Andrew Griffith: we’re ready for the battle of ideas

At a Centre for Policy Studies fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, the CPS's new Director Liam Halligan put the questions to Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith.

Griffith, a former FTSE 100 finance director, begins with why Britain’s growth rate never recovered after 2008. He points to a tax system that discourages risk, a state now spending 45p in every pound, an ageing population that governments tried to offset with high immigration and years of quantitative easing that rewarded owning assets over building businesses. He accepts that Conservative governments share the blame. In his view the party’s biggest failure was that it stopped making the case for markets, and by the end it was telling people how to heat their homes and regulating how fruit yogurt is advertised.

On the public finances, he compares Britain to Wile E. Coyote, clinging to the cliff edge while paying more for 30-year borrowing than Greece, Portugal, Morocco and Bulgaria. He insists the problem is political rather than economic: the Chancellor, John Healey, could find the savings ‘this afternoon’ if Labour were willing to reform welfare. He also explains why high energy costs are only one layer of ‘the whole stack’ holding British business back, and why he thinks handing power to arm’s-length regulators has been a disaster.