Return to Growth Volume One & Two By Jon Moynihan

When Tony Blair's government came to power in 1997, public expenditure in the UK was 35 per cent of GDP and on a declining path, and taxes were 31 per cent. At the end of Rishi Sunak's 2024 Conservative government, expenditure was at 45 per cent of GDP, and taxes are 36 per cent and rising - yet still nowhere near sufficient to cover public expenditure. The government's net annual borrowing is now an unsustainable 4.4 per cent of GDP, with our overall national debt rising steadily.

In Return to Growth, Jon Moynihan analyses the UK's decades-long stagnant economy and looks at what can be done to resuscitate it. Combining rigorous research with unparalleled business experience, the author explores the key dynamics affecting economic growth, ranging from government borrowing and expenditure, tax and regulation to the way national resources are deployed on non-productive and futile growth-stifling endeavours.

What he reveals is nothing short of a crisis in economic growth. Growth has now completely stalled in those western democracies, the UK included, where high government spending and high taxes have steadily burgeoned, decade after decade. Free market economies now threaten to leave us behind in terms of wealth, opportunity and standards of living.

Moynihan shows that unless we act now to arrest the decline, by radically restructuring our economy so as to stimulate economic growth, then the UK, along with other social democratic economies, risks first stagnation, second developing financial collapse, and finally, a long-term disintegration in our standard of living.

The acclaimed Return to Growth Volume One by Jon Moynihan – one of our finest economic thinkers – addressed the mystery of why growth has deserted western democracies like the UK and wrote a tough prescription to cure our economic ills. Continuing his vital examination in Volume Two, Moynihan looks at the causes of our stagnation – high government spending, excessive tax and regulation and too much bureaucratic interference and waste – and finds that the new government shows no sign of addressing these three ‘devils’ that affect our ability to achieve growth. He outlines the three crucial ‘angels’ that support growth in the economy, which we urgently need to embrace – free markets, free trade and sound money. Moynihan concludes with a set of practical steps on how to restructure our government and economy and return to the growth the UK has been so desperately lacking for the past several decades. In this powerful manifesto for economic change, Moynihan combines his extraordinary business acuity with a profound political overview, making an authoritative moral case for action and outlining the steps we can take both to reverse our decline and avert the impending economic disaster.