Post-growth Britain is spiralling towards class war
Negativity, nastiness and envy are inevitable in a society where prosperity is now a zero-sum game
Ididn’t live through the 1970s, so I envisage that era through its culture – a glitzy riot of flares, glam rock and Saturday Night Fever. But to those who were there, it was a different matter: civil unrest, strikes and piles of rubbish in the street. It wasn’t just that nothing “worked” either, although some recall with sepia-tinted nostalgia doing their homework by candlelight on waxsplattered exercise books. An atmosphere of class envy and real nastiness prevailed. My mum, a student in the mid-1970s, recalls the Trotskyists gleefully splattering the smarter girls going into student balls with red paint to ruin their posh frocks.
The national mood was matched by swingeing taxation. The tax rate ballooned from punitive to outright thievery. While the standard rate of income tax hit 40 per cent, the higher rate exceeded 80 per cent at some points. Between 1945 and 2008, Britain experienced four full years of economic contraction – all between 1974 and 1981.
I mention all this because class war so often accompanies a low-growth society. Our current cost-of-living crisis, and its immediate implications, unsurprisingly dominate today’s discussions – but there is a philosophical dimension, too. Now, as then, growth has evaporated, not just this year, but according to Bank of England projections, over the years ahead as well.
Many fear we have lurched into “post-growth” territory. Some environmentalists positively celebrate this trend, regarding prosperity as ecologically damaging – think Greta Thunberg’s vociferous denunciation of “fairytales of eternal economic growth” in her infamous 2019 UN speech. Some on the Left dislike the ambition and competitiveness associated with economically free societies. But even the Tories look complacent, scarcely mentioning growth and how to boost it.
This mindset carries enormous risks. A low-growth society could not hope to match the current appetite for everrising public spending, especially in future years when pensioners will make up a higher proportion of the population than they currently do. The economic boom of the early 2000s enabled Tony Blair’s government to raise public spending while keeping taxation relatively low. The pandemic seems to have entrenched a public mood that demands a muscular state placing, in Boris Johnson’s words, a perennial arm around the nation, yet without the requisite growth to fund it.
Low growth not only carries practical implications, it puts the political debate on a very different footing. While there is growth, it follows that everyone can, in theory at least, share in the economic gains of it. Wealth needn’t be a zerosum game. Yet the logic of a low or zero-growth society is precisely the opposite – that of the fixed pie, in which wealth, almost by definition, must have been acquired at someone else’s expense. This can trigger a primitive way of thinking; without confidence in the future or your ability to prosper by adding to society’s cumulative prosperity, you fight your fellow man for what is there. The result, as veterans of the 1970s can attest, is a descent into redistribution and retribution against anyone seen to be doing too well.
High-growth societies also generate a cultural confidence, now largely absent from our politics, but pervading the election material of more prosperous periods, like the earnest optimism of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign video, broadcast in a year of bumper growth. Blair, who took power while the economy was in good shape, created arguably the cheesiest campaign video of all time in 1997 – a plea to “Do It” (get out and vote). “Things can only get better” blares out, while a mystery man heads to the voting booth who, in a David Brent-like final-hour twist, is revealed to be none other than Blair himself, grimacing awkwardly with his polling card in hand.
Fashion may be having a 1990s moment, with its bucket hats and chokers, but watching the “Do It” video today feels like opening a Victorian time capsule, or greeting a Martian emissary. Politics has become relentlessly negative; the electorate seems more likely to vote against something than for it. If Keir Starmer emerges as prime minister, most likely heading a progressive coalition, it will be more through being “not-boris” than anything else. If Boris Johnson (or other leader) clings on, victory may well hinge on negative campaigning about the dangers of that progressive coalition. Even Labour’s flagship policy, a windfall tax, is precisely the kind of idea generated by the zero-sum low growth mindset – why should they profit, when we have not?
The public has traditionally rejected the politics of envy; the economic historian Rainer Zitelmann recently surveyed public attitudes towards the wealthy in several developed countries, ranking Britain among the least envious. But for how much longer?
Revolutionary fervour is already – understandably – stoking up among the furious young, locked out of home ownership by our broken housing market, and demanding increasingly radical policy solutions. Extreme measures, such as a wealth tax, are on the horizon. This will only compound zero-growth and the zero-sum mindset that accompanies it. And the big question; is it too late to escape? follow read more