Summary: Economic historian Tyler Goodspeed offers a diagnosis of why the UK economy essentially flatlined after 2008. On his analysis, if we had simply maintained our historic pre-2008 GFC growth trend, we would be 30% richer today. Instead, if Britain were a US state, we would be poorer than Mississippi.

Goodspeed acknowledges some of the usual conservative suspects (planning laws, high taxes) but points the finger squarely at post-2008 banking regulations like the Basel Accords. By aggressively penalising lending to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to engineer risk out of the system, regulators choked off the lifeblood of British capitalism. "You can't have capitalism without capital." B

ecause UK businesses rely far more heavily on traditional bank loans than US firms (where there are many more local and regional banks to offer startup funds), our startups simply cannot get the capital to scale, creating a massive drag on productivity. (It's also why so many British startups end up either listing on the New York Stock Exchange or being bought out by a bigger American company that can provide the company they need to scale.) Because of these rules, the rejection rate for small business loans in the UK has skyrocketed from around 10-20% to nearly 50%

He argues that we have to stop being so paralysed by the fear of a recession that we smother our own prosperity. He argues we must abandon "one-size-fits-all" bank regulations to get credit flowing to SMEs again, and that by obsessing over extreme financial risk-aversion, we are sacrificing the material foundation required for successful businesses, family formation and human flourishing.

Ruth Davidson and Andy Street are the sorts of Tories who, they share some of our values, you know, respect for the rule of law, tolerance, decency. Don't always agree with them on everything, of course. I think there's gonna come up a moment, when they have to make a choice. If Kemi Badenoch and the Tories end up putting Reform into power, despite these problems with those relationships, and, if they do, I think they need to think about the Liberal Democrats. My door will be open, if they decide not to go with Kemi Badenoch and do something with Reform.

A very interesting discussion with, imo, one of most thoughtful conservative commentators in Britain about Christian faith, politics and hope.