Unless the Treasury is tamed, there’s no solution to Britain’s problems

00:00 04:56

Robert Colvile has narrated this article for you to listen to.

The Tory era is not (quite) over yet, but already the obituaries are in. In particular, two new books from Torsten Bell and Paul Collier seek to bury not just Rishi Sunak and his cabinet but the whole economic approach that the Conservatives have taken since 2010, or perhaps even 1979.

Let’s start with Bell – until very recently head of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, and before that the man who, as Ed Miliband’s policy director, gave us the joy of the EdStone. Great Britain? sets out a comprehensive list of the ways in which we have become a ‘stagnation nation’: low investment, high inequality, insufficient house building, stingy benefits, low-paid labour and so on.

This has become a country, Bell argues, where how you do in life depends on having good parents or a good marriage – in effect, a return to the social realities of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.