𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

There is nothing like an England football victory to put a spring in your step. Why can’t we bring that same combination of determination and skill to our own national fate? As Labour Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham is drawing up his plans for a revived Britain, he might like to consider the following policies that would transform our future. Our prosperity has always depended on our ability to make and sell products around the world. To do that we need to encourage investment at home and from abroad and that means lowering the cost of doing business in this country.

Labour’s recent taxes on employment have flattened growth by increasing the cost of taking on new staff, especially among young people who most need a solid introduction to work. Youth unemployment at 16.2% is at its highest for ten years and recruiters have begged the government to pause the convergence of minimum wages to encourage more firms to take on untried young people.

Brexit was supposed to gift us a new competitive advantage, but successive governments have fudged it, perhaps for fear of incurring the wrath of the EU. But the Republic of Ireland was a poor nation for decades until it cut corporate taxes and made a drive to attract foreign English-speaking businesses to its shores.

Singapore-on-Thames was a worthy ambition post-Brexit offering lower regulation and taxes to the rest of the world. Only those establishment left-wingers who harbour fantasies of re-joining the EU disagree with this.

The other needless burden we need to rid ourselves of is net zero. Begun by the Tories and continued by Labour, green fanaticism has given us some of the highest energy costs in the world.

This is destroying our traditional industries and remains the biggest barrier to developing new industries, such as AI, because the data centres on which they rely are hungry for electricity. Foreign investors will not even think about building them here so long as our industrial energy bills remain sky-high. Pocketing more money from opening up the North Sea gas and oil fields would also allow the government to reduce taxes.

Devolution is Andy Burnham’s big idea but that has hardly brought prosperity to either Scotland or Wales. Wasting yet more taxpayers’ money on expanding mayoral bureaucracies around England is poor use of scarce resources. The best kind of “devolution” is giving power back to businesses, getting the government off their back and putting more money in their pockets to invest as they know best.

Worryingly, Burnham spoke last week of encouraging “good growth” in the UK by introducing a moral judgment into business – despite such misguided policies already having led to absurd levels of compliance and red tape. Ideology rather than practicality is the curse that is holding Britain back.

Labour’s benefits obsession has led to record levels of dependency, encouraging people out of work. It is certainly the pull factor behind thousands of illegal migrants who get free housing and hand-outs for breaking into our country. Some £332.6billion will be spent this year on our social security system. Slashing the cost of this growing burden would free up more money to cut taxes. Watching the England squad take on ever more challenging teams in the World Cup has to be a model for the future of Britain. Aggression, confidence and skill is the only way to win in the international arena. We should not be embarrassed to be competitive and we should allow our star players – our top companies – to thrive as best they can without hindrance.

But will Andy Burnham be an England manager like Thomas Tuchel?

Will he make the most of this country’s natural talent? Will he heck! Like every other left-leaning politician, he loves big government, believing he knows best and trampling on the ambitions of ordinary hard-working Britons who just want the chance to succeed but are constantly held back and disappointed. It’s no way to run a football team and certainly no way to run a nation.

It’s splendidly symbolic also that England football fans have dropped the anodyne American “Sweet Caroline” anthem for the properly English Wonderwall. National pride is on its way back and we need a political leader who can make the most of that.