Budget Resolutions

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

In our era of perma-meta-poly crisis, the decisions the Chancellor has taken to provide our country with a little breathing space will be welcome to many of my constituents. The longer-term question that remains is what we mean by good growth, because, looking back over the last two decades, it has proven perfectly possible for GDP growth to happen, and yet simultaneously for almost everyone’s life to get harder. Our country will drift until politicians can give a meaningful definition of good growth that the whole country can strive for and mobilise around.

Fortunately, we do not have to reinvent this wholly anew for ourselves. John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economic mind our country has ever produced, left us many of the answers we have been fumbling for. Nearly 100 years ago, he warned that a focus on the wrong priorities would keep us

“for ever in the pit of want”.

In other words, chasing the chimera of infinite, exponential increases in consumption completely misses the point of what economic policy should achieve. Since Keynes’s time, there has been nearly a sixfold increase in UK GDP per capita. We have more than enough wealth to ensure that every one of our constituents is meaningfully employed, can afford decent food and is well housed, yet hardship, reliance on food banks and the housing crisis do not just persist but, in many ways, continue to worsen.

When Keynes wrote about the economic possibilities for his generation’s grandchildren, I do not think this is what he had in mind. We may have a growing surplus of AI slop, all the poisonous social media one could possibly want to consume, and the jolly good fun of casino capitalism that does not actually produce anything, but we lack safe, comfortable and genuinely affordable homes for millions of people. We lack food that is both affordable and nutritious for all and, almost everywhere outside London, we lack a public transport network that can reliably get us to where we need to be.

The reason for that economic failure is straightforward: we have not had the self-confidence and determination to mobilise our enormous resources to meet our fundamental problems. Keynes was right when he argued that we already have all the “resources and technical means” to erase economic need in our country; what we have lacked is the organisation to use them. There are literally trillions of pounds managed by UK pension funds and asset management schemes. If we directed just a fraction of that to investing in our actual priorities, our country could finally hop off the nauseating merry-go-round of chasing growth that endlessly forces us to make trade-offs that have brought our natural world to the brink of collapse.

I will end on this. The fundamental fact about all our lives is that they are transient. The promise of consuming more every year than the last is irrelevant to making the most of the time we are each allotted.