Britain is in decline. Stagnant wages, high cost of living, increasing national debt, historic high taxes, worse services, a flatlining GDP and a frequently decreasing GDP per capita. These are the numbers, but the feeling of decline is all around us. It’s in our streets: we now suffer theft and shoplifting at the highest rates on record, rubbish is literally piling up in councils across the country, and graffiti has become a punctuated part of any urban life.
Britain didn’t use to be this way. Years of mismanagement, low political ambitions, cowardly leadership and a complete inability for governments to take any actions has led to this. We’ve been unable to hold a functioning justice system, a functioning border, a functioning welfare state, a functioning health service, a functioning energy grid – you name it, our governments have failed to deliver.
It’s easy to simply accept this fate (indeed, that is what our politicians have chosen to do!), but it’s not the only path. For many people reading this, your frustrations are likely similar to mine and you have a sense that something must be done. So we’re doing it.
Just six months ago, myself, Joe Reeve and my brother James, started Looking For Growth (LFG). LFG isn’t a think tank, it’s not a substack, it’s about action. We launched with 400 people packed out in a bar in Camden and put forward our own infrastructure bill. After launching it officially in a viral post a month later, the Government started to brief multiple aspects of its own Planning Bill, early, and chose to highlight multiple parts that were now closer to the LFG bill.
But writing and pushing policy is only a part of the solution – the other part is action. A few months ago, Joe went about cleaning the streets of London, wiping away graffiti and scouring gum off the bins of public places. Just yesterday, he led a team of volunteers – including the GBNews host Tom Harwood – to clean tube trains that have been, inexplicably, left covered in graffiti for months on end. The videos went viral, newspapers jumped on, even Elon Musk saw it. All from just using some eco-friendly graffiti remover and taking out a Sunday morning.
This month we’re running a hackathon with Basis Capital – asking coders to come along and build where our state is failing. We now have 16 chapters across the country, we have big plans and large ambitions. What we need is more of us – and if you’re reading this, I suspect that’s you.
Will this fix everything? No. Will it apply pressure? Will it improve the small things we can? Will it make clear we don’t have to be passengers on this journey of decline and, in some small way, we can take the wheel and try to move the oil tanker of our state away from managed decline? Yes. To accept anything else is to accept defeat – and I don’t much fancy that.
There is a lot to do, and ideas to discuss and share. The editor of CapX, Marc Sidwell, attended LFG#1, back when it wasn’t clear what this was going to be. There are few places that offer the freedom to write what you think and put it into the world without apology – CapX is one of them. I’ll be writing here, once every two weeks, making the case for diagnosing and fighting against Britain’s decline.
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