Idle Britons owe the rest of us an apology

Too many have succumbed to indolence and apathy. They are taking hardworking taxpayers for fools

Interest rates have gone up to bring inflation under control. Taxes have risen to pay for the ruinous cost of the pandemic. The war in Ukraine, and now a conflict in the Red Sea, have snarled up supply lines.

There are plenty of explanations as to why the British economy slumped into a recession during the second half of last year. Ministers have been trotting out all the usual excuses. And yet the problem persists.

Productivity is plunging, most notably in the public sector, but also in the three-day-a-week-working-fromhome-wellness-obesessed corporate world. Britain’s idle millions are taking the rest of us for fools – and could drive the country off the edge of a cliff.

By any measure, it was a poor set of figures. The UK economy contracted by 0.3 per cent in the final quarter of last year. With two consecutive quarters of falling output we are now officially in a recession.

It is true that, thanks to Germany’s woes, Britain may be spared the indignity of becoming the slowest growing economy in the G7. But compared to many others we are getting poorer and poorer.

Worse still, there is little hope that our performance will improve. More likely we will continue along this path of managed decline, our growth lagging ever further behind the United States, Canada, South Korea, or indeed many European countries: Greece and Portugal, for example, are expected to grow roughly 2 per cent this year.

We aren’t leading the world, we are trying to catch up, and the reason is that we’ve forgotten why growth matters – and how to achieve it. With immigration at record highs, and unemployment still low, we should have more workers than ever. Instead, the UK has close to a million vacancies and falling productivity. Among our political elites, few seem to understand why this is the case.

Nowhere is this collapse in output more apparent than in the public sector. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, productivity in the public sector is now just 4 per cent higher than it was way back in 1997. Over a quarter of a century, despite massive spending, not least on growing the headcount, it has barely advanced at all.

With the Government now employing close to 6 million people, consuming resources that could be put to more efficient use in the private sector, it is extremely difficult for the whole economy to expand. In the past, rising output in the private sector could compensate for that. From 1997 to 2022, productivity in the economy as a whole grew by around 30 per cent. But that has now stalled as well, and looks as though it could soon go into reverse.

It is not hard to identify why. Swathes of the corporate sector have been captured by the same anti-effort ethos as the public sector. We can see it in the expectations to carry on working from home, or even “working from anywhere” (which, funnily enough, always seems to include a view of a beach), despite a growing body of evidence indicating that it makes staff less productive.

We can see it in the demands for four day weeks, with no corresponding reduction in pay, or in the insistence that workers ought to have a “right to disconnect” between 5pm and 9am. We can see it in the diversity workshops and the campaigns for yoga days, typically an excuse for yet more time off. And we can see it in the celebration of “lazy girl jobs” and “quiet quitting” on social media, with staff openly boasting about how little they do. Like a virus, the culture of indolence and entitlement has spread from the public sector to the private, under the guise of “empowerment” and “wellness”.

Some Britons, of course, are working harder than ever. But far more appear to have decided to coast, complacently assuming that growth simply falls from the sky like manna from heaven. It doesn’t.

It is going to be very hard to reverse this cultural shift. It will require CEOS to stand up to HR overlords and start unapologetically demanding improved levels of output. It will take entrepreneurs who can work out how to motivate staff to outcompete bloated FTSE-100 rivals. Perhaps most importantly of all, it will take a Prime Minister who is able to preach the virtues of endeavour, and lead a national crusade for higher productivity.

Until that happens, the whole country will be propped up by an increasingly embittered group of hard working, taxpayers – while everyone else takes them for a ride.