Rishi on affordability versus growth continued

I put up a quote at the weekend from a column in The Times by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

The honesty of the column enormously impressed me: how many senior politicians an you think of who would write for publication that they are concerned about their successor repeating their own mistake?

Rishi argues that the politicians' dilemma is this - almost every reputable economist will tell you that if you want to provide decent public services while protecting the standards of living of everyone in society, especially the most vulnerable, the most important  thing you should concentrate on is economic growth.

(Even Starmer appeared to understand that at the outset.)

But that is "Jam tomorrow" and is rarely at the top of the priority list for swing voters.

You can't deliver a better society without growth, and you can't deliver growth if you listen to every trend on social media and the newspapers (or if you listen to a single word that delusional people like the Green party say)

His article includes this chart, based on ONS data and his own calculations, about what has happened to growth in productivity per hour worked since the crash of 2008. You can argue about the extent to which the trend in productivity growth between the late 1990s and 2008 was sustainable but you cannot argue about the fact that although there was some modest growth between about 2015 and about 2022, since 2008 under governments in which all the main parties participated, growth in hourly productivity largely flatlined.





 







This flatlining of productivity per hour instead of growth is the biggest single reason for most of Britain's problems. And no party which doesn't have a credible plan to fix this problem is going to solve Britain's problems.

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