Saturday 22 March started like any normal weekend. Awake earlier than I’d hoped. Debating with my toddler why toast was better than crisps for breakfast. A quick gym session. An even quicker dip in the cold plunge pool.
But that’s where the normality ended.
By 14:30, I had arrived at King’s House in London to find half a dozen volunteers in Looking For Growth T-shirts setting up cameras, pinning A1 paper to the walls and arranging chairs for over 200 guests. By 15:15, the venue was packed. Full of optimistic, ambitious and energised individuals from every walk of life, gathered to talk about growth.
This is not normal.
Over the next five hours, that energy only intensified.
CEOs, students, journalists, programmers, policy researchers and investors sat shoulder to shoulder to hear from the major political parties. Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Business Secretary, laid out the key issues holding Britain back and the ten policies he’d like to see implemented. Zia Yusuf, Chairman of Reform UK, delivered a powerful call to action and argued why his party was the political alternative to managed decline. Chris Curtis, Co-Chair of the Labour Growth Group, made the case for fighting for growth within government and emphasised how his group is pushing Labour to go further.
But this wasn’t a one-way street of political messaging. Harriet Green, founder of HSG Advisory, shared sharp, candid lessons on building businesses where the state has failed to deliver. Dominic Cummings, in expert form, gave a wide-ranging and unsparing critique of the broken systems we live under and laid out practical ways to fix them.
This wasn’t just talk. Real policy was made in the room, and Chris Curtis publicly committed to tying his future MP pay rises to the median increase in the private sector. These commitments – and the level of cross-party passion – would be remarkable at any event.
But Looking For Growth isn’t aiming for remarkable. It’s aiming to change the game.
Throughout the day, five workshops tackled some of the most critical issues facing Britain: from ‘Ozempic for the State’ – a provocative look at how to slim down bloated public spending and strip away regulation that chokes innovation – to ‘The Robots are Coming’, a deep dive into how Britain can seize the AI opportunity and lead in the next industrial revolution.
Participants didn’t just listen – they contributed. Experts, founders and students provided ambitious solutions on everything from civil service reform to energy policy, infrastructure, AI and data governance. It was a rare thing: a room full of people trying to fix problems, not just score points.
This kind of gathering shouldn’t be unusual. But it is.
That so many people showed up on a Saturday, unpaid, unaffiliated and full of ideas, is a testament to how deeply people care. It shows how fed up people are with decline, and how ready they are to choose something better. There’s hunger. Not just for economic growth, but for new ideas, for ambition, for hope and for a politics that doesn’t accept failure.
What we saw at King’s House was the power of our new movement. LFG is just getting started. To capitalise and achieve systemic change, it needs to 10x. 10x in size, in reach and in impact. That means more people, more events, more solutions, more pressure. It means translating ambition into action, and action into results.
Thank you to everyone who came, spoke, volunteered, hosted or simply listened. Thank you to those already helping us build.
Looking For Growth is not normal. But that’s exactly why it’ll work.
To learn more about LFG or to support the movement, visit https://lookingforgrowth.uk/
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