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\t\tPic: PA\t<\/p>\n\t\t\tWednesday 11 February 2026 5:51 am
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\t\t\tTuesday 10 February 2026 4:54 pm\n\t<\/p>\n
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Between the mid 1960s and the mid 2000s, the living standards of the poorest half of households doubled. Increasing by 1.9 per cent a year, it took four decades to make this leap. To emulate that progress again, starting from today, would take 137 years. <\/p>\n
This is not a state of affairs that can be blamed on Keir Starmer (though his government certainly isn\u2019t helping) as the rot really set in after the global financial crisis which put the UK economy into a coma<\/a> from which it has barely emerged, save a few flickers of the finger. <\/p>\n Productivity, living standards and economic growth have all stagnated leading to a grim state of affairs; GDP per head in the UK is around \u00a337,000, in contrast to \u00a360,000 in the US. Had we continued to grow as we were up until 2008 our per head figure would be closer to \u00a350,000. <\/p>\n The fact that the poorest half of households won\u2019t see another doubling of their living standards until the year 2163 \u2013 as calculated by the left-leaning Resolution Foundation \u2013 is a shocking indictment of decades of economic and political consensus on everything from immigration to energy policy and welfare. <\/p>\n Starmer believes in subsidy and redistribution<\/p>\n For the country as a whole, once you adjust for inflation the average working person in Britain today earns a lower (or not very different) wage now than they did in 2008. The last time our economy grew at an annualised rate of 3 per cent (the minimum necessary to improve our condition) was more than a decade ago, in 2014. The best we\u2019ve done since then was 2.2 per cent in 2015. Growth this year is expected to be a shade under one per cent. <\/p>\n Keir Starmer maintains that this will be the year that people start to feel better off, but it will take more than some frozen prescription charges to reverse decades of tax increases, public spending and regulatory overkill \u2013 and even if the PM had the political capital for this fight, he isn\u2019t interested in it. For him, living standards are improved by subsidy and redistribution. <\/p>\n Fortunately, the public is waking up to what must be done. The latest social attitudes survey published yesterday by the National Centre for Social Research shows the percentage of Brits who want higher taxes to fund more spending has fallen from over 50 per cent in 2020 to 36 per cent today, while the number calling for tax cuts and spending reductions has been climbing higher since 2021. <\/p>\n We have to hope that this shift in public attitude translates to a political revolution<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRead more<\/p>\n