Another author, Samuel Hughes, works for the Centre for Policy Studies (Margaret Thatcher’s favourite think tank), and the last, Sam Bowman, comes from This is Works in Progress, “a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world” and was once an executive director at the ASI.
I mention all this because Brexit is rather swept aside. It appears just twice under ‘setting the scene.’ First, as one of those things that just 'happened' in the 2010s along with covid and second, as the OBR’s reason for the UK losing 4% of GDP, something they dismiss as a “small fraction of the growth we have missed over the past fifteen years.”
It lists a whole lot of stuff that is claimed to be holding us back from enjoying the prosperity that is somehow rightfully ours. I seem to remember ten years ago, this was membership of the EU. I haven’t checked if Bowman, Hughes and Southwood were involved but pre-referendum an awful lot of people on the right working in Tufton Street and elsewhere were knocking out papers arguing that it was over-regulation from Brussels at the root of our problems.
Now that excuse has been eliminated, they're on the lookout for more culprits.
Expensive energy, lack of housing and other infrastructure, over-burdensome and expensive planning rules and so on. They are all characterised as far as I can see, by being wholly separate from the EU. In short, Brexit has achieved nothing in helping to overcome the problems identified in the paper, except to make investment even less likely by shrinking our own domestic market.
One irony is that this investment or rather the paucity of it, both private and public, gets mentioned 57 times in the paper. Another irony is that it is a vindication of Boris Johnson in 2013 when he wrote as London Mayor in The Telegraph:
“If we left the EU, we would end this sterile debate, and we would have to recognise that most of our problems are not caused by 'Bwussels', but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and underinvestment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure.”
So, having made life more difficult for ourselves by quitting the EU, the search is underway for the real reason behind our problems.
Britain is said by the authors to have “enjoyed rapid catch-up growth from the early 1980s” under Thatcher and later, Tony Blair. They don’t mention the EU’s role in this revitalisation which is put down to privatisation along with tax cuts and the curbing of union power as being behind the “fixing” of important swathes of the UK economy.
I think most people nowadays believe that privatisation has been disastrous. The water companies and the railways are cases in point.
Helpfully, a chart is included:
Membership of the EU is totally ignored in this remarkable transformation in GDP per capita.
The paper talks about Britain being the world's leading economy from the mid-eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century before being overtaken by the United States, and remaining Europe's leading economy until the early 1950s, "with the continent’s highest productivity and living standards, and its most advanced innovating firms."
It fails to acknowledge how the EEC and later the EU helped European economies to overtake us from the mid-1950s or how the loss of empire with its millions of captive customers helped to cut Britain's exports, opening up a trade gap and driving down the value of the pound.
Energy, which is covered prominently in the paper as one of the reasons we are falling behind, is today a privatised, fragmented, expensive mess with no clear long-term strategy. The UK produces per capita just two-thirds of what France manages (4,800 kwh per year in Britain versus 7,300 kwh per year in France). Note that France is fully state-owned. The difference is that it makes sensible decisions and privatising the whole thing is not one of them.
Private companies they claim have "tackled chronic underinvestment in sectors that had been neglected under state ownership" - what like Energy and Water?
So, what is their conclusion? I kid you not, this is it:
“We believe that Britain can enjoy such a renewal once more. To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do: build homes, bridges, tunnels, roads, trams, railways, nuclear power plants, grid connections, prisons, aqueducts, reservoirs, and more.”
Brexit was the simple answer ten years ago and has clearly failed, now the authors want to go back to another simple answer of forty years ago - more private sector involvement in public infrastructure and services - which also failed.
If we carry on, within the next century or two we may even accidentally hit on the right answer. Attitude.
