The New Year brings with it the customary flurry of optimistic economic commentary. Forecasters get a trouser tumescence and revise the growth outlook slightly upward, ministers cite green shoots, business lobby groups issuing cautiously hopeful statements.
Forgive some scepticism. Britain has been here before, and the structural constraints on growth have not shifted materially in the eighteen months since Labour took office.
The UK’s fundamental problem is not cyclical. It is not a matter of waiting for rates to fall far enough or for global demand to pick up. It is structural.
We have the second-highest tax burden in our post-war history, a planning system that makes building anything of scale an act of heroic perseverance, and an energy policy that has consistently prioritised green insanity over affordable power for consumers and industry.
Solving any one of these problems does not require ideological revolution. It just needs competent, sustained attention and a willingness to take on vested interests.
The planning reforms announced last year were a start; they need to go considerably further. The business rates system remains a punitive absurdity for physical enterprises. The NI threshold freeze is quietly strangling low-margin employment. Income tax thresholds will continue to disincentivise earning more until 2031.
The government has the parliamentary majority to act decisively, but lacks the political backbone and brainpower to do anything useful with it.
Macro Aggressions 