"This week Donald Trump has shown that another world is possible. Unshackling the economy can still turn us around"
Telegraph: 22 January 2025: Allister Heath argues that Britain has a choice: we can double down on our mistakes, and race towards miserable irrelevance, or we can swallow our pride and learn from Trump. Which will it be?
"Britain is cooked. Thirty years of malgovernment, ideological derangement and relentless self-sabotage have ruined us. We are careering towards quasi-bankruptcy, our international reputation shot, our society fractured, our citizens impoverished, unhealthy and demoralised, our public sphere strewn with litter, and our institutions discredited. Crime and disorder are at intolerable levels. Those who can are fleeing.
Little of value is ever built, and certainly not enough homes or infrastructure. Our energy costs are the highest in the world, and blackouts loom. Goods, services, housing, transport and healthcare are rationed by government fiat, and congestion, over-regulation, bureaucracy and propaganda grind down anybody with any ambition, courage or creativity.
We are craving a hard reset, but Keir Starmer, our worst prime minister in fifty years, is doubling down on the toxic mix of socialism, class warfare, uncontrolled and often low-grade migration, confiscatory taxation, net zero extremism, regulatory zealotry and woke nihilism that has brought Britain to its knees. He is the ultimate non-player character, unable to imagine a different way forward, convinced of his righteousness as Britain races towards fiscal armageddon.
The scale of the catastrophe appears belatedly to be dawning on Rachel Reeves. The Chancellor is bigging up a trade deal with China, signalling her support for expanding Heathrow and seeking to speed up infrastructure projects. Such granular initiatives make sense, but don’t amount to a coherent plan, let alone a diagnosis of our pathologies: they are panic moves from a clueless administration whose tax raids and attacks on business have trashed the economy."