The hardest thing about being prime minister is that you have no time to think. The urgent crowds out the important time and time again. The result is that once you are in No 10, you are far too often responding to events rather than shaping them.
This problem is compounded by the tyranny of polling. It is much easier to play back to voters what they already feel rather than make — and win — new arguments.
So, when Sir Keir Starmer shifted his priority from economic growth to the cost of living, I sighed in recognition. As PM, I had done the same, making affordability a central part of my pitch. I knew why he had done it — and that it was a mistake.
Focus groups will tell you growth is too abstract. We used to feel certain that a growing economy would make us all healthier and wealthier, but the financial crisis and the low-productivity recovery broke that link.
This is particularly true in those swing seats that flipped to the Tories in 2019 and then back to Labour in 2024. The feeling there is that growth is something that happens to other people, and so gross domestic product numbers cut little ice. We were the fastest-growing economy in the G7 at the time of the last election, and the result showed just how little weight that carried.
GDP increases mean little to voters unless accompanied by a substantial and sustained increase in real wages.
• How does the UK economy compare against its G7 rivals?
So, the temptation is to concentrate instead on specific interventions that people can see. I am sure Labour’s measures — caps on rail fares, energy bill support — will poll better than abstract promises of higher GDP. But the danger is that we can’t see the wood for the trees any more. We are missing the fundamental need for growth and treating the symptoms of low growth, such as soaring living costs, rather than its causes.
This problem is exacerbated by ministers always looking for a quick fix, while pro-growth, supply-side policies can take years to have an impact.
It is growth that will give us the financial and political space to do the right thing. Every ambition we have for our country — security at home and abroad, higher living standards, leadership in the technologies that will define the coming decades — requires growth.
In the coming weeks, I will try to set out here some of the things we should do to improve our economic performance, but what’s certain is that concentrating on capping fares or subsidising bills will not make our economy stronger.
Since the financial crash of 2008, and the precedent set by the bank bailouts, we have grown used to more and more government interventions designed to soften the impact of the sharpest problems. These well-intentioned decisions are crushing the dynamism of our economy by limiting the amount of creative destruction; we have to be prepared to let less productive firms go to the wall even if that requires workers finding jobs elsewhere. Otherwise, neither capital nor labour will be used as efficiently as they should be.
We can be blind to how slow our growth has been because many of our neighbours are in the same boat. Since 2008, our GDP has grown, in real terms, by 21 per cent. This is better than France (18 per cent) and Germany (16 per cent), but half that of the US. Now, you might say this is a result of America becoming the world’s leading oil producer, the remarkable performance of its tech companies, and the fact that the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency allows the US to do things other countries cannot. But Canada (34 per cent) has also comfortably outperformed us.
If we were a US state, we would be the poorest in per capita terms. We should surely aspire to be richer than Mississippi.
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So, we have to be prepared to put growth above other objectives. This won’t be politically straightforward; on too many issues, our revealed preference is for something else.
It’s noble to want to reduce emissions, preserve the green belt, reduce inequality, address regional disparities and enhance social protections. But where these things are in conflict with growth, we must choose growth or we will never break out of the trap we are currently in.
I must admit that, as prime minister, I didn’t always put growth first. Early on, I watered down planning changes to appease MPs worried about the reaction in their constituencies. But when I did try to change restrictive environmental nutrient-neutrality rules to enable more housing to be built, Labour used the House of Lords to block the plan.
The truth is that all of us in British politics need to take our share of the blame for prioritising so many things over growth. If delivering higher growth were politically simple, we would have done it already.
A strong economy would offer us security and prosperity in this new “hard power” world. But the harsh reality is that we can have growth only if we are prepared to accept the trade-offs required to achieve it. If we don’t choose growth, we will become poorer, our welfare state will become less and less sustainable, and our public services will deteriorate.
Growth will, once we are through the initial pain, make our politics less scratchy. Decisions won’t be zero-sum any more. Growth isn’t just one policy in a programme; it’s the policy that makes all others possible.
No government has yet worked out how to win the argument for growth in today’s Britain; how to make the case for it when the alternative is more politically palatable, at least in the short term. Winning this argument won’t be easy in such politically volatile times. But without someone doing so, it is almost impossible to see how we break out of this cycle.
The Sunday Times supports the Richmond Project (richmondproject.org) and the work it undertakes. Rishi Sunak has donated the fee for this column to it