This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Here is an important and fascinating book about what ails our economy. It tells us what needs to be achieved and gives us insights and prescriptions into what we should be doing about it. Four authors, each renowned in their own right — Arthur Laffer, Matthew Elliott, Michael Hintze, Douglas McWilliams — present a formidable collection of lightbulb moments and innovative proposals.
The central thesis of the book is its “North Star” of growth — five key things an economy must get right: low taxes, small government, minimal regulation, free trade and sound money. (I would add a sixth: free markets.)
Laffer authors the first section of the book, which therefore could only start with taxes and the need to lower them. It repays a careful read. “The poor always lose when you tax the rich,” is one of Art’s many great lines.
And yet the cry goes up to tax the non-doms, the millionaires and the billionaires more. Each time, whichever group is under attack hotfoots it from the country, and tax revenues decline. An LSE survey asserted that only 77 non-doms would leave; the numbers already surpass that by many orders of magnitude and continue to grow.
The non-dom regime attracted world-class bankers, industrialists, footballers. No longer: it is not just who has left, it’s also who will now not come. Oppressed by overregulation and with this talent departing, the City of London is dying in front of our eyes. The Premier League (assailed both by tax law and the dreadful Football Governance Bill) will, before long, no longer be the world’s greatest football league.
Laffer’s authority on tax makes it difficult to ignore his prediction that Britain will, as “the slip turns into a slide”, tumble further into poverty, being overtaken between 2030 and 2050 by Saudi Arabia, Poland, Turkey and Lithuania. Complying with our complex tax code, for business alone, costs some £15.4 billion. Just a 1 per cent tax cut grows GDP by 2.5 per cent in three years. The triangle the authors have to square is how to achieve tax cuts, low government spend and sound money.
So long as spend is at 45 per cent of GDP, the taxpayers’ pips squeak. Yet UK spending between 2019 and 2024 rose more than in any other major country; spending always overran OBR forecasts; recent UK governments always failed to rein in spend. Treasury discussions, Parliamentary debates, newspaper columns are about raising, not dropping, taxes.
Then, excessive regulation. There are good insights here and a terrific proposal from Simon Wolfson to focus on public sector deregulation, overrun as it is with ridiculous fantasies and obsessions — DEI, Net Zero, ESG. (The authors muff it by saying “Net Zero is important”. It isn’t.)
The book correctly advocates free trade; the deals we have now struck are leading to growth in exports. On sound money, the book’s endorsement of Damian Pudner’s advocacy of a nominal GDP target (“The Bank of England should stop worrying about inflation”) is eccentric.
There are 24 solid proposals for improving growth in the UK. The first are for a flat tax and to remove growth-destroying taxes (such as stamp duty and National Insurance). Others are pension and welfare reform; reinstating the non-dom regime; getting rid of planning, anti-landlord and anti-employer bills; increasing infrastructure and defence spending; pushing free trade.
Some proposals are incrementalist. As Jean-Claude Juncker noted: “We all know what needs to be done, we just don’t know how to get re-elected if we do it.” But incrementalism has its dangers, and Javier Milei has shown that once the electorate is primed and fed up, the radical approach gets the vote.
The final section quotes an impressive list of former PMs, chancellors, politicians and commentators — the establishment to some, a rogues’ gallery to others. They agree governments have become unreliable and anti — business. Their general motto seems: “be left-wing when in power, talk right-wing when in retirement.”
Johnson puts the boot in on Sunak; Johnson and Osborne say Covid lockdown went too far; Osborne is snitty to Badenoch, saying that growth is about taxes, not toilets. An odd alliance of Liz Truss, Tony Blair and Gus O’Donnell agrees vested interests are powerful and prepared to play dirty. There’s also a consensus on how to change things: show leadership, prepare well, get electoral buy-in, gut the civil service and, above all, focus on growth.
This is, in so many ways, a valuable book, with new insights popping out on every page. Anyone with any serious intent to turn our economy around will need to have absorbed its teaching well before they get into power.
