopolies, lowering taxes and protecting the value of the currency, politicians pretend that our problems can be solved by some witchdoctor alternative. Crack down on fraud! Use more AI! Join the customs union!
What makes this book so valuable is its relentless empiricism. Moynihan is an entrepreneur who came relatively late to politics via chairing Vote Leave – something he did with the same unfussy efficiency that helped him to succeed in business.
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