John Marriott: The UK’s latest ‘Dash for Growth’ – ‘Déjà vu all over again’?

By John Marriott Columnist

The US baseball star, ‘Yogi’ Berra (1925-2015), was also a famous perpetrator of malapropisms. One of the most repeated was probably; “It’s déjà vu all over again”. Well, that was how I personally felt when I looked at the Truss/Kwateng modern reworking of the famous Anthony Barber ‘dash for growth’ of 1970 to 1973. Barber had been unexpectedly handed the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in July 1970 following the sudden death after barely a month in office of the much respected Iain Macleod. Most experts were taken by surprise by Edward Heath’s victory over Labour PM, Harold Wilson, in the previous month’s General Election. Having possibly unexpectedly inherited the poisoned chalice, Barber, with Heath’s backing, proceeded to shred regulations to make credit easier to obtain, as well as cutting taxes and reining in public expenditure, thus giving a massive sugar rush to the UK economy.

The so called ‘Barber Boom’ didn’t end well. Suffice it to say that the tax cuts and credit relaxations worked for a while and the all important growth rate did rise as wages and prices spiralled upwards. It all ended with several massive u-turns following confrontations with the trades unions, including the emergence on the national scene of a certain Arthur Scargill. Inflation peaked at around 24% in 1975, by which time Labour was back in power following the ‘three day week’ and two General Elections in 1974 with a bail out from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) two years later.

One of biggest sectors affected over those four years was the housing market, where, with demand far outstripping supply and with mortgages far easier to obtain, prices, like oil, quadrupled, as we found out to our cost when I and my wife returned home in 1974 after four years living and working abroad.

So, that is why I, and possibly others of my generation, view with the utmost scepticism what our new Prime Minister and her Chancellor are now attempting. It has been tried before and has not worked. It would appear that the world’s financial markets seem to agree. I have never understood why, to make the rich work harder, you have to reward them financially; but to make the less well off work harder, you have to cut their real wages or even threaten them with redundancy.

Back in 2012 the Chancellor added his name as well as that of other up and coming young Tory free marketeers, including our new PM, to a book, ambitiously titled ‘Britannia Unchained’, that included the comment; “Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world”. The theory of ‘trickle down economics’ is that some of the money given to those at the top will find its way down to those at the bottom. The late US President, George H Bush, when it was first adopted by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, called it ‘voodoo economics’. It didn’t work then so why should it work now?

What also helped to derail the Barber Boom were events mainly out of the UK’s control, particularly the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 following the Yom Kippur war between Israel and the Arab nations. For Yom Kippur then perhaps we could read Ukraine today. Back then we at least had the cushion of our newly acquired membership of what we then called the European Economic Community and the prospect by the end of the decade of riches in the form of oil as well as gas from the North Sea. Today we are very much going it alone outside of Europe and are trying to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

So, what do we do now? They say that history keeps repeating itself. On the other hand, perhaps we should cross everything and hope that, if things really do go belly up, the Officers of the 1922 Committee might come knocking on the PM’s door sooner rather than later. And then there’s always Keir Starmer and his New Labour Mark Two, who still reckon they alone have the answer and who appear at the moment to have a comfortable lead in the opinion polls. Even the IMF is making worried noises.

You could make a strong argument for ‘déjà vu again’ in Labour’s case as well. Having gifted Margaret Thatcher’s Tories victory in the 1983 General Election with a Manifesto, christened famously by the late Gerald Kaufman MP as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, they repeated the trick in 2019 with another give-away menu-with-no-prices Manifesto, when the inability of the combined opposition parties to get their act together over how to do Brexit gifted the Tories under Johnson a massive working majority they did not deserve, elected as they were by only 29% of those eligible to vote. As a letter writer commented this week in one of our more serious daily newspapers, in some countries, like Italy, it takes an election to get a far right government. All it takes here apparently is around 180,000 paid members of the Conservative Party!

When will it end? As Yogi Berra famously said; “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over”. Doesn’t anyone fancy another General Election?

John was a councillor for thirty years, finally retiring in 2017. A schoolteacher by profession, he served on the North Hykeham Town Council (1987-2011), the North Kesteven District Council (1987-1999, 2001-2007) and the Lincolnshire County Council (2001-2017). He was also a County Council member of the former Lincolnshire Police Authority for eight years until standing down in 2009. In 1997 he was the Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for Sleaford and North Hykeham. He is currently not a member of any political party.