Tory anti-growth forces stand in way of a growth strategy

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Good morning. The good news, if you’re Jeremy Hunt, is that there is no serious prospect of your Autumn Statement not passing through the House of Commons. The bad news, though, is that passage will be accompanied by plenty of grumbling, off-the-record briefing, the occasional on-the-record unhelpful remark and general gnashing of teeth.

In many ways, the most dangerous opponent Hunt and Rishi Sunak must face is within the party, not outside of it. Some more thoughts on that below.

Inside Politics is edited by Abby Wallace today. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to [email protected].

Nothing compares to EU (membership)

Both from the perspective of the immediate challenges facing the UK, and the electoral self-interest of the Conservative party, Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement was about as good as it could possibly have been, considering the circumstances he delivered it in and the constraints he faced.

He increased both the state pension and in-work benefits to shield households from some of the pressures they face. He has hiked some taxes in the here and now and unveiled plans to increase more — an important part of reassuring markets after Liz Truss’s disastrous experiment went awry — while avoiding sharp cuts to public spending, which, given the growing demands on the UK state are essentially undeliverable anyway.

He increased spending on both health and education, helping to shield those public services from some of the real-terms cuts that were coming their way thanks to inflation. Given that there is essentially no hope or prospect of a Tory election victory if both schools and hospitals are seen to be in a state at the time of the next election, this was the right move both in terms of the social pressures facing those services, and the Conservative party’s electoral prospects.

There are a couple of important ‘buts’ coming, though. There was very little in the statement to get the UK out of its present grim trajectory in which growth is low, productivity continues to be weak and fiscal events such as last week’s become the norm not the exception.

That is connected to the second “but”, which is that the group of people at Westminster who are the most hostile to the idea this was a good Autumn Statement are inside the Conservative party.

Achieving growth is hard but there are a number of things that we can file in the “don’t do stupid things” bucket: don’t have a distant economic relationship with your nearest trading bloc, don’t compound that mistake by having a series of pointless political rows with your nearest trading bloc, don’t have a planning system that makes it really hard to build anything, don’t ban offshore wind.

And the biggest reason why Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement didn’t do anything about those things is, again, inside the Conservative party. While the UK’s anti-growth forces are not confined to the Conservative party, the most powerful single component is the part inside the governing party. It’s fear of that group, as much as anything else, which means Downing Street has denied reports that it is seeking a “Swiss-style” relationship with the European Union.

A lot has been written about how the Conservatives are doomed to defeat at the next election. But in many ways, defeat is the least of the party’s worries: that it is hard to construct a growth strategy that has a path to commanding a majority among the party’s MPs is a much bigger problem than whether they go into opposition after the next election.

Now try this

I saw Living at the pictures: a slight but beautifully constructed tear-jerker. It’s a very-well-put-together remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 movie Ikiru. It’s a rare delight to see Bill Nighy in a film that allows him to actually stretch his acting muscles, but the real star for me is Tom Burke, who consistently runs off with every film that he’s in. Leslie Felperin’s review is here.

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