Andrew Griffith is the Shadow Secretary of State for Business & Trade, MP for Arundel & South Downs and a former FTSE100 Finance Director & COO.
As Keir Starmer stumbles through another week as Prime Minister in name only, the real story is Britain slipping ever closer to economic oblivion.
UK political commentary is easily distracted by talk of the colour of the front door whilst the house behind crumbles to the ground. What Britain needs is not more political intrigue but an economic transformation on a scale not seen in decades.
Asked about the prospects for economies like the UK, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon summed up the situation most succinctly: “You’ve got to compete. There’s no divine right to success”. Instead, Westminster continues to act as if the world owes us a living and that ‘growth’ is a Harry Potter-esque condition to be conjured up by simply saying the right words.
The results have objectively been a disaster in plain sight. Britain ranks 29th in the 2025 IMD World Competitiveness Index, squarely behind economic minnows like Belgium. Median wages are still lower in real terms than in 2007, while we have seen constant real terms rises in the minimum wage. While I accept “GDP per capita”, is not a phrase you hear down the pub, it is a strong measure of how rich Brits are, and it hasn’t risen either. Most would agree that Britain neither is, nor feels, richer now than 20 years ago. We may not yet notice, but the talented and ambitious young sense the absence of a positive vibe here most of all, and they are voting with their feet.
How has this happened? A failed economic consensus at the top, for which our own party must shoulder much responsibility. I only came into politics in 2019, unusually leaving a 25-year career in business including as Board Director and Chair of FTSE100 companies to do so. The jury is still out on whether that move was wise, but I could not be passive whilst the Conservative party was veering at some velocity away from its core economic principles of free markets, individual choice, and fiscal discipline.
There is another way. But it will require brutal honesty as politicians of all stripes have spent years deflecting blame to “international factors” and deceptively benchmarking against the G7 club of declinists. A recent IEA poll showed Brits think we are richer than most US states. In fact, we are poorer than even the poorest of them, just as we are being overtaken by nimbler, G20 and OECD economies.
The real problem is that whilst competitor countries have bet on the free market, with minimal strategic interventions, we — the country that articulated the concept of free market economics — have given up on it. As Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs elegantly set out in The Critic, Britain today is closer to a command economy than a free market one. We are beset with price controls, cross-subsidies, friction taxes and complex webs of regulation. This week Labour’s Kings Speech will be at it again, reportedly with micro regulation of secondary ticket sales; an issue far from even the top twenty most pressing that our nation faces. Britain has chocked private sector enterprise. This has made us poor.
You don’t have to go far to find examples. The Renters’ Rights Act essentially expropriates flats through a combination of de-facto rent controls and unlimited tenancies. The intentions may be noble, but the result is already higher rents and fewer landlords.
Successive governments have caused energy prices to soar by chocking supply and layering on interventionist subsidies and excessive taxes.
The list goes on: the spurious pay litigation based on soviet-style determinations of ‘equal value’, viability destroying ‘affordable’ housing targets, arbitrary discounts for benefits claimants, or restrictions on what type of vehicles we can buy. The crux is that in every corner of life the state creates problems by meddling in the markets or failing in its basic responsibilities. Faed with the consequences, it then tries to fix those problems with yet more meddling.
Prime Ministers under Conservative and Labour governments ignored years of pleas from the steel, chemicals and ceramics sectors to reduce the price of energy and cut uncompetitive climate regulations. When the industries finally collapsed, Labour ministers rushed to provide taxpayer subsidies to keep them afloat. The socialist adage applies: if it moves, tax it – when it stops moving, subsidise it.
In the philosophical vacuum left by past governments, eager to appease the public with quick and easy fixes, these policies have become popular. A recent Opinium poll for The Critic showed that 38 per cent of Conservatives and 40 per cent of the public would back price controls on groceries. A genuinely mad idea that killed millions in the 20th century and, mercifully for mankind, is today reserved for only the most North Korean basket case economics.
Just as the Conservatives abandoned price controls in the 1970s in favour of an economic revolution under Margaret Thatcher, we must be the advocates of that radical revolution today. This won’t immediately be popular, but you don’t win an argument by not having it. Almost two generations have never heard many of the first-principles arguments for markets made well — although many Conservative MPs and groups like the Next Gen Tories are rapidly stepping into that void.
Over the next few years things are only likely to get worse. Labour will continue to borrow huge sums, because they don’t understand that someone has to be willing to buy all the debt they issue. Like in the 1970s, the markets will demand ever more in return for that borrowing. Our national debt will swell and debt interest (already near £120 billion a year) will soar. Like in the 1970s, reality will eventually come knocking.
When Conservatives return to office, we will need to be ready with our radical and ambitious plans to cut the size of the state and scythe through regulation. Only yesterday, we set out a broad tranche of our legislative plan for government in an alternative Kings Speech. It was far more optimistic than Starmer tying our fortunes closer to the slow-or-no growth EU. In the time before the next election, we will continue to engage with the difficult questions around welfare, pensions, health, and growth that generations of politicians have sought to ignore.
Uniting all the threads of policy will be a clear plan to restore the primacy of markets. We will need to rein in cross-subsidies, remove price controls, lower taxes and unshackle business – especially the smallest enterprises – by cutting everything from reporting regulations and EDI rules to social value requirements and net-zero.
All of this will face resistance and all of it will require strong leaders who can press their case. But if we don’t do it, history will remember us as the generation that finally bankrupted Britain. As Kemi said from the outset: “we must tell the truth”, even if it is uncomfortable. We cannot accept another decade of managed decline. I know that voters will not either.
