In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, notes that "Labour’s agenda so far has been to hike up taxes on the private sector, increase state spending and to embrace a plethora of new regulations." This should provide an opportunity for Kemi and the Conservative opposition. 

It seems our beleaguered chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is attempting to pivot her entire economic strategy. If we are to believe her words from earlier this week, she really is now “laser focused on growth”.

This has unsurprisingly opened up a rift in the government by simply proving the rather obvious point that politicians face trade-offs.

You can decide to end drilling in the North Sea, to ban the extraction of shale gas, to prohibit airport expansion and to make energy more expensive to hit a carbon target. You might well get to a greener Britain as a result. But you should be unsurprised if economic growth is low or even negative as a result too.

Labour’s agenda so far has been to hike up taxes on the private sector, increase state spending and to embrace a plethora of new regulations. To give just two examples, the government wants to further regulate the labour market and to impose a state regulator on English football (thereby part-nationalising one of our fastest growing sectors of the last thirty years). You can do these things if you like, but you are very likely to make people poorer as a result. You certainly shouldn’t be surprised if that’s the outcome.

I suspect that neither the Reeves nor the Miliband wing of the government will emerge entirely victorious. They will probably grind themselves into a stalemate. That would be better than them continuing to roll out a swathe of damaging policies but it is hardly the medicine the economy and the country needs.

In theory, this should provide an opportunity for Kemi and the Conservative opposition. But so far, the party appears to have been unable to quite seize it. Indeed, opinion polls are increasingly tending to place the Tories in third place. The party is struggling to answer the question as to why it didn’t conduct the necessary surgery over its fourteen years in office.

To my mind the answer to that question needs to be that we utterly failed to reform and reset the institutional framework of the UK. That meant we were trying to steer a train on rail track laid by Tony Blair. You can’t really steer a train – the track sets the direction you are going to end up going in.

A look over to America might provide a solution. President Trump has acted with astonishing speed in issuing a flurry of executive orders. However, he hasn’t really surprised anyone. He made entirely plain throughout his campaign that the USA needed enormous change and the Washington authorities needed a huge overhaul.

That overhaul is now happening and I expect the results to be both dramatic and positive. (If you missed it, you can see my conversation with Greg Swenson of Republicans Overseas UK earlier this week on what we can learn from Trump here).

I’m very fond of Ronald Reagan’s old adage that there are no easy answers but that there are simple answers. What he meant was that the right prescriptions can be politically challenging even if they are straightforward and logical. This government – and let’s be honest long stretches of the last one – have tended to go down the “easy” rather than the “simple” route whilst professing how terribly difficult all the decisions they face apparently are.

We therefore have had a political consensus which wills the ends of economic growth and prosperity but has been unwilling to will the means.

There will be huge electoral dividends for any political party that can articulate a radical and decisive way of mending broken Britain. But it will require considerable courage and brilliant communications. Those seem a little thin on the ground at present.

Keep the flag of freedom flying.