Return to Growth Volume One By Jon Moynihan
- Synopsis
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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.
- Search End Notes
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About The Author
Jon Moynihan is a businessman and Venture Capitalist who started his career advising companies and banks in Holland, the US and the UK, as a specialist in mergers and turnarounds. He then ran the global firm PA Consulting Group for 21 years. He transitioned into venture startups, creating over 20 companies to date, most of them in the Science and Technology fields. Jon has worked as a volunteer in the charity sector all his life, from Bangla Deshi refugee camps and other work in developing countries, in the 1970s, to Educational thinktanks, charities and fundraising, to the Arts sector, where among other activities he was President of the Royal Albert Hall for a number of years. Jon has developed a layman’s expertise in Economics, starting with taking a Master’s Degree in Finance from MIT. His interest eventually led to his becoming, during the Brexit referendum, Chairman of the Campaign Committee of Vote Leave, then of its Finance Committee, finally of Vote Leave overall.
A must read for any would be chancellor. It is a compelling blueprint for how to end decades of economic malaise.
Jon Moynihan is right – it’s time for a fresh look at how our economy should work. Growth and aspiration will only return when private-sector entrepreneurialism is allowed to thrive in a low tax, free market setting. More hard work and less regulation is the way forward.
If Rachel Reeves is serious about her growth agenda she should buy herself a copy of Jon Moynihan’s book. Lucid, passionately argued, contemptuous of the groupthink that landed our country in debilitating stagnation; here is a manifesto to get Britain motoring.
Since the election, Conservatives have been desperately looking for a solution to Britain's economic malaise that isn't just a retread of the failed polices of the last 25 years. They need look no further. This book is the answer. Future governments will ignore it at their peril.
Jon Moyihan combines serious business acumen with a firm grasp of the political big picture. Return to Growth is an important and timely book – a route map to a more dynamic, secure and prosperous Britain, by someone who knows what works.
In terms that the economic layman can understand, probably because he’s not a professional economist himself, Jon Moynihan lays out the economic, political, but also moral basis for how Britain can get growing again. These ideas are so practical, achievable, logical and overdue that his thesis is frankly unanswerable. It represents nothing less than a manifesto for national revival, and has profound implications for economies beyond the UK too.
This may well be the most important economics book of recent years. Moynihan’s book is an urgent appeal to stop the decline and set western economies on the road to growth and prosperity.
Moynihan challenges the bovine assumptions of ‘social democracy’ that will inexorably lead to fiscal collapse. No doomster, he asserts convincingly, ‘We needn’t keep doing things this way. We needn’t keep digging our own graves.’ Clear, readable, riveting and vividly illustrated.
Moynihan reviews three enemies of growth: high expenditure, high taxation and high regulation. His inescapable—and well-supported—conclusion: raising taxes, bloating spending and bureaucratic meddling just make things worse. I love this book.
A trenchant, eye-opening and controversial tour de force from one of our foremost economic brains. Anyone who wants growth and wonders why it has become so elusive in Western social democracies needs to pick up Return to Growth and take urgent note. Jon Moynihan shows, in crystal clear and accessible prose, that you can either have ever greater government expenditure or you can have decent levels of growth. Contrary to cakeism, you can’t have both. Rising public sector expenditure brings greater debt, inflation and ultimately, if it is not controlled, national bankruptcy. A smaller state which does not crowd out the private sector is better able to preside over higher economic growth, which raises standards of living for the country as a whole. If the analysis of how we got into our current economic predicament is sobering, Moynihan’s meticulously elucidated prescription offers a more hopeful way forward for those brave enough to take it. Return to Growth is an essential and compelling read for policymakers and general readers alike.
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