Economics: Martin Wolf cries out in despair. The British electorate and Nick Clegg have together given the British Tories the baton to run the country since 2010. They have run it into the ground—failed to invest in Britain, and broken many of the links to the outside world and some of the domestic systems that boosted and supported prosperity. And now they are about to try to break them again in the hope that offering yet another tax cut to their base will somehow bring them a semi-miraculous victory in the next election. Fortunately for Britain, they probably will not get the chance, and a bunch of less-cynical more-competent leaders who are not actively malevolent will get the chance to try to fix things. What should Keith Starmer’s Labour government do, if things do not continue the dumpster fire of the past decade and a half? Tax, invest in infrastucture, invest in people, invest in systems, and make it as easy as possible for the hard-working and entrepreneurial to move into Britain and for British exports of goods and services to move out of Britain:
Martin Wolf: Britain needs more than fiscal games: ‘The old budgetary theatre will not help improve the dire performance of the UK economy…. In the fourth quarter of last year, real gross domestic product per head was 28 per cent below what it would have been if the 1955-2008 trend had continued…. In all, this is a disaster. The chancellor is right that performance elsewhere has been rather bad, too. But his tendency to fall back on favourable comparisons with the growth of GDP in other large European countries flatters to deceive…. The chancellor has… promise[d] modest tax cuts. The OBR had to grant its imprimatur, because he has made promises of frugality that almost nobody believes will happen, justified in part by promises of higher public sector productivity that are no less implausible…. This, then, is… doubly frivolous.. frivolous relative to the need to transform the… British economy… [and] in its own terms, as a system for ensuring credible fiscal policy… <ft.com/content/dab5f449…>
