The Grand Illusion of Ministerial Control
The British political class is obsessed with the "lever." From Keir Starmer to the shadows of the previous administration, the rhetoric remains the same: the government has a dashboard of magical switches that can lower your grocery bill, shrink your mortgage, and freeze the price of a kilowatt-hour.
It is a lie. A comfortable, bipartisan, poll-tested lie.
When a Prime Minister claims to be considering "every lever possible" to tackle the cost of living, they are not describing a strategy. They are describing a panic. The "lazy consensus" suggests that inflation and economic stagnation are simply technical glitches that a sufficiently empathetic committee can patch. In reality, the cost of living crisis isn't a bug in the UK economy; it is the logical output of twenty years of energy illiteracy, NIMBY-ism disguised as planning, and a refusal to let the market reallocate capital to productive uses.
If you want to understand why your disposable income is evaporating, stop looking at the "levers" and start looking at the plumbing.
The Fatal Flaw in "Subsidize Demand"
The most popular lever in the Westminster toolkit is the subsidy. Whether it is energy price caps, rent controls, or direct cash transfers, the instinct is always to give people more money to buy things that are fundamentally scarce.
This is the economic equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a canister of high-octane gasoline.
I have sat in rooms with policy advisors who genuinely believe that "protecting consumers" from price signals is a moral imperative. It isn't. It's a macroeconomic suicide pact. Price signals are the nerves of an economy. They tell us when something is scarce. When the government dulls those nerves through subsidies or caps, they ensure the underlying scarcity is never addressed.
- The Energy Cap Fallacy: By capping prices, you remove the incentive for the private sector to build new generation capacity. You also prevent the demand-side response that naturally occurs when prices rise.
- The Housing Trap: Thinking that "first-time buyer grants" help people get on the ladder is a delusion. All they do is increase the amount of money chasing a fixed supply of homes, which—surprise—drives the price up further.
We don't have a "cost of living" crisis. We have a "cost of production" crisis.
The Invisible Tax of the Planning System
Politicians love to talk about "growth" because it sounds positive and vague. They rarely talk about the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. This is the one lever they refuse to pull because it requires actual political courage.
The UK has effectively nationalized the right to build. If you want to build a laboratory in Cambridge, a data center in Slough, or a terrace of houses in Manchester, you are at the mercy of a discretionary system that prioritizes the aesthetic preferences of retirees over the economic survival of the workforce.
I’ve seen developers walk away from billion-pound infrastructure projects because the "consultation period" for a simple solar farm lasted longer than the actual construction would have. This creates a massive, hidden tax on every single British citizen. You pay for it in your rent, your electricity bill, and your stagnant wages.
The Productivity Gap is a Choice
The competitor article frames the cost of living as an external storm that the government must weather. This ignores the fact that the UK has the worst productivity growth in the G7.
Since 2008, the UK has chosen to be a low-investment, high-employment economy. We have plenty of jobs; they just don't pay very well because the people doing them aren't equipped with the capital or the technology to produce high-value output.
We have "leveraged" ourselves into a corner where we use cheap labor as a substitute for capital investment. Why buy a $500,000 robotic arm when you can hire five people on minimum wage? The "every lever" approach usually involves raising that minimum wage—which, while well-intentioned, often just accelerates the closure of the very businesses that provide those jobs, without addressing why those businesses weren't productive in the first place.
Why "Stability" is the Enemy of Recovery
Starmer and his team preach "stability" as the ultimate virtue. They want to reassure the City and the public that the "chaos" is over.
But stability in a decaying system is just a slower death.
What the UK needs is instability. It needs the creative destruction that allows failing firms to go bust so their resources—talent, land, and capital—can flow to the companies of the future. By using "levers" to prop up every struggling sector and shield every household from the reality of global market shifts, the government is essentially embalming the 2024 economy.
The Brutal Truth About "Every Lever"
Let’s dismantle the "People Also Ask" myths that usually follow these political announcements:
- Can't the government just tax the banks/oil companies to pay for my bills?
You can. Once. But capital is mobile. If you create a regime where "windfall taxes" are the go-to solution for every budget hole, you ensure that no one will invest in the UK long-term. You are eating your seed corn to make a one-day porridge. - Why can't we just print more money or borrow to lower costs?
We tried that during the pandemic and the energy crisis. The result is the very inflation you are complaining about now. There is no such thing as a free lunch; there is only a lunch you haven't been billed for yet. - Isn't the government's job to protect the vulnerable?
Yes. But when you try to protect everyone, you protect no one. Broad-based cost-of-living support is a transfer of wealth from the future to the present.
The Unconventional Path Forward
If a leader actually wanted to "pull a lever" that mattered, they would stop looking at the social security budget and start looking at the statute book.
- Abolish the Green Belt: Not all of it. Just the parts that are scrubland and car parks. Build three million homes. Watch the "cost of living" vanish as rent drops by 40%.
- Deregulate Nuclear Power: Stop treating every nuclear reactor project like a potential Chernobyl and start treating it like a necessary piece of 21st-century plumbing.
- End the Subsidy Junkie Culture: Stop bailing out industries that can't compete. If a steel mill or a car plant isn't viable at current energy prices, let it fail and focus on retraining the workers for sectors that are viable.
The downside to this contrarian approach? It is politically toxic. It involves telling voters that they cannot have everything they want, exactly where they want it, at a price the 1990s would have found reasonable. It involves admitting that the government is not a god, and the economy is not a machine.
The Myth of the "Technical Fix"
There is a comforting idea that if we just find the right "expert" and the right "lever," we can return to a world of 2% inflation and 3% growth without changing anything about how we live or how we build.
This is a fantasy.
The competitor article is a play-by-play of a theater production. The ministers are on stage, moving cardboard levers back and forth, while the audience cheers or boos based on the lighting. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, the actual machinery of the British state is rusted solid by bureaucracy and a fundamental fear of the future.
Stop waiting for a minister to save your bank account. The government doesn't have a lever for your prosperity. They only have a vacuum for your taxes and a megaphone for their excuses.
The only way to tackle the cost of living is to make living cheaper to produce. That means more concrete, more reactors, more competition, and significantly fewer "levers."
Get out of the way and let the country build. Everything else is just noise.
Burn the dashboard. Build the infrastructure.
Stop asking what the government can do for your bills and start asking why the government makes it illegal for anyone to make your bills cheaper.
