Economic and Taxation Policies: Jobs, Growth and Prosperity

Lord Goodman of Wycombe Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell on securing this important debate, on his penetrating criticism of the Government’s economic policy, echoed by so many of the speeches of my noble friends, and, not least, on having a positive alternative to put forward in this debate—namely, his book Prosperity Through Growth, which I am looking forward to reading. I gather that it promises 24 policies that would raise growth by 7% above current forecasts within five years and are fully costed.

I shall make three points in responding to him. First, my noble friend is right to argue that our economic culture since the age of Gordon Brown has been so fixated on wealth distribution as to forget the primacy of wealth creation, as I put it in my own rather more modest publication for Policy Exchange, The Right Way. Small and medium-sized firms are the forgotten heroes of the British economy—a point just made in his speech by my noble friend Lord Risby—but I am afraid I suspect there will be nothing much for them in the Budget.

Secondly, tax cuts are the easy bit. The heart of it, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, referred to a moment ago in his speech, is public spending control. The medium-term financial strategy of the 1980s, the foundation of British economic recovery in the Thatcher era, was built on reducing borrowing. It is to the credit of my noble friend that his book apparently—as I say, I am looking forward to reading it—proposes some economies.

Finally, pamphlets like mine, books like my noble friend’s, OBR forecasts and Treasury Red Books are all important and have their place, but they must operate amid all the roughness and unpredictability of the real world, where there are known unknowns, unknown unknowns and known knowns, and it is to one of these that I want to turn in closing.

Our urban areas are at the risk of balkanising. Our streets are seeing open support for terrorist groups. Palestinian flags and St George’s crosses are becoming territorial markers. Jews have been murdered simply for being Jews. Mosques as well as synagogues are targeted for violence. The driver of this unrest has been Islamist extremism and the reaction is white nationalism, and in between is the mass of the population, of all religions and none. Countering this extremism requires a cross-government programme, run from Downing Street, that runs from monitoring out-of-school settings to providing more prison places, through prosecuting incitement in mosques and curbing violent protests—in other words, taking the action that successive Governments have failed to for probably over 25 years. This challenge cannot be met by public money alone, but it will cost public money if we are to meet it. That money is going to have to come from somewhere, and, if I hear the voices of my noble friends correctly, at least some of it should come from welfare reform.

There is no such animal as economics without politics; indeed, it is politics that shapes economics. If the political challenge of the coming decade is strengthening our internal security, as I fear it is shaping up to be, the economic challenge of the coming decade will be strengthening our security. I urge the Minister and the Government to rise to it.