It’s time to get serious about the British economy. Yes, we are a member of the family of high-income nations, but we are a long way from the top of this group and the gap has been widening. Growth ground to a halt in March and the OECD forecasts the UK economy will not grow at all in 2023, a worse performance than any G20 country bar Russia.
Such predictions of future underperformance should be treated as highly uncertain, but our recent experiences of it are painfully concrete. We caught up with more productive countries such as France, Germany and the US during the 1990s and early 2000s. But that came to an end in the mid-2000s and our relative performance has been declining ever since. While we are not yet in danger of relegation from the top division, we are increasingly a long way from qualifying for the Champions League.
