Political squabbling about the ‘R’ word does nothing for struggling Brits
As politicians shadowbox on the economy, the real impacts of the recession are not being engaged with, writes Eliot Wilson
By any measure, last week’s data from the Office for National Statistics was bad news for the government: the UK’s gross domestic product between October and December 2023 fell by 0.3 per cent, which means that the country was in a technical recession.
A recession is defined as two or more quarters of what some with a straight face call “negative growth”. Given that GDP had gone down by 0.1 per cent in the third quarter of last year, the ONS figures made it official. The Labour Party was cock-a-hoop, as one would expect. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, charged that the Prime Minister’s plans for growth were “in tatters”, and that Rishi Sunak could “no longer credibly claim that his plan is working or that he has turned the corner on more than 14 years of economic decline”. Dubbing it “Rishi’s recession” was an easy ball.
The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is an old hand now, an MP for nearly 20 years, and can summon up the kind of calm under stress that his father, Admiral Sir Nicholas Hunt, former commander-in-chief of the fleet, needed to reach the top of the Royal Navy. The government, Hunt assured the media, “always expected growth to be weaker” towards the end of last year, but the British economy is now “more resilient”. Not everyone has been convinced.
is one element of this no-holds-barred economic grapple over the ‘R’ word which is striking. The UK may only have experienced a “technical” recession, but perhaps it is a serious blow. In any event, it is an argument about what happened. Bear that in mind: this is a debate about the condition of the economy last year. That is not to say it is irrelevant or academic. One of the best indicators of future direction is past performance, and it is entirely fair, especially in a general election year, to say that a government which has presided over an economy in recession is not best placed to bring about a recovery.
But it is now the second half of February. I wrote in this column last month that voters were disenchanted and discouraged by politicians hammering home neat but glib slogans to the exclusion of argument, and I sense that this kind of shouting match is of a piece. The electorate looks at Sunak and Starmer, or Hunt and Reeves, or whichever proxies are on the media round that day, and sees two sets of politicians flushed with righteous anger about how we choose to label the performance of the economy in the last quarter of last year.
I have thought for some time that voters are exhausted with the performative aspect of politics. We are very good at seeing through falsity now, very attuned to an even faintly flat note by politicians, and we long for them to be honest, not least because they seem allergic to the notion. I think, for all that we are bored by politics, we also long for a little more substance, a willingness to engage with the business of everyday life.
When we think about the future, say the next 12 to 18 months, we think about whether our jobs are safe, whether our pay will go up, whether inflation will continue to edge downwards – what all of this will mean for the cost of living. Consequently, we want to know how the parties will address these challenges, and at the moment we see a government widely expected to cut taxes at the Budget on 6 March and a Labour Party insisting that abandoning its pledge to invest £28bn in the “green economy” is not a U-turn at all. It does not inspire confidence.
We have done this to ourselves, to an extent. From Blair and Brown onwards, we have told ourselves that the economy is about a technocratic scale of competence and incompetence, all marked on the same scale. It leaves our politicians squabbling over the gradations of the marking – because they have nothing else. This is all part of a wider problem. They need to stop, draw breath and treat us like adults. And we need to show we can handle it.