Andrew Griffith is the Shadow Secretary of State for Business & Trade, MP for Arundel & South Downs and a former FTSE100 Finance Director & COO.
As Keir Starmer stumbles through another week as Prime Minister in name only, the real story is Britain slipping ever closer to economic oblivion.
UK political commentary is easily distracted by talk of the colour of the front door whilst the house behind crumbles to the ground. What Britain needs is not more political intrigue but an economic transformation on a scale not seen in decades.
Asked about the prospects for economies like the UK, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon summed up the situation most succinctly: “You’ve got to compete. There’s no divine right to success”. Instead, Westminster continues to act as if the world owes us a living and that ‘growth’ is a Harry Potter-esque condition to be conjured up by simply saying the right words.
The results have objectively been a disaster in plain sight. Britain ranks 29th in the 2025 IMD World Competitiveness Index, squarely behind economic minnows like Belgium. Median wages are still lower in real terms than in 2007, while we have seen constant real terms rises in the minimum wage. While I accept “GDP per capita”, is not a phrase you hear down the pub, it is a strong measure of how rich Brits are, and it hasn’t risen either. Most would agree that Britain neither is, nor feels, richer now than 20 years ago. We may not yet notice, but the talented and ambitious young sense the absence of a positive vibe here most of all, and they are voting with their feet.
How has this happened? A failed economic consensus at the top, for which our own party must shoulder much responsibility. I only came into politics in 2019, unusually leaving a 25-year career in business including as Board Director and Chair of FTSE100 companies to do so. The jury is still out on whether that move was wise, but I could not be passive whilst the Conservative party was veering at some velocity away from its core economic principles of free markets, individual choice, and fiscal discipline.
There is another way. But it will require brutal honesty as politicians of all stripes have spent years deflecting blame to “international factors” and deceptively benchmarking against the G7 club of declinists. A recent IEA poll showed Brits think we are richer than most US states. In fact, we are poorer than even the poorest of them, just as we are being overtaken by nimbler, G20 and OECD economies.
The real problem is that whilst competitor countries have bet on the free market, with minimal strategic interventions, we — the country that articulated the concept of free market economics — have given up on it. As Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs elegantly set out in The Critic, Britain today is closer to a command economy than a free market one. We are beset with price controls, cross-subsidies, friction taxes and complex webs of regulation. This week Labour’s Kings Speech will be at it again, reportedly with micro regulation of secondary ticket sales; an issue far from even the top twenty most pressing that our nation faces. Britain has chocked private sector enterprise. This has made us poor.
You don’t have to go far to find examples. The Renters’ Rights Act essentially expropriates flats through a combination of de-facto rent controls and unlimited tenancies. The intentions may be noble, but the result is already higher rents and fewer landlords.
Successive governments have caused energy prices to soar by chocking supply and layering on interventionist subsidies and excessive taxes.
The list goes on: the spurious pay litigation based on soviet-style determinations of ‘equal value’, viability destroying ‘affordable’ housing targets, arbitrary discounts for benefits claimants, or restrictions on what type of vehicles we can buy. The crux is that in every corner of life the state creates problems by meddling in the markets or failing in its basic responsibilities. Faed with the consequences, it then tries to fix those problems with yet more meddling.
Prime Ministers under Conservative and Labour governments ignored years of pleas from the steel, chemicals and ceramics sectors to reduce the price of energy and cut uncompetitive climate regulations. When the industries finally collapsed, Labour ministers rushed to provide taxpayer subsidies to keep them afloat. The socialist adage applies: if it moves, tax it – when it stops moving, subsidise it.
In the philosophical vacuum left by past governments, eager to appease the public with quick and easy fixes, these policies have become popular. A recent Opinium poll for The Critic showed that 38 per cent of Conservatives and 40 per cent of the public would back price controls on groceries. A genuinely mad idea that killed millions in the 20th century and, mercifully for mankind, is today reserved for only the most North Korean basket case economics.
Just as the Conservatives abandoned price controls in the 1970s in favour of an economic revolution under Margaret Thatcher, we must be the advocates of that radical revolution today. This won’t immediately be popular, but you don’t win an argument by not having it. Almost two generations have never heard many of the first-principles arguments for markets made well — although many Conservative MPs and groups like the Next Gen Tories are rapidly stepping into that void.
Over the next few years things are only likely to get worse. Labour will continue to borrow huge sums, because they don’t understand that someone has to be willing to buy all the debt they issue. Like in the 1970s, the markets will demand ever more in return for that borrowing. Our national debt will swell and debt interest (already near £120 billion a year) will soar. Like in the 1970s, reality will eventually come knocking.
When Conservatives return to office, we will need to be ready with our radical and ambitious plans to cut the size of the state and scythe through regulation. Only yesterday, we set out a broad tranche of our legislative plan for government in an alternative Kings Speech. It was far more optimistic than Starmer tying our fortunes closer to the slow-or-no growth EU. In the time before the next election, we will continue to engage with the difficult questions around welfare, pensions, health, and growth that generations of politicians have sought to ignore.
Uniting all the threads of policy will be a clear plan to restore the primacy of markets. We will need to rein in cross-subsidies, remove price controls, lower taxes and unshackle business – especially the smallest enterprises – by cutting everything from reporting regulations and EDI rules to social value requirements and net-zero.
All of this will face resistance and all of it will require strong leaders who can press their case. But if we don’t do it, history will remember us as the generation that finally bankrupted Britain. As Kemi said from the outset: “we must tell the truth”, even if it is uncomfortable. We cannot accept another decade of managed decline. I know that voters will not either.