We are heading for economic ruin, and no political party has what it takes to stop this

Telegraph

24-05-2025

What a dreadful week. For the first time, I find myself wondering whether there will be anything left to salvage. I don't mean for Sir Keir Starmer. No, I mean for Britain.
Everything that elevated us above the run of nations is being lost: our competitiveness, our sovereignty, our credit-worthiness, our prestige. We are diminished morally, financially and, after the Chagos surrender, physically.
At the start of the week, a different future looked possible. Labour had put the Chagos deal on hold, reluctant to hand billions of pounds to a foreign government while cutting benefits at home. There was talk of how, under the influence of his no-nonsense enforcers, Pat McFadden and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer was becoming more sensitive to voters. Just as the foreign aid budget had been cut to increase defence spending, so we were told to expect hard-edged policies on immigration, net zero and welfare.
But, when the moment came, Labour returned to its comfort zone. Instead of cancelling the payments to Mauritius, it cancelled its sole attempt to trim the benefits bill, namely the removal of the winter fuel allowance from all but the poorest pensioners.
At that moment, any hopes of a more fiscally responsible Labour Government dissolved. All those briefings to the effect that Labour would act where the Tories lacked public trust – cracking down on bogus sicknotes, ending the state's monolithic control of healthcare – were exposed as wishful thinking. When push came to shove, Labour would not challenge the prejudices of its core constituency.
That core constituency is no longer the working class. Rather, it is what we might call the perking class, made up of those who depend directly or indirectly on state handouts: quangocrats, BBC employees, civil servants, human rights lawyers, white-collar shop stewards. A subset of the perking class is the shirking class: people who will vote against any party that makes it tougher to get signed off work.
If Labour could not slow, even slightly, the ballooning of the state pensions bill, we can forget about Liz Kendall's benefits cuts. The pensioners who would have lost their winter fuel payments were largely Tories. The working-age people who watch YouTube videos on how to qualify for invalidity payments are Labour.
Here was a vision of the next four years: a Labour Government prepared to spill the cash in every direction while doing nothing to generate more wealth. Mauritius was paid to take over territory that it had already been paid for renouncing. The EU was paid for graciously taking over our food standards – just in time for its trade war with the US, our chief export destination. Meanwhile, the welfare bill continued to grow.
We are heading for national penury. Labour is not just expanding the state, giving pay rises to its public-sector friends while making their work-from-home arrangements permanent. It is simultaneously driving taxpayers to less punitive jurisdictions.
Ministers seem not to understand why there might be a problem with pushing out a millionaire every 45 minutes. Leftist commentators positively cheered when it was reported that Britain had suffered the largest fall in the number of billionaires since records began. But who do they imagine is picking up the departing plutocrats' share of the tax bill?
In any case, it is not just plutocrats. The real story, masked by our net immigration figures, is that we are also losing young entrepreneurs at every level. Never mind hedgies and property moguls. Beauticians, fitness instructors, IT consultants and estate agents are emigrating in pursuit of higher salaries, lower taxes and better weather.
Many nurses in the UAE's top hospitals come from Scotland, as do a lot of the doctors. Who can blame them? Their colleagues in the UK are gearing up for yet another strike because what the Government manages to squeeze from the private sector is never enough. We train medical students expensively only to watch them cross the seas for better pay and conditions – in practice, if not in theory, ending their student loan repayments.
Their places are taken by unskilled immigrants, most of whom become a net drain on the Exchequer. So the vicious cycle continues: higher tax rates, lower revenues, worse public services and a deterioration of the workforce.
What might break the cycle? The first challenge is to forge a credible opposition. I don't intend to repeat all my arguments for a Tory/Reform entente. I have been periodically making that case in these pages since last year, but few in either party want to hear it. I will simply observe that, if I were to anonymise the reactions of the two parties to the EU and Chagos deals this week, you would not be able to tell which was which. Their divisions are rooted in past grudges, not present policy. Still, let's suppose that the two Right-of-centre parties managed to form a parliamentary majority. Do they have what it takes to nudge us out of our nosedive?
To get back to the growth that we enjoyed before the massive expansion of the state under Gordon Brown, we need to cut government spending by a third. Nothing in either the Conservative or Reform programmes suggests that they are prepared for the radical solutions that the moment demands. Neither party backed Labour's mild reduction in pensioner benefits. Both theoretically favour smaller government; both oppose specific cuts.
To be fair, they are accurately representing their voters. When the condition is as serious as ours, and the treatment so unpleasant, sufferers will often cast around for quack alternatives. Angela Rayner pretends we can solve our problems through even higher taxes – taxes of the most anti-competitive sort, falling mainly on savers. Reform and the Tories pretend that we can get the savings we need from foreign aid or efficiency drives or scrapping DEI programmes.
The truth is that we need to abolish entire departments, halve the state payroll and remove the Government from swathes of public life. We need to dismantle the Blairite juridical state that prevents elected governments from implementing their promises. We need to repeal the laws on which that state rests – the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, the Climate Change Act – and the quangos they spawned.
We need to let ministers appoint their own senior officials, and to allow the Lord Chancellor to remove activist judges. We need to overhaul the immigration system, automatically removing illegal entrants and letting them appeal against that decision only afterwards and from overseas.
We need to replace the NHS with Singapore-style individual healthcare accounts. Instead of penalising our private schools, we should be replicating their success in the state sector by introducing school vouchers. We should scrap the EU-era tariffs and regulations that, five years on, still clog up our books. We should replace the ECHR with a Bill of Rights that would restrict itself to guaranteeing our basic liberties: free speech, free association, free contract, free worship and equality before the law: no more protected characteristics.
Simply to list these things is to see how far any party or, indeed, public opinion, is from them. Even before 2020, Britain was in an authoritarian mood. Since the dreadful lockdowns, the state has become, for many, a first rather than a last resort.
An ugly phrase kept coming into my head this week: De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, or On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. It was the name of a tract by a fifth- or sixth-century Welsh monk, Gildas, who chronicled the destruction of his country by the invading Anglo-Saxons. To Gildas, the barbarians were simply an instrument of divine justice. It was the sinful Britons who had brought the disaster on themselves.
Is there time to turn aside? Are we ready to vote for candidates who offer hard truths rather than sweet delusions? Are we prepared to accept that public spending is limited by the laws of scarcity, not the meanness of politicians? Perhaps. Or perhaps, like the Britons of Gildas's time, we have already left it too late.