Camilla Cavendish’s op-ed in the FT today makes a case in favour of Prosper, a new centre-right Conservative group. I think, though, it shows the problems the group is going to have in establishing credibility for itself.

The story underlying Cavendish's argument is that the UK was doing pretty well until 2016 when Brexit happened, and then really went off the rails under Boris and Truss.

Brexit and Covid obviously haven’t helped (nor have the Truss, Boris, or Sunak govts since then), but I don’t think this grapples with the performance of the British economy from the mid-2000s onward, which has basically flatlined in productivity terms for twenty years.

The Cameron and May governments that Cavendish views as being the good days (she objects to the line “14 years of Tory failure”) never seriously tackled this, and a lot of the really bad things that we are stuck with now started or were strengthened under them.

- The Cameron govt directed large subsidies to renewable energy, paid for by billpayers (to this day). The Net Zero law was passed by Theresa May.

- The triple lock was introduced by Cameron’s government, which will have raised pension spending by £23 billion/year by 2029 compared to if we'd raised pensions in line with CPI.

- 'Social value' procurement rules which, eg, required small modular nuclear reactor bidders for the govt's competition to promise that 50% of their entire supply chain would be staffed by women.

- The way Stamp Duty was reformed has led to extremely high tax penalties for moving house in London – eg, £63k for a £1.2m house – which has led to even more sclerosis in the housing market.

- Major infrastructure projects like HS2 and Hinkley Point C were approved with governance that has led to enormous cost overruns.

And there is a lot of important stuff they didn't do – any kind of planning reform, cost-reduction for nuclear and transport infrastructure, effective reform of the NHS.

I do agree that the Tories under Badenoch need to be much more detailed and serious about economic policy than they have been. Mel Stride in particular, with his focus on tax giveaways to different voter blocs, seems out of touch with how hated the Tories are and how far they are from power.

But so far Prosper doesn't really seem serious to me if it intends to paint the years to 2010–16 or –19 as being basically well-run and the divergence in the British economy as only happening afterwards (and/or because of Brexit). I would be interested in hearing the "Prosper theory" of stagnant British productivity over the past 20 years.