However, the problem with getting Brexit done is that you can’t do it again. Thatcherite nostalgia is big part of it, but there are more recent triumphs to hark back to - not least, our miraculous escape from the clutches of the EU. However, I don’t want to give the impression that the conservative cargo cult is only about the 1980s. One has to ask whether a serious effort will be made at all - or whether the announcement was just an excuse to conjure up the past. There’s no reason to suppose that a second attempt will be any more successful. This is fine in principle, but the offer isn’t attractive without a hefty discount on the market value of the relevant properties- and who is going to pay for that? First proposed in 2015, the Government has already tried, and failed, to make this policy work. To widespread groans, the Government has dusted off a policy to extend the Right so that housing association tenants can buy their homes too. The Conservative cargo cult is also attempting to resurrect the Right to Buy. The ritual re-enactment of past triumphs isn’t limited to economic policy. The Chancellor acknowledged this structural impediment in his Mais Lecture earlier this year, but even he felt the need to appease the tax cut fetishists in his ill-fated Spring Statement.
Rather our number one economic problem is the chronic failure of British business to invest in productivity improvements - despite the incentives of lower Corporation Tax, cheap migrant labour and minimal borrowing costs. We’re not perpetually on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve. Again, we see a demand for the ritual re-enactment of policies from the Thatcher era but the conditions that applied then don’t apply now. In the long term, they’re probably right - but they’re wrong about the means by which they want to revive the economy: i.e. Other Conservatives see a lack of growth as a bigger problem than rocketing prices. Bailey could have chosen his words more carefully, but he’s a lot closer to the truth than those who believe that UK interest rates can control global commodity prices. There was a furious reaction when the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, suggested that policymakers were helpless in the face of these inflationary pressures. Rather, the beast was born out of the extraordinary disruption to global supply chains caused by the pandemic and compounded by Putin’s war. Nor does its origin lie in the last decade or so of very low interest rates, otherwise it would have shown itself years ago. The inflationary monster today is not the same beast that was slain in the 1980s.
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