The paper’s authors are too diplomatic to say it directly, but the implication is clear: Rachel Reeves is pursuing a policy that risks making the crisis she fears more likely, not less. Markets have noticed. Long-dated gilt yields have been rising for most of 2025 even as the Bank of England has been cutting interest rates, a dissociation that signals precisely the kind of underlying distrust the paper warns about.
The question the paper ultimately poses is not an economic one. It is a political one. These reforms, the civil service reductions, the welfare tightening, the Bank of England adjustments, the net zero rephrasing, are all achievable. They were, in many cases, the settled common ground of British economic management not long ago. The question is whether any government has the nerve to implement them before a crisis compels it, or whether, as the authors quietly and rather despairingly note, “even among policy experts there is growing recognition that much of what needs to be done will not be attempted until a crisis compels it.“
That sentence should haunt anyone who reads it. Because what it describes is not a failure of economics. It is a failure of political will. And in a democracy that has spent six years lurching from one emergency to another, we should not be sanguine that the compulsion will arrive in time, or in a form we would choose.
Break the glass now, or wait for someone else to break it for you. That is the choice. And this paper, to its credit, has at least had the honesty to say so.
– Gawain Towler, discussing In case of emergency, break glass by The Centre for a Better Britain
That is a very good document from Redwood and others. A pal of mine is working on a document that is also likely to cause a lot of discussion among Reform UK and for that matter, the sharper minds in the Conservative Party in coming months. Things are moving.
And as ever, I plug Lord (Jonathan) Monyihan’s Return To Growth two-volume opus that sets out, in great detail, the tax, monetary policy, spending, trade and related steps that a government needs to take to get the UK firing on all cylinders again. It is not going to be easy, but it can be done.
I worry that by the time a set of corrective measures are even taken, the building will be on fire. And this is not happening, remember, in calm times (Gulf, sectarianism in UK politics, immigration anger, a poisonous culture in our universities and schools, etc).
As Lord Horatio Nelson said at Trafalgar just before he was shot – “hard pounding, gentlemen.”