The UK economy has continued to flatline for the entire second half of 2024. Nothing seems to happen in the UK anymore. There seems to be an atmosphere of decline. House prices are becoming absurd, but no houses can be constructed. Businesses on the high street are closing, but new ones cannot replace them. The examples go on and on, creating a quite grim mood amongst society. The government is obsessed with summoning growth from this dire situation so they can save their skin, claim to be the great society mechanics they imagine they are, and stay in power. The Labour government’s brand of governance appears to believe political institutions and the actors within it are best-suited to create the growth they so desperately need to stay in power; they are going to be sorely disappointed when the “experts” fail them.
A hypothetical, but entirely plausible, scenario may shed some light on the UK’s situation. A construction company CEO goes into his normal day of work. He opens a vast spreadsheet of accounts that show where every single penny in the company is going and what they are hoping to earn in profits. The CEO looks at his spreadsheet and notices that the quantity they acquired of steel that month came at a surprisingly low price; the cost of steel must be falling thus, profit has edged upwards! The CEO now has multiple possible decisions.
They could pay the workers higher if they perceive the fall to be a long-term drop, offer them bonuses if they perceive it is a short-term fall. They could choose to expand the company’s operations to build more houses. The options all present themselves from this spreadsheet that only him and other individuals working within the company can access. The CEO will look at the numbers and choose what they believe to be the best option for the company but the pertinent point is that only they are able to know the wisest decision.
However, an energy regulator is currently in his own office. He’s stewing about how best to help society. What’s trendy right now? Climate change. He sees all the buzz, the many government ministers claiming they will make every effort, strain every sinew to tackle the problems of climate change. So, the regulator writes to the government and states that the production of steel consumes mountains of dirty fossil fuels. To tackle it, they are going to regulate that a certain percentage of energy used by steel producers must come from renewable sources, so that’s exactly what they do. The next month passes, and suddenly, the CEO finds that, due to the regulation, the profit made last month is wiped out and they can no longer sustain the pay rise, hand out a bonus, or expand the company’s production. The very real growth potential has been stymied.
The above is a completely hypothetical, yet intensely realistic, scenario that plagues British society. Imagine that scenario, but thousands of regulations piled upon each other like a great heap. One can see how this completely rearranges the structure of production, but critically, how it contains and shrinks it.
This is not isolated to one sector of Britain. Every facet of life is infected with a state regulator at a preponderance for how to improve society. A van driver in London on a modest income cannot drive his older vehicle around specific parts of London without paying a fee for the luxury, yet he does this while driving a van filled with fuel made artificially expensive by fuel duty. This is not hyperbole for thousands of people in the UK, it is their very real, daily experience.
At every step, they are warping the structure of production that sustains and galvanises human flourishing by directing resources to where society perceives the value to be. Unfortunately, the UK is at the precipice. Stagnation has taken over the UK. Let there be no doubt, it is no coincidence that the British state is consuming more of the economy during peacetime than it ever has before whilst society is dragging itself along. Prices are not an evil capitalist ploy, they seek to signal where society believes value is and points towards where resources should be deployed but regulation, after regulation, has corrupted these signals to the stage where society cannot but trudge along.
One thinks that a group that wishes to manipulate society to a desired end would need to be omnipotent. For most, there exists a little voice when decisions need to be made that affect others. This beseeches them to know as much as you can about the specifics for the individuals involved before coming to a decision. Politicians and state regulators must suppress that voice. They evolve to feel no issue with affecting millions of people they can’t possibly know about. Most barely know anything about their neighbors’ lives, yet feel the righteous urge to support those who would stamp their own agenda into the lives of those very same neighbors.
Politics is merely bombastic hubris that justifies knowing very little, but affecting a lot. Toleration for this kind of ignorance is very rare in the great expanses of private life because it leads to bad outcomes, but in politics it is accepted, encouraged, and allowed to thrive. Humility should not only be valued in private life, it should be demanded by the leaders of our society. A politician seldom runs, stating their knowledge is bare, yet that is exactly how it is.
Statist politicians convince themselves that because they believe a goal is beneficial for humanity that they get to force everyone else along for the ride, often harming millions in the process because they think winning an election (a shambolically poor attempt at consent) gives them justification to use the resources of the masses towards that end. A political gang in the UK won the last election with 33 percent of the vote. More people voted against them than for them, but the statist philosophy explains that this is a just form of consent.
Thinking this through exposes the incoherency and moral depravity of this philosophy. The UK political system has allowed 33 percent of voters to win an election by a landslide and install a particular political party in government for the next five years. During those years, the Labour party can hike taxes, increase regulations, plunder scarce resources, and funnel them into their own boondoggles. And this is supposed to be completely just and moral. You cannot peacefully opt out of this system without risking legal consequences. This is neither just nor peaceful.
There is no greater exemplification of the ignorance of Britain’s political elites than Keir Starmer and the Labour government. They are a thoroughly unimpressive gang who know not that government intervention causes the stagnation of the country. They experience decades in politics, witnessing numerous governments pile regulations on high, see governments growing the size of the state and strangling the market—the only source of productivity in society—and think it was just the wrong regulation.
They don’t journey down a road of abolishing these regulations, instead, they chuck more regulations onto the steaming heap that burdens Britain in a desperate attempt to get it right this time. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that a government that demonstrates zero awareness of how those involved in the private market think and act is composed of career politicians who would not know a business ledger if it jumped up and struck them on the forehead. The economy is stagnating, regulation has restrained the market from creating the growth that thrusts society onward, yet the government is asking the regulators how to create growth. You’d be better asking the axeman how best to survive with no head!
