Looking for Growth? Look no further.
The fury online is palpable, high-fliers feel undervalued, and ‘Britain is Broken’ has become the ridiculing punchline enjoyed by American crypto traders and digital nomads. Here though, at a mini arena in Greenwich on a Thursday night, Looking for Growth – LFG – is not a lost cause.
Some attendees are unsure exactly what they are going to, but everyone knows what brought them here. Entering the venue, a young professional complained “things don’t get done” and a policy wonk felt the country was “losing its way”. One civil servant laughed nervously, “I shouldn’t be here”.
LFG’s description of itself, a “political movement to push Britain out of decline”, dodges some of the more pressing questions of what this organisation actually does. Is it a think tank? Its office is near Westminster and it produced a draft bill on planning that influenced Labour ministers. But LFG refuses to adhere to the more well-trodden ways of analysis and dry comms seen at other institutions.
Is it a lobby group? It is defiant in its message that growth matters most, but it is not clear how it counts its members. Is this a vigilante group that takes matters into its own hands, a trade union for tech bros, or a precursor to an insurgent political party?
People are angry
Whatever it can be defined as, main man Dr Lawrence Newport, along with his brother James and friend Joe Reeve, has conceived an ambitious and straight-talking pressure group out of angry Henrys and Nicks, 30 ans.
Any newcomer to LFG would realise there is a clear reason for this group’s existence after seeing where cleaning graffiti off the Bakerloo line took them. When Transport for London commissioner Andy Lord, who is paid around twice as much as the Prime Minister, claimed to have evidence of people deliberately spraying graffiti on the tubes in order to film the cleanup, Freedom of Information requests revealed a frantic scramble for what “evidence” there actually was. Answer: none. Lord is now under growing apologise for the claim:
Despite Newport’s tirade against Keir Starmer’s government and 14 years of stagnation under the Tories, the event featured choreographed speeches from Labour Growth Group chair Chris Curtis and the Conservative Party’s in-demand Katie Lam. Mischief-maker Dominic Cummings riled against the British establishment in conversation with a pollster. And Reform UK’s Danny Kruger sent in a blurry video message. He received boos from some in the audience.
It may have made some sense for LFG to align itself with Reform given their parallel agendas of wanting to shakeup Whitehall, burn through red tape and challenge the status quo. Perhaps the two insurgent groups could yet form an alliance but some at Looking for Growth still haven’t quite warmed to the “boomer socialists” at Nigel Farage’s party.
Make the UK Rich Again
The set piece event of the night was a defiant address from Matt Clifford, Britain’s AI hero who served as an adviser under both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, to “Make the UK Rich Again”. Clifford took aim at the “political class” for not making growth an urgent mission and made the obvious – and often forgotten – case for why it is just so important.
Clifford said: “If what you really want is a fairer society, well you need people to feel like they’re playing a positive sum game. You need people to feel like they’re not scrapping over a shrinking pie. That’s when people’s instincts to look after each other kick in. If what you really want is a safer society, then you need people to see paths from poverty to prosperity. You need people to pay for well-lit spaces, for great public spaces.
“We should aspire to live in a country where the way to get rich is to create new things, to take big risks, to figure out how to make products and services that people love. But we’re not going to get there if we don’t learn to love success, if we don’t learn to celebrate our entrepreneurs, our inventors, and our builders.
“It’s all fixable because Britain’s a great country that’s saveable and worth saving.”
The demand for growth
Earlier in the day, Rachel Reeves spoke to Spain’s economy minister Carlos Cuerpo at an event at the London School Economics, their alma mater. The discussion, titled “Policies for balanced growth”, could not have matched the zest of Looking for Growth’s rally. Whereas one forum saw the bigwigs and titans of Threadneedle Street and Downing Street from past and present ponder over the high art of stable policymaking, another saw venture capitalists and disruptors of Silicon Valley and Silicon Roundabout brainstorm how to turn the national psyche on its head.
For all the ambitious plans to build a new city near Cambridge, drafting a hit list of NIMBYs and cracking down on phone snatchers in London, there was no mention of taxes, interest rates, state expenditure or anything about the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Competition and Markets Authority or any influential public body other than Natural England.
This was surprising, one month out from the Budget. But talking about monetary or fiscal policy would be the moment this cross-party movement shows where it really lies on the political spectrum.
LFG is at the apex of a wider change in how think tanks and campaign groups are responding to the UK’s economic malaise. Several growth-focused wonk groups are now scaling up research efforts: the left-leaning Good Growth Group, the Entrepreneurs’ Network, the centre-right Onward, Re:State, the YIMBY Alliance, Truss-backed free market group The Growth Commission and, more recently, the Centre for British Progress.
Far from the days David Cameron considered getting the UK to rank higher on the happiness index, there is a renewed spirit to go all-in on economic growth.
Given the sheer number of wonks now devising growth policies, LFG can lead on driving the message through. Newport and his energetic movement, which counts chapters across the country – often meeting in pubs – are doing things differently. They channel the “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” mindset that could, if properly directed, shake this country out of its malaise.