Reeves talks a good game on growth, but Labour shows not the will to achieve it
Rachel Reeves tried yesterday to shift the agenda back to the prospects for getting growth going. That is indeed the most important challenge for this Government, just as it was for the last one.
It may sound optimistic to talk about growth as distinct from the miserable business of balancing the books. But raising the growth rate of a mature democracy with lots of well-organised lobby groups is not easy; it involves winning some difficult battles.
The challenge Labour have set themselves is to raise Britain’s growth rate to the highest in the G7. At the moment we are in the middle of the pack at about one per cent per head per year GDP growth – any higher figures which suggest we are doing better than that are driven by population growth, not performance per head.
(It would be great if every politician who says they want to bring down immigration also pledged to use every economic statistic on a per head basis, rather than trying also to use immigration to boost their apparent economic performance.)
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