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.
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.
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!
These people know nothing about anything practical. The government bureaucracy knows nothing but how to be a bureaucrat, the professional politicians know nothing but lining their own pockets and the pockets of their donors and only the private sector people know what they want, need and have high priorities. This is another case of tyranny for your own good.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” ― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)