I sometimes think that everything that is wrong with the way that Britain is governed today can be boiled down to a single issue: we are ruled by people who think that ‘to grow’ is a transitive verb. They actually think that government has it in its power to create wealth. In their worldview, economic policy is really just a series of levers and buttons that politicians fiddle about with in order to ‘grow’ the economy as such. And policy can therefore be assessed as being good or bad depending on whether it can be plausibly be said to be ‘delivering’ growth, or words along those lines.
We got an interesting insight into the underlying psychology of this daft notion in a face-saving, rally-the-troops style interview which the U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, gave to the Guardian in the run-up to Christmas. Things are going extremely badly for Reeves. She has been embroiled in a rumbling scandal concerning alleged falsification of her CV, and her Autumn Budget is widely considered to have been a disaster that is fuelling a “hiring recession“, leading to higher inflation and bringing growth to a shuddering halt. So this underarm throw of an interview with the Guardian, the mainstream news outlet guaranteed to be most naturally sympathetic to Labour politicians experiencing a downturn in fortune, was an opportunity for her to portray herself as still possessing something like initiative.
Instructively, she came out swinging for one figure in particular – Nigel Farage – whom she castigated for his purported inability to come up with “answers”:
What’s Nigel Farage’s answer on the economy? How is he going to make working people better off? He hasn’t got a clue. How’s he going to grow the economy? He’s not got the faintest.
“He has no idea on the biggest issue that matters to voters,” she continued, “which is tackling the cost of living crisis.”
Reeves, like the entire Cabinet, is obviously worried about Nigel Farage and the momentum that has accrued to Reform U.K. since the election earlier this year. That she should be training her guns on him is no surprise. It is the angle of attack that is intriguing. Reform’s ideas for the economy are basically Thatcherite – in the previous election, the party promised that if elected it would cut taxes (mostly by raising thresholds on, for example, income tax and inheritance tax) and also shrink spending. So it isn’t, as Reeves alleges, that Farage or Reform has no “answers”. It is rather that those “answers” are not designed to make people better off, grow the economy or tackle the cost of living crisis. They are, rather, designed to get the state out of the way so that those problems can be resolved by society itself.
Reeves, I am sure, can wrap her head around this concept in principle – doubtless she has read a bit of Hayek, if only to try to understand why he was wrong – but she cannot, to use a Heinlein-ism, ‘grok’ it. Her intuitions flow in precisely the opposite direction: society is passive, government active; society is naturally in crisis, government is the solution; society’s wealth is small, government will “grow” it; society is badly off, government will make it “better”. So when she is faced with the idea that economies tend to grow for themselves when the state shrinks, she goes through a kind of biological, immune-system response – she rejects the notion as though it were an invasive foreign organism. And this manifests itself as unthinking, blind dismissal: you don’t have a clue. You haven’t the faintest.
Read More: Rachel Reeves’s Abject Failure
