With Rachel Reeves swerving allegations that she misled the country over its finances, David Lammy shutting down jury service because we can’t afford to pay for it, and Shabana Mahmood doing some creative accounting to keep asylum numbers down, it is perhaps understandable that what could be a far greater pivot in government thinking has been overshadowed in recent weeks.
Late in November, the Office of Fair Trading’s former head John Fingleton published his review into Britain’s nuclear regulation. In a much-quoted topline, Fingleton concluded that Britain “has become the most expensive place in the world to build nuclear projects”. Regulatory complexity and risk aversion has taken the UK from nuclear pioneer to laggard.
The effects have been evident to any Brit familiar with their own energy bills. For a three-bed house you can expect to pay between £1,800 and £2,000 annually for gas and electricity, according to British Gas. For industry, British energy is the costliest among any member of the International Energy Agency, which includes much of the developed world.
A lack of nuclear energy is not the sole cause of our woes, but it has left us far more exposed to the vicissitudes of global energy prices than was necessary. Nothing better demonstrates the depth of our folly than a video of Nick Clegg from 2010, in which the future deputy prime minister dismissed extra capacity for nuclear energy generation on the grounds that it would not come on stream until 2022.
In fairness to Clegg, his later government colleague David Cameron was also not keen on nuclear, owing to the “problems of nuclear waste”. Politicians from Labour’s left to the Scottish National Party have also been reluctant, with the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan in 2011 doing little to warm the wider public to the potential of nuclear energy.
It is therefore significant that Keir Starmer has embraced the Fingleton review. Paraphrasing the report approvingly, the prime minister echoed worries of “pointless gold-plating, unnecessary red-tape” and “well-intentioned, but fundamentally misguided, environmental regulations”.
This is all good news for British energy bills, or will be in a few years. But the most significant line is what follows. “The truth”, according to Starmer, “is we see this story repeated again and again right across our economy”, where the government is systemically failing to speedily approve everything from data centres to laboratories.
“Rooting out excessive costs in every corner of our economy is an essential step to cutting the cost of living and creating more dynamic markets for business,” the prime minister said, adding that he’d be asking the business secretary to apply Fingleton’s principles across the government’s industrial strategy.
To some degree this is the standard Blairite blather that we’ve come to expect from Starmer’s tribute act. During the last electoral cycle, the incoming prime minister could often be heard claiming that Labour was the “party of business”, admittedly going up against a party whose former leader had told business to go explore leisure and travel.
With productivity growth over this period essentially negligible … it’s hardly surprising that people feel this country is in managed decline
But while it’s always wise to retain your cynicism, allowing the country to build and grow again will be a far more longstanding legacy for Starmer than whether he removes the two-child benefit cap or takes away the pensioners’ winter cruise allowance.
That it’s become banal to point out that economic growth has stagnated in this country ever since the Great Recession should not bely its importance. With productivity growth over this period essentially negligible, with a commensurate impact on pay, it’s hardly surprising that people feel this country is in managed decline.
Growth has not been absent from British political discourse in recent years, but it has not taken centre stage either. Arguably, when it comes to Brexit, immigration and identity, we have been talking about more important things. And yet, there’s been no reason we couldn’t have been building more things while we talked.
It is in this context that groups like Looking for Growth have sprung up. Founded in 2024 by former university lecturer Lawrence Newport and software engineer Joe Reeve, the group wants Britain to “build cheap, abundant energy and vital infrastructure”, “enjoy lower prices, good homes and safe, clean streets”, and for the country “to be the best place in the world to develop frontier technologies”.
It is the latest example of the so-called “abundance agenda” that began life in the US as the brainchild of journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Their book, Abundance, argues that efforts to materially improve American lives are held back by regulatory overreach, notably the gold-plating of policy with diversity goals, climate change mitigations and other sops to various progressive pressure groups.
It all sounds like the kind of missive you’d get from Tufton Street. But fundamentally there is a near apolitical goal here. Outside of the kind of Green party voter who believes that more economic growth will inevitably harm the planet, nearly everyone can agree that making people richer while making life’s necessities cheaper is a good thing.
That’s why Looking for Growth’s conference in October, ahead of the Budget, attracted speakers from Labour and the Conservatives, as well as the impossible to classify Dominic Cummings. Whatever your stance on how the pie should be divided, it’s easy to agree that it should be grown.
Whether Labour can pull it off before the next election is of course another matter, though there are some encouraging signs. Even before Fingleton, the government showed some appetite for cutting red tape, with Reeves telling regulators in February that they would be assessed twice a year on their efforts to make policies more amenable to economic growth.
And in success or failure, it will be these efforts that determine whether historians see this Labour government as having taken the right steps to modernise the country and improve its citizens lives, or accepted the doom spiral that has set in since Gordon Brown saved the world in 2008.
