I went to a Looking For Growth headline event. It was tragic, self-contradictory, and hopeful.
My friend, previously not overtly political, started posting about Looking For Growth (LFG) and joined a local chapter. It looked like LFG attracted people who weren’t in the UK political sphere before, so when they announced a headline event, I had to go and see the event for myself.
What I saw was tragic, self-contradictory, and hopeful.
The event
I got to O2 Indigo in time for the pre-show, as the room was slowly filling up. The crowd was overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, white men between 20 and 40. Maybe a fifth had a strong conservative society vibe. The organisers claimed 1,300 people came in; I have my doubts. Here are two photos mid-event:
The “pre-show” was Foundations authors talking about the essay and growth in general. The combination of looking for good examples in other countries and pushing for housing, energy, and infrastructure is great! I was nodding along, until they started talking about the upcoming Renters’ Rights Bill, taking a hardline Randian stance. Apparently, having a way to challenge punitive rent rises is the same as state-controlled rents, so the bill, in their view, is classic rent control. It felt especially weird after seeing an MP at Labour Conference rebuking a suggestion from an activist to cap rents, saying that rent controls don’t work, and that the bill is explicitly designed to leave rents to the market. I guess ideological allergy is a thing and makes people see things that aren’t there.
Next up, an introduction from LFG people, the centrepiece of which was another iteration in LFG’s fight with TfL to clean up graffiti on the tube. Andy Lord, the Commissioner of TfL, claimed to have evidence that the volunteers put the graffiti themselves in some cases. When LFG made a Freedom of Information request, they found that the claim was baseless. All fair game, and Andy Lord shouldn’t have done this. Interestingly, this time LFG didn’t mention Sadiq Khan, whom they previously attacked for similar claims he made.
Sarah Coombes MP talked about her campaign against “ghost plates”. Ghost plates are number plates with coatings obstructing number-plate recognition (ANPR), but invisible to the naked eye. Great stuff! I’ve started to appreciate that kind of targeted policy campaign lately (subscribe to hear about my own soon). We need more of this, not just large sweeping reforms that dominate the headlines.
Next guest, Liv Boeree, couldn’t be more different. No policy, just talking about poker, the US, and comparing Britain to Texas. Apparently it’s not cool to be patriotic in the UK now, which is a problem, because without that “aggressive religions” (on twitter she just says Islam) will subsume us. After the host asked Liv about recommendations for the UK for the third time, she finally said something generic about growth. It wasn’t just me struggling to see the point: towards the end the stage was almost drowned out by the audience chatter.
The sponsor’s speech was alright, but then Matt Clifford really captured the audience and the chatter died. He talked about past British achievements, how we’re down now, and how many things are fixable with growth and the country getting wealthier. It’s unlikely that many in the audience saw how close the mood was to Starmer’s speech at Labour Conference just a few weeks ago! Optimism conditional on reforms. Change for the better being possible. Inclusive patriotism.
Then, an unannounced pre-recorded speech from Danny Kruger MP, a Tory MP who defected to Reform. Free of content except migrants-migrants-labour-bad. The most original part of this was the introduction by James Newport, who warmly announced that it’s Danny’s birthday.
Dominic Cummings, the absolute low of the night. This speech marked a first in my life: first time I couldn’t cope with a speech and left. The stream of unchallenged confidently wrong midwittery, from immigration to Ukrainian drones to the British political process, was too much. Few things are as corrosive to my psyche as the most well-known SPAD in modern history, with a film about him starring Benedict Cumberbatch, droning on about “the elites”.
In a short respite, Chris Curtis went on stage and promoted the Labour Growth Group. Decent speech, I just wish he weren’t reading it.
The final speaker was Katie Lam, a Tory pushing for deportation of millions of people lawfully settled in the UK. In the only mention of Tories (more on this below), an LFG host called her a phoenix rising from the ashes of the Conservative Party. What followed was very reminiscent of Liz Truss, down to speech cadence, with more anti-immigration rhetoric. There was no acknowledgment that the very lack of growth she lamented was caused by her own party, which she was an important part of since 2019.
