The Growth Delusion: Britain’s Perpetual Dance Between Ambition and Anxiety

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I found myself at a dreary economic conference last week, the kind where PowerPoint presentations go to die and coffee serves less as refreshment and more as life support. The speaker, a distinguished economist whose name I’ll charitably forget, was explaining Britain’s growth puzzle with all the enthusiasm of a sloth on sedatives. But somewhere between my third espresso and fifteenth slide of declining productivity graphs, I had an epiphany: We’re all living in Britain’s longest-running theatrical production — “The Growth That Never Was: A Tragicomedy in Infinite Acts.”

Here’s the thing about British economic growth that nobody wants to admit: we treat it like that friend who keeps promising to join us at the pub but never shows up. We talk about it incessantly, plan our evening around it, even save them a seat — but deep down, we know they’re staying home to watch “Bake Off” reruns.

The latest performance in this endless drama stars Sir Keir Starmer, casting himself as the AI-wielding hero who’ll finally crack the growth code. His recent speech promised to “make AI work for everyone” — a phrase so magnificently vapid it could have been generated by ChatGPT itself. It’s rather like promising to make gravity more equitable: well-intentioned, perhaps, but fundamentally missing the point of…