Make Britain rich again – by Iain Martin

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The entrepreneur Matt Clifford made a speech last month at the O2 that is well worth watching because it is so damn cheering, combining economic realism with optimism about Britain’s prospects if – big if – we can get it together.

Clifford was speaking at a conference held by a new insurgent organisation called Looking for Growth, of which more in a moment. What was so transgressive, shocking even, about Clifford’s fourteen minutes of remarks is that they were optimistic and hopeful. This was a counter cultural address in which he told an enthusiastic, young audience that national decline and stagnation are not preordained. It doesn’t have to be like this and we can draw inspiration from our history of innovation to get us out of our low growth doom loop, he said. The speech is quite unlike anything you’ll hear in most of our media, which is (quite understandably) focused on how dysfunctional our politics has become and how deficient is our state capacity.

I’ll admit as a life-long journalist – now more like a recovering journalist – that of late even for a news addict like me the news, particularly on social media, has grown oppressive. I have started to try to limit consumption, sticking to a handful of respected outlets among them a few key Substacks, and I hear all the time others are doing this too. At dinner on Thursday night in Manchester, where I was delivering an after dinner speech to a business audience, several guests told me they avoid too much exposure to current affairs although they know that what is happening is important. No wonder when everything we hear seems to be doom. News now moves so fast, all of it covered by an increasingly bewildered media battling to keep up with technology and how it is changing our tastes and habits.

One even hears it said – as on the promotional film for that BBC Newscast podcast – that the news or politics have never been like this before, never so crazy is the implication, which is why we need to hear about it constantly. Which is obviously rubbish. Look at previous decades such as the 1920s, or the 1940s, or the 1970s. The Seventies were defined by tremendous turmoil from two oil shocks, a deep recession, rampant paranoia in politics, the Iranian Revolution and for British children sinister public information films warning of imminent immolation by electricity sub-station or overhead wires or early death in a quarry.

Still, perhaps because I had such a happy childhood I look back on the 1970s as a boundlessly optimistic era defined by the expansion of the British middle class, the food revolution and widening access to travel. All this good stuff happened even while the world and the economy seemed to be collapsing. A friend from the Fleet Street era still maintains that the 1970s were fantastic because he and his colleagues got such massive annual pay rises. When I point out that these pay rises were eroded by inflation, which was also massive, he waves his hand dismissively. His point is that our then politicians – and what a breed they were, the post-War generation, or most of them apart from the scoundrels – were battling epic historic forces and we all got on with it, life carried on, we came through it stronger and here we all are, still on the go.

We need a dose of that realistic optimism today. And when a friend sent me the video of Matt Clifford’s speech evangelising for growth it hit the spot in that regard.

You can watch it here.

Clifford has started firms and been a senior adviser to the government on AI. The Looking for Growth event was packed apparently. They want radical planning reform, technology unleashed, a tax system that works and pro-business supply side reform implemented to the max.

Cards on the table, I expect I won’t subscribe to every one of their policies or ideas. One attendee says it is too much of a Dominic Cummings fan club and having critiqued Dom as being brilliant but too often (what’s the word?) nuts that is always going to make me suspicious. But there is such an energy about what Looking for Growth are saying that they are worth listening to.

What’s interesting is that there is an observable wave of this, of younger people who like business and innovation deciding that actually they have had enough of decline and stagnation.