What happened to ‘growth, growth, growth’?

This is hardly how 2024 was supposed to end for Labour. Free from the shackles of ‘14 years of Tory misrule’, the economy was supposed to take off. ‘Growth, growth, growth,’ Keir Starmer told us, a little unconvincingly, were going to be the government’s three main priorities. Indeed, Britain was going to tear away as the fastest-growing economy in the G7 – although he never offered us any explanation as to why this would be the case, still less which of his policies was going to achieve it.

This morning’s revised GDP figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reaffirm just how big a failure the government’s economic policies have so far proven to be. The figures show zero growth in the third quarter, while GDP per head shrank by 0.2 per cent. Figures for October show that the economy contracted by 0.1 per cent, and there is little to suggest that the news will be better for the last two months of the year.