Thoughts on today's Spring Statement
Matt Goodwin
Mar 26
Britain’s economy, in case you haven’t noticed, is in the toilet. Growth has collapsed. Productivity is poor. Living standards have suffered one of the sharpest declines in recent history. Confidence has slumped. And prosperity feels like a distant dream.
I don’t know about you but when I walk around the streets of Britain these days I feel a mix of depression and embarrassment. The streets are dirty. Public transport rarely works and when it does arrive it’s worn down. Petty crime has basically been legalised, leaving a mood of fear and anxiety hanging the air. Public services are a joke. London is dead. People are visibly struggling. And nothing seems to work.
The only thing I do feel certain about is that while the present is already worse than the past, the future looks set to be even worse. And I’m clearly not the only one to feel this way. Wealth creators, entrepreneurs and investors are now fleeing Britain in much larger numbers than in the past while many young I meet are not talking about building businesses here but, instead, moving to the likes of Dubai or Europe to take up digital nomad visas. They just don’t find Britain attractive anymore.
And why would they? Just look at the latest numbers. While Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and the new Labour government promised us at the general election last year they would fix this by ‘going for growth’, this year the Bank of England forecasts growth of just 0.7 per cent while inflation looks set to run at around 3 per cent. Britain is now trapped in a toxic combination of poor growth, stubbornly persistent inflation, low productivity, and a huge pile of incredibly expensive national debt.
Here’s just one statistic that reflects how bad things really are.
While much of the nation was recently, understandably, furious about a decision to take winter fuel payments from British pensioners to save £1.5 billion, this year alone the British taxpayer will pay £105 BILLION, or £9 billion every month, just servicing our national credit card —just paying off the interest on our national debt. We now spend considerably more each year servicing our debt than defending our country.
Which is partly why, today, in the Spring Statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Labour government find themselves with zero room for manoeuvre. Having already presided over massive spending increases and tax rises in the budget last autumn, including clobbering British businesses with higher taxes and smashing any confidence that remained, Rachel Reeves today looks set to announce further drastic cuts to spending to try and shore up our national finances, including additional cuts to welfare and the civil service. Everything, in short, looks set to get worse.
And the British people have noticed. When it comes to the economy, which is the top issue for voters, the Labour government and Rachel Reeves have already lost the room. Today, as she delivers her Spring Statement, just 11 per cent of voters think Rachel Reeves is doing a ‘good job’ while, last week, pollsters Opinium put her net rating at minus 37. This makes her the least popular cabinet minister by some way and puts her where Meghan Markle is in the national polls —which is definitely a good thing.
Nor are voters impressed with Labour. Nearly three-quarters —73 per cent—think Keir Starmer’s party is managing the economy ‘badly’, while two-thirds think Labour is failing to manage inflation, which it is. Only small minorities support them.
There have been other big shifts since Labour came to power, too. The share of voters who think Labour ‘taxes and spends too much’ has rocketed, from just 28 per cent last year to 41 per cent. Only 12 per cent think Labour has the balance between tax and spend ‘about right’. With further stealth taxes and spending increases en route, Labour look set to become further out-of-touch with the country.
And when Ipsos-MORI asked the British people how they have felt since Labour took office, just 14 per cent said they feel ‘better off’. Only one in four say they are living ‘comfortably’, down 6-points on last year, while most people either say they are ‘finding it difficult’ or, at best, are merely ‘coping’. Indeed, ‘coping’ seems to be the best one can hope for in modern Britain. Most of us are merely existing, not living.
But here’s the thing. It’s not just the Labour Party that people are convinced does not have the answers to Britain’s growing pile of serious problems. It’s everybody. What I see when I look out there at the country, when I look at the polls, is a much wider, deeper, and systemic collapse of public trust and public faith in the entire system. The British people simply do not believe that anybody can fix this mess.
There are now dangerous amounts of pessimism, distrust, and disillusionment in the country with the overall direction of Britain and with its political leadership in Westminster, irrespective of whether it’s on the left or right. Almost nobody, for example, expects the country’s economy to improve in the years ahead.
When the British people were recently asked what they think will happen to Britain’s economy in the year ahead, not even one in five people, just 17 per cent, said things will get better. Like me, it seems, most people appear convinced that the future will be worse than the present and so they are buckling in, putting on their seat-belt and hunkering down, turning away from their leaders in Westminster and, more importantly, the idea that Britain will deliver them a good, prosperous life.
YouGov Polling, March 2025
And when YouGov asked voters this week whether they think the Tories would do a better job than Labour most just shrugged their shoulders and said ‘not really’.
In fact, consistently, on everything from reducing poverty to providing jobs, from helping people get onto the housing ladder to improving living standards, from tackling the deficit to keeping prices down, the most popular answer when people are asked who would do best is neither Labour nor the Tories. It is ‘none of them’.
Once again, only small minorities of people back one of the two big parties to fix this disaster. Look, too, at the net ratings of every frontline politician in Westminster. They are all sitting in ‘net negative’ territory, disliked by a larger number of voters than the number they are keeping on side. Nobody is popular. Nobody is capturing the public imagination. SW1 just looks completely remote from people’s lives.
And this total sense of apathy and estrangement from the political class is not just visible on everything to do with the economy but runs through people’s reactions to many other issues that are dominating the agenda, too. Whether the people are asked who will lower legal immigration, stop the small boats, or reduce spiralling crime, a large swathe of the country simply no longer have faith in the idea there is somebody within the establishment, on the left or right, who can solve these problems.
Instead, there is a widespread sense out there in the country that the people are now trapped in a flimsy, disintegrating boat on stormy seas, with no captain and enormous, terrifying waves pushing them all around.
And you know what? This is my big concern. It’s not just about the dire direction of the economy or what Rachel Reeves and the Labour government say today. It’s something much deeper and potentially far more disruptive.
It’s this overwhelming, palpable, stifling feeling out there in the country, among the British people, that nobody in power really knows what they are doing anymore.
Nobody knows how to get us out of this big tax, big spending, big welfare, big state, big Net Zero, and big immigration economy that is making us poorer and further pushing our country into managed decline.
Nobody can stop the boats. Nobody can lower immigration. Nobody can reverse the de facto legalisation of crime, symbolised by online videos of marauding armed gangs and the fact that in London last year some 70,000 smartphones were stolen.
Nobody can fix the health service. Nobody can stop the cultural rot and sense of malaise that has descended across these islands. And nobody seems able to stop and reverse the very visible, managed decline of our once great nation.
And it’s this, I think, more than anything else, that is now pushing us into a very dangerous place indeed.