…like a turkey

This week: some thoughts on the real anti-growth coalition. Also, a brief ramble through polling history, and a map of European housing.

Yesterday morning I gave a speech to a trade body’s conference on the subject of British politics in 2022. (I like doing this, so if you have an organisation and a budget then let’s talk.) Anyway: I included a line about the audience having an advantage over me, because having been up there for two minutes with my phone off I could no longer be entirely sure who the Prime Minister was. This was no doubt a terrible joke. It was also not entirely a joke.

This, not for the first time, is a problem faced by this newsletter. It seems entirely possible, if not likely, that Liz Truss will be gone in a few days, and when it happens it might happen suddenly: the whips’ baffling decision to make today’s vote on fracking a motion of confidence in the government may, though it has no official status as such, prove some kind of flashpoint. The conspiracy theory version, indeed, is that this is the point, that they know they’ll lose, and that this creates the window they need to change leader. 

There is, though, an inevitable lag between my writing this stuff and your actually reading it. At the time you click “open”, I can no longer be entirely sure who the Prime Minister is. So I’m going to avoid predictions and talk about something else.

The closest Liz Truss has come to establishing a slogan for her government, in the “We can’t go on like this” or “Get Brexit done” mould, is to promise to take on “the anti-growth coalition”. This crusade is not completely crazy: Britain’s growth has been a bit anaemic the last few years, in roughly the same way that Dracula is, and while growth may not be meaningful to the electorate in itself, wages, living standards, spending on public services and all the other things that growth allows are are. 

The thing is, though, that’s a sentiment so anodyne that almost everyone in politics agrees with it. Growth is not an inherently Tory idea, any more than opposition to it really takes the form of a coalition of (deep breath) “Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think-tanks, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers and Extinction Rebellion”. 

Sure, perhaps the latter are self-consciously anti-growth, and in my darker hours I worry they might have a point. But militant unions are no more anti-growth than militant-management – less, perhaps, since they generally want pay rises. As for the “Brexit deniers”, breaking down barriers with the huge trade block that surrounds us will do a lot more for growth than anything this lot are proposing. It also takes quite some gall for a Prime Minister backed by the Institute for Economic Affairs to even use the phrase “vested interests dressed up as think-tanks” because, come on, other people can hear you. 

There are other factors that are holding back growth in this country. The failure to build enough homes, or to even attempt to explain to communities that oppose them why they might be needed. The failure to upgrade our regional rail network, or build other missing transport links that might make it easier to connect people to jobs. The failure to invest in greening the economy, or to build the energy infrastructure that could make us less dependent on Russia and ensure the lights don’t go out this winter.

It is not merely that the current government has been in office for 12 years, so must take much of the blame for failing to do those things. It’s that it has governed explicitly on behalf of the sorts of people who want to build as little as possible. There are people in this country who don’t want growth. One of the many reasons Liz Truss is doomed is that they overwhelmingly vote Tory.