The tragedy
The most important part was not Dominic Cummings, or the surprise Reform MP appearance. That can be explained by LFG trying for a diverse lineup. After all, there were Labour MPs on the stage.
The most important part was what wasn’t said. It seems impossible to talk about the British decline and not mention the party that was in power for 14 years, and yet that’s what LFG hosts did. There was space for contempt for the Labour government, but the only mention of the Conservatives was in the introduction of Katie Lam.
The absence was too obvious and too awkward to be accidental. It makes the diverse lineup explanation implausible.
The impulse of trying to make one’s environment better, to do things, is right and noble. People joining LFG chapters, people cleaning the tube, people collecting rubbish in the parks — they are some of the best people in this country. They contribute their time with no expectation of personal profit, they do it just to make things a little better. They are my tribe.
The tragedy is that LFG is seeking to exploit the impulse and bait-and-switch followers into hard-right politics. To hijack the growth-seeking agenda and use it to promote Katie Lam and Dominic Cummings. The Labour MPs served as a fig leaf, and even then they half-distanced themselves from the government.
The contradictions
This strategy is full of contradictions.
The Labour government is apparently useless, but LFG, an upstart political organisation, affected the policy with their pro-growth suggestions in less than a year, and considers it their achievement. It is an achievement, but it won’t happen without a government willing to listen.
A decade of decline, but the party in power at the time and responsible for the decline is never named. The person directly responsible for one of the most growth-harming policies, Brexit, is on stage, pontificating about reforming Britain, pretending to be an outsider. A campaign for change for the better, started with a lie by omission.
“You can just do things”, but truly effective things (working on policy, convincing MPs and ministers, starting political campaigns and finding funding) are reserved for LFG and aren’t mentioned. Instead, things to do are posting on twitter, non-political grassroots activism, and supporting LFG. It’s a terminal case of “do as I say, not as I do”: LFG-the-organisation is a nice office with a bunch of full-time and part-time employees, which requires very different actions from posting on twitter and cleaning graffiti that they suggest to their followers.
The least important contradiction that nonetheless made me chuckle: according to an LFG staffer, their political organisation that transforms donations into political pressure is not a political organisation, but a startup. It’s strange to position a political organisation as something that generates an outsized return on investment and be proud of it. Either the intended exit is selling the British government to LFG’s investors, or more likely it’s just Dominic Cummings brain worms.
The hope
All of those contradictions make LFG inherently vulnerable. The right thing to do is to learn from them.
Their insight is that there’s a lot of untapped drive for making the country better among early- and mid-career professionals who aren’t involved in politics yet. Anecdotally, I see that too: on more than one occasion, I talked to a stranger, and twenty minutes later they wanted to contribute to policy. A lot of people want to help, and most of them aren’t hard-left or hard-right, so they can be persuaded. If the Labour Party learns to harness this potential, it will lead to a renewal of the party, national politics, and ultimately the country.
Another insight is that boring everyday annoyances (low-level crime, rubbish, urban disrepair) that many in the party consider barely important, almost petty, do matter to voters. They matter enough to drive engagement and activism, even if they are unlikely to show in polling. Ask people if they care more about big issues bringing major suffering to a few people or fly-tipping, and they are more likely to answer the former, because that’s the story about themselves they want to believe. All major parties are hyper-focused on opinion polls, which creates an opening for LFG. On top of that, the Labour Party has its own biases that don’t help.
My hope here is that this is fixable. Labour “just” needs to re-learn how to attract and retain younger idealistic activists and guide them into the funnel of MP and councillor candidate selection, and slightly rebalance its priorities to show tangible everyday improvements for most people.
If a few people and Dominic Cummings in a trench coat can do that, so can the Labour Party.
Brushing off criticism of the Renters' Rights Bill as "hardline Randian" is really weak sauce. UK didn't have this law until yesterday, was it "hardline Randian" then? There's also historical precedent of similar well-intentioned legislation backfiring: https://capx.co/equal-pay-claims-are-a-fiscal-timebomb