FOREWORD

Growth. In theory, every party wants it. Indeed, with the exception of the Green Party, all the parties insist that it is their ‘priority’. So why, relative to comparable countries, is it not happening? How is it that Britain – the breeding-ground of so many inventors and Nobel Prize winners, the nation that engendered the Industrial Revolution, which is the central fact of your life and mine – is stagnating?

The truth is that, while all our politicians claim to want growth, they are not prepared to do the things that would enable it. When Sir Keir Starmer came to office, he told us that he would ‘pull the lever called growth’, as if his predecessors in all parties had, for some mystifying reason, chosen to leave it unpulled.

What he discovered on entering Number 10 was that the easy levers had all been tugged long since. Getting prosperity back into our economy, returning to the growth rates we took for granted for most of the twentieth century, requires making tough decisions as opposed to just talking about them. No prime minister since Tony Blair in his first term has been prepared to do that.

We must stop pretending to ourselves that there is a convenient eye-level lever just waiting to be grasped. The authors in the pages that follow begin by showing why no such lever exists, and why those who claim that our poor economic performance is the result of some specific policy error or exogenous shock – austerity or Brexit or the Ukraine war – are deluding themselves.

We need to understand that the machine to which the lever is connected is malfunctioning. The structure of our juridical and governmental machine makes the pursuit of growth, in every sense, unprofitable. Our authors describe, in pitiless detail, a legal regime that makes it impossible to build the infrastructure that every incoming government sincerely wants; that has burdened us with the most expensive energy in the developed world; that makes us pay more to build fewer houses than any other developed country; and that penalises the work, saving and investment on which output depends.

Though we like to blame others, we have spent a quarter of a century rationing our land, capital, energy and labour – taxing them, regulating them, forbidding their use. Our stagnation is a policy we adopted, clause by clause, and have yet to repeal.

That is the sombre news. The hopeful news follows directly from it. What was done by statute can be undone by statute. A nation that legislated itself into decline can, with better deliberation, legislate itself out. We did this to ourselves – which means, thank heaven, that we can undo it.

Daniel Hannan
Director General, Institute of Economic Affairs
July 2026