You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. And today I'm talking to William Davis, a sociologist and political economist who teaches at Goldsmith's University of London.

His books include the limits of neoliberalism, the happiness industry, nervous states, and this is not normal, the collapse of Liberal Britain, some of which was first published as pieces in the LRB.

He wrote recently in the paper on the

Labour Party's economic plans. There's one thing that everyone agrees on, he said, whether they

are economists, politicians, business leaders, journalists or voters, the country is in a very bad

way. Hello, Will, and thank you very much for joining me today. That's a pleasure.

So before we get onto the government's attempts to solve them, perhaps you could lay out,

in broad terms, what the economic problems are that the UK faces. Well, the problems have been

identified by successive prime ministers and governments that the overall rate of

economic growth has slowed significantly since the global financial crisis of 2008. And the rate of

GDP per capita has slowed almost to a standstill. I mean, the one thing that is keeping GDP creeping

up at all,

or has been particularly since the end of lockdowns in 2021, has been unprecedented levels

of net immigration. But if you were to look purely in terms of the amount of, in terms,

look at productivity indicators, which are ultimately where growth in output comes from and where

growth in prosperity comes from, and as a result, allows for governments to expand the provision

of things like healthcare and education and so on. Britain's productivity growth rate has slowed

from a rate that was before the financial crisis around about 2% to now below 0.5%.

And I mean, that happened to most comparator economies to some extent around the world, but Britain has been unusually badly hit by the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

And then its recovery after COVID has been less successful than in, certainly than in the United States.

So the effect of all of that is that in order to meet the rising needs in areas such as healthcare,

the benefit system, which has been hotly debated

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