What’s required is a much more vigorous carrot-and-stick approach to the problem. The Chancellor has briefed that he’ll have very limited scope for tax cuts in next month’s Budget, but if Britain is ever to restore the incentives needed to get people back to work, then the space will simply have to be found.
Similarly on the other side of the ledger, where the incentives not to work need to be removed, making living on welfare less of a choice.
This may sound harsh, and is admittedly much easier to say than to deliver, but there is also a certain eloquence to the pincer grip on worklessness implied. Cut taxes to persuade people back to work, and pay for those cuts by squeezing welfare, which will in turn further increase the relative attractions of employment.
George Osborne was lacerated as chancellor for cruel austerity when he took the axe to working-age benefits, but popular opinion was behind him. He was pushing at an open door, and later confessed that his mistake was in not going far enough.
The challenges of workshy Britain are bad enough, but have been exacerbated by the Government’s abject failure to make anything out of Brexit. A report by Goldman Sachs, published last week, found that Brexit had so far cost the UK economy between 4pc and 8pc of GDP.
You don’t have to accept the bald numbers, which are at the high end of other such estimates, to recognise the negatives that GS identifies – the underperformance since the referendum on trade and business investment, and the replacement of EU migrant labour with less productive, non-EU sources of immigration.
To these I would add an often neglected, but equally potent drag on the economy, which is the sheer, energy-annihilating impact of the exiting process – four years of seemingly endless political argument and soul-destroying negotiation in which nothing else got done and the country was reduced to an international laughing stock.
In short order, this was followed by another all-consuming and hugely costly distraction from Britain’s underlying problems: the pandemic. Small wonder we are up the proverbial without a paddle.
Stagnating Britain faces ruin without radical action
What’s required is a much more vigorous carrot-and-stick approach to the problem. The Chancellor has briefed that he’ll have very limited scope for tax cuts in next month’s Budget, but if Britain is ever to restore the incentives needed to get people back to work, then the space will simply have to be found.
Similarly on the other side of the ledger, where the incentives not to work need to be removed, making living on welfare less of a choice.
This may sound harsh, and is admittedly much easier to say than to deliver, but there is also a certain eloquence to the pincer grip on worklessness implied. Cut taxes to persuade people back to work, and pay for those cuts by squeezing welfare, which will in turn further increase the relative attractions of employment.
George Osborne was lacerated as chancellor for cruel austerity when he took the axe to working-age benefits, but popular opinion was behind him. He was pushing at an open door, and later confessed that his mistake was in not going far enough.
The challenges of workshy Britain are bad enough, but have been exacerbated by the Government’s abject failure to make anything out of Brexit. A report by Goldman Sachs, published last week, found that Brexit had so far cost the UK economy between 4pc and 8pc of GDP.
You don’t have to accept the bald numbers, which are at the high end of other such estimates, to recognise the negatives that GS identifies – the underperformance since the referendum on trade and business investment, and the replacement of EU migrant labour with less productive, non-EU sources of immigration.
To these I would add an often neglected, but equally potent drag on the economy, which is the sheer, energy-annihilating impact of the exiting process – four years of seemingly endless political argument and soul-destroying negotiation in which nothing else got done and the country was reduced to an international laughing stock.
In short order, this was followed by another all-consuming and hugely costly distraction from Britain’s underlying problems: the pandemic. Small wonder we are up the proverbial without a paddle.
Read More:Stagnating Britain faces ruin without radical action
2024-02-17 12:00:00