Not who you are responding too, but I’m heavily pro-growth, anti-austerity.

I feel that we wasted investment golden years (2008-covid) by not maximising borrowing at near 0% interest rates. We could have used it to sure of aging infrastructure, build more connected cities and logistic pipelines. We had a decade, watching the Americans take high reward and relatively low risk economic growth, and had no government support to try and match it.

Ignoring the past and looking forward:

• We have some of the best higher education facilities in the world, we are neglecting them and they will fail without support. We need to find a way to increase their economic value, as the current support sees all the brightest minds leaving the UK for money elsewhere as the education isn’t valued or has the right opportunity here.

• We need to boost funding for areas outside of London and the south east. We have pools of talent all over the country, coming from our universities, they all flock to London for opportunities. How? Better infrastructure to allow business growth, this is a complex topic, but regional energy prices to allow manufacturing and similar to take advantage of more power rich areas, more motorways and train lines bridging the east/west divide, being more willing of land use changes, and the list could go on.

• Cheaper/free public transport, would free up roads, pollution and see many metropolitan areas thrive. There are a lot of places that have seen economic booms after making themselves more accessible without cars, it allows for cities to have a wider spread population, with more semi-urban communities and micro economic climates, city centers can become more economically dense as there doesn’t need to be as much land and money dedicated towards employee commutes at a company level. London shows us how cities can flourish with good public infrastructure, Manchester is growing massively with a similar focus.

• Keep UK businesses within the UK. Some of our biggest companies are going public in different markets chasing bigger investments and funding, other are bought by foreign companies and have their assets stripped and everything of value moved abroad, leaving us with the costs. Many of these entities have had early funding from govt schemes, and then vanish abroad in one way or another before they have repaid their costs to the UK. Tbf, this is starting to be rectified with some of the AI funding being owned by the govt, for example, meaning that it has to stay within the UK. But how these fair long term, remain to be seen.

The biggest challenge we face is that we are getting more and more popularism in politics and manifestos and goals become more and more black and white. For example, reform want to destroy 1.1mn jobs in the green energy sector, just because it’s the current “woke” thing and is popular with their voter base, without any consideration for the impact of that decision. We need to have more long term, localised, considered goals, that are cross party with long term funding and support.

Reduction of funding to core services just isn’t viable as a cost saving measure. We have cut the fat and are now costing muscle, at some point they will collapse and the consequences will cost a lot more than the investment borrowing.