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.”
“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.”
But first consider running a risk assessment of the dangers of falling glass, for which we will need a steering group plus several working parties…
I thought it was Wellington who made the “hard pounding, gentlemen” utterance; in reference to the Battle of Waterloo that was unfolding before him.
I read elsewhere that the last tanker loads of jet fuel arrived in Britain a month or so ago. Once people cannot go on holiday, there will be a fairly compelling crisis. At that point the RAF will no doubt also be grounded, as this Government can be expected to do everything in its power to delay the inevitable up to the very last minute.
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, spoken during the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815
Maybe it’s already too late?
“The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.”
(Louis MacNeice)
Do we blame the politicians or the electorate? Do we blame a small number of people attempting to cater to the electorate’s delusions or a large number of people for possessing those delusions?
@patrick,
“Do we blame the politicians or the electorate?”
It’s both I’m afraid – it’s self-reinforcing.
That said, I think there are enough pissed off people that a few notable public figures making a good case could cause the dam to break and allow the overton window to shift dramatically.
The only question – as per OP – is whether this will happen before a catastrophic crisis. If it doesn’t, we may not get the correction that’s needed…
Rachel Reeves has her faults – for example pretending to have been a Bank of England economist in London when the lady was really a customer complaints person in Leeds (and was almost sacked from that job – for not turning up to work), but we all have our “Walter Mitty” moments (I certainly do – indeed later on today I may well be pretending to be the King of a fantasy Kingdom, although in a game – rather than on my C.V.) – and, in relation to the Labour Party, the lady is a “moderate” – the other likely candidates for Chancellor are WORSE.
Are the voters to blame? In some places yes – for example in Scotland and Wales the failure of leftism (the left has been in power in both these places since “Devolution”) has not led to any reexamination by most voters – who have, mostly, continued to vote for parties of ever-bigger-and-more-interventionist government. As for Birmingham, the second city of England, the situation there is truly awful – and it is going to get a lot worse, and (yes) most voters have continued to vote for decay.
But in much of England most voters are NOT to blame – indeed most voters support political parties who say they support limited government. But, tragically, the Conservatives and the Reform Party continue to cut each other’s throats – in Kettering there are more Conservative voters than Reform Party voters, but in other parts of England the situation is the other way round , so neither party is really to blame.
The question is what sort of country do we want?
Presently the United Kingdom is on track to be, in American terms, a place like California or New York State – where only a lunatic would invest.
What we need to be is a place like Florida (not small – tens of millions of people live in Florida) – where government spending, taxes and regulations are much less.
The difference is indeed vast – government spending and taxation in New York State is more than twice what it is in Florida, and I do mean “per capita” – per person.
I agree with Johnathan Pearce – the reforms set out in the policy paper are (as Graham Towler correctly points out), both sensible and MODERATE – they would not turn the United Kingdom into Florida, or Texas (the Houston area dwarfs any area of the United Kingdom in terms of industry), or Tennessee, but they might (just might) be enough to save the United Kingdom from collapse.
But, and here is the tragedy, there is no chance whatever of these reforms being carried out in the next three years – and the next General Election is unlikely to be before May 2029 – why should Labour Members of Parliament vote themselves out of a job? There will be no election till 2029.
So Britain is going to collapse – that is very sad (indeed tragic), but it will happen.
You, we, and Uncle Tom Cobbley can write all the excellent papers we wish (and many of them are excellent, including the one referenced). The trouble is, we’re not in charge, the loonies are. So I suspect Paul is mostly correct: I don’t expect collapse, but decline and demoralisation will continue until 2029. After that, who knows? Trump will be gone, Putin may well be gone, Britain will be back in the EU in all but name, and the job will be that much harder. But despair is a sin.
See the discussion just yesterday: we’re talking about economics, when we haven’t even begun to tackle the cultural-relativism-vs-observable-truth nonsense.
My concern is beginning to be: “exactly what does this coming catastrophe look like?”
Are we talking zombie apocalyse/collapse of food distribution or just a late 1970s vibe?
Amen. As always, in democracies, we get the government we asked for.
They are representatives, not mullahs. They do what we tell them to do mostly – and if you’re infuriated that they’re not doing what YOU told them to do, that means you lost the election.
“My concern is beginning to be: “exactly what does this coming catastrophe look like?”
Are we talking zombie apocalyse/collapse of food distribution or just a late 1970s vibe?”
It’ll be more zombie apocalypse than late 70s vibe, in the UK at least. Think how much more redundancy there was built into systems in the UK 50 years ago, more ability of people to cope for themselves, generations who had experienced wartime deprivations. The UK was energy self sufficient. It was c. 75-80% food self sufficient (thanks to post war agricultural subsidies, both before and after joining the EEC). It largely manufactured most of the major things required to keep society functioning. Just in time management wasn’t a thing, people and companies held stocks of goods and supplies. People knew how to cook food from scratch. Food production, processing and retailing was far more dispersed than today. Management and financial systems relied on nothing more complex than a pen, some paper, a filing cabinet and some postage stamps. Most ordinary people were paid in cash, and used that alone for their purchases. The country was racially and socially largely homogenous.
21st century Britain has none of that resilience. If electronic systems fail people will not be able to trade, to buy and sell, or communicate. If food fails to appear in shops for more than a few days people will start going hungry, and rioting and looting would erupt very quickly. If energy is in short supply, many would freeze in winter, few have any alternative to their electric or gas heating. Life in Britain today requires everything to work just perfectly, if for any reason it stops doing so, real crisis will soon follow, for which 99% are totally unprepared. We live on a knife edge, and it won’t take much to push us off it.
Jim.
Yes – you describe the grim reality. Society today is horribly “brittle” – it is vastly more vulnerable than it was.
And we depend on imported food, raw materials AND manufactured goods – and we pay for all this with (in effect) I.O.Us.
It is demented to call this mess a “free market” or “free trade” – this is nothing like the sort of economy the Classical Economists supported, indeed it is the opposite of it.
It is an economy (a society) that is based on consumption not production – turning Say’s Law on its head.
That’s my fear too. The big issue is, I think, power resilience. The grid goes offline and, under a cold/black start, it could take weeks to restore – cold starts are very very hard. During that period, nothing is working – petrol stations can’t pump even if they have petrol, internet is down so you have no comms and you can’t pay for anything and stores can’t transmit orders. Entertainingly, the increase in the use of EVs makes this worse – demand at restart could be significantly higher as any connected EVs try to recharge.
Worse still the authorities will really struggle to coordinate the public to get the grid back up as no-one will be able to power their TVs, so very hard to get messaging out to the public (even assuming they trust it and would act on it). And after a week even mobile phones will likely be dead too.
The Pedant-General
People in, say, West Virginia might survive such a power collapse – at least the ones that have not fallen into the nightmare of opiate abuse (alas – some people have, and they are dying). Many people in such places still have basic survival skills – and know how to help other people as well as themselves.
But in Britain the results of such a collapse would indeed be terrible – mass death.
Paul:
That seems to be the future that Ed Miliband has planned out for us. He is the worst politician this country has ever had to suffer.