On Wednesday the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will set out her latest plans for boosting growth in the UK.

It will be a familiar message. If the mantra that got Keir Starmer’s Labour Government elected was ‘change’, then the overwhelming message since then has been about ‘growth, growth and more growth’. Not since ‘Get Brexit Done’ has there been such a single-minded purpose to an administration.

She will follow in the footsteps of her boss, Keir Starmer, who promised a group of senior city executives this week that he would also “hard wire growth into all decisions” in his Government, adding that in future all of his ministers would always have to “set out the growth credentials of new policies in order to get approval”.

But will this strategy work, and is it right?

The first obstacle to Starmer and Reeves’ plan is the question of whether growth really does lie within the control of individual governments.

It is true to say that the recent performance of the UK in terms of growth and productivity has been poor. Particularly since COVID, the economy has struggled to get back to pre-pandemic levels.

However, such problems can take decades and multiple governments to turn around through patient investment in infrastructure, industrial strategy and education and skills.

Securing sustained growth requires deep roots. There are no quick fixes available to Reeves and certainly not before the OBR reports in March on whether the Government have broken its own borrowing rules.

After the recent close run in with the bond market vigilantes a couple of weeks ago, this latest intervention smells like panic. We now hear from Reeves that Britain needs ‘a dose of Trump positivity’ as she self-consciously shifts from Eeyore to Tigger in the blink of an eye. In talk of ‘releasing the animal spirits of the market’, and therefore the crowding out impact of the state, Reeves is playing with fire as she underpins right-wing frames of the private sector being more important than the public.

But it’s not just the tone of Trump that is being copied, but some of the practice. The boss of the UK’s competition regulator has been sacrificed in favour of an interim who ran Amazon, and now presumably will put profit before public interest. This has worrying echoes of Elon Musk’s role in the US administration.

Everything is now being subordinated to the growth agenda. Lisa Nandy over at the Culture Media and Sport Department spoke at a recent ‘creative industries growth summit’ addressing firms like Netflix offering them stability and investor confidence. She said “You want a government willing to take a bulldozer to every barrier to growth” and promised to take the brakes off some of the fastest growing industries in the UK.

But just as brakes on a car enable the driver to go faster, regulation is crucial to a functioning economy. Without it, monopolies emerge, corners are cut, and people suffer.

The issue is what do we regulate and how. From an environmental perspective, and to get bills down, renewable energy infrastructure should be deregulated, so should planning for new high-speed train networks.

On this basis, the decisions to expand already overheated southeast airports, including potentially Heathrow, looks like a disaster on every front. Is this our version of Trump’s ‘drill baby drill’? Meanwhile the decision to weaken regulation on non-doms, while beefing up regulation on benefit claimants is just the very worst form of the reverse class politics.

The overall sense is of a Government acting on the hoof and it is a strategy that raises more questions than answers.

After all, if you prioritise growth then what happens when business objects to new policy ideas, like the hike in employers’ National Insurance contributions or the New Deal for Workers? As Oliver Shah wrote in the Sunday Times this weekend “Labour is deluded if it thinks it can keep talking about growth while bringing in silly policies such as its proposed workers rights bill.” It’s a mess.

And it begs the question, who benefits from this rush for growth? Presumably, the underlying assumption is that growth will trickle down evenly to all – floating every boat.

In reality this is far from the truth. Over recent decades we have seen increasing social and geographical disparities, as the rich, particularly in the southeast, race ahead of the rest of the country. Meanwhile the medium to long term costs of destabilising financial markets and not attending to climate chaos will add billions of pounds to the public accounts while leaving millions of people suffering unnecessarily.

However, the big question about this growth fixation is, do we need it at all?

I wrote about this in 2009 in a book called All Consuming. Only when we challenge the fundamental notions of what a good life and the good society are, will we start to live the most rewarding lives possible.

Buying stuff we didn’t know we wanted, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t know has become a cultural obsession, made worse by the fact that prices are going up and incomes are flat lining.

We are becoming ever more frustrated turbo consumers. “There are many visions of the good society” wrote J K Gailbraith “but the treadmill is not one of them”. When enough is never enough we simply sow the seeds of disappointment and disaffection which feed either the epidemic of mental illness or the rise of the populist right.

Of course we need to stop people relying on food banks or having to live in mould infested flats. That will take money. But if you think that the already rich and powerful don’t want to be even more rich and powerful, then just maybe think again. Taxing super wealth, not tolerating it, is the best answer to help ‘working families’.

Equally needed is a vision of a good society we can all share, with air we can breathe, the time to read a child a bedtime story, the space and time to let our minds wander and our bodies rest, to be citizens not just consumers. A world in which culture is the very cauldron in which a critique of society should flourish, not just a marketing vehicle for more.

Back in the day when I was a bag carrier for Gordon Brown, I remember a conversation about economic approaches with the then Shadow Treasury team in which Harriet Harman exclaimed ‘when we talk about growth people think we’re talking about cancer’.

Harriet was accidentally onto something, the cancer of the treadmill, the cancer of climate chaos and enforced mass migration because the air burns your lungs and nothing will grow beneath your feet. Let’s grow care and time, our relationships and compassion, let’s grow trees and realistic hope because there is no economic growth on a dead planet.

This article first appeared in the Byline Times on Wednesday the 28th of January 2025.