In Can We Be Rich Again? the former chancellor delivers a refreshingly self-aware diagnosis of what has gone wrong with the British economy, and a costed prescription that SMEs, in particular, ought to read with interest.
He could so easily have phoned it in. A bulky political memoir, a couple of nicely judged knives slipped between the shoulder blades of former Cabinet colleagues, an amusing yarn or two from Davos and the IMF spring meetings, and a discreet bit of humble-bragging about steadying the ship after the Truss-Kwarteng mini-Budget. Sir Jeremy Hunt, now liberated from the red box and with rather more time on his hands, could have produced precisely the sort of worthy but unreadable volume that gathers dust on the shelves of every Westminster bookshop.
To his very considerable credit, he has not. In Can We Be Rich Again?, the former chancellor has instead set himself the rather harder task of working out, with disarming honesty about his own role in the muddle, what has gone so badly wrong with the British economy, and how it might still be put right.
A question that should not feel provocative
That the title itself reads as slightly cheeky is, in truth, a damning indictment of where we have arrived. Rich? In an economy where output per person has barely shifted since the eve of the pandemic, the Office for Budget Responsibility’s March 2026 outlook puts real GDP per head growth at an average of just 1.1 per cent a year between now and 2030, against the 2 per cent enjoyed before the financial crisis, the average voter has long since lowered the bar to “not visibly poorer than last year.”
Sir Jeremy will have none of it. “We still have a lot going for us,” he writes, with the breezy confidence of a man who has just remembered he is no longer responsible. Britain, he reminds the reader, retains the integrity of its institutions, robust property rights and a serious legal system. It is the most open of the major economies and houses the third-largest technology ecosystem on the planet, behind only the United States and China. Harness those advantages, he argues, and the British economy can grow again. The diagnosis chimes neatly with the IMF’s own 2026 Article IV concluding statement, which praised the broad direction of the government’s investment-and-reform agenda while warning that “credibility will ultimately hinge on sustained implementation.”
The eight-point plan, costed
What lifts the book above the standard centrist-Tory lament is that Sir Jeremy has done his homework. Each of his prescriptions is tested against an estimated effect on GDP, lending the manifesto a refreshing absence of magical thinking.
The two opening shots are familiar enough: bring taxes down, and adopt a new fiscal rule that compels debt to grow more slowly than output. Then come the supply-side reforms, eight of them, that form the spine of the book. Fix a welfare system that has parked too many working-age adults on long-term sickness benefit. Relax planning rules so that Britain can build something, anything, again. Drive public-sector productivity higher. Hand local mayors the powers and budgets to rebuild their regions. Embrace artificial intelligence rather than regulating it into irrelevance. Restart oil and gas production in the North Sea. Repair an education system that has spent decades failing the 50 per cent of school-leavers who do not go to university. And, perhaps closest to the heart of this magazine’s readership, properly encourage entrepreneurship.
Put the whole package to work, Sir Jeremy reckons, and Britain could add three percentage points a year to its growth rate, a compounded gain of around 20 per cent over a decade. That is not loose change. It is the difference between managed decline and a recognisably advanced economy. For founders and owner-managers, it is the difference between scaling and surviving, a tension Business Matters has chronicled at length in its coverage of SME expansion plans.
Quibbles, mostly minor
It is not difficult to pick at the detail. AI may, in time, prove less revolutionary than its loudest evangelists promise, although the early productivity numbers, Business Matters recently reported research suggesting SMEs deploying AI can unlock productivity gains of between 27 and 133 per cent, argue otherwise. Politicians have been promising to fix vocational training for the best part of a century, generally without troubling the outcomes.
More seriously, Sir Jeremy remains, in temperament, a pragmatic centrist. He instinctively underplays the ferocity of the resistance any reforming chancellor will encounter from what Liz Truss memorably christened “the anti-growth coalition”, that diffuse weave of judges, quangos, NGOs and Whitehall lifers known to its critics as “the Blob”. After five years of a Labour administration that has fed and watered that ecosystem with some enthusiasm, it will be denser, better funded and considerably more confident than it was when he occupied 11 Downing Street.
The book Hunt wishes he had been handed
These, though, are quibbles. Sir Jeremy is unlikely to return to office, and the book never pretends to be a Treasury-ready blueprint. Its real virtue is in marshalling, in one place and with proper analytical rigour, every credible lever available to revive British growth, and in making the unfashionable case that none of this is especially difficult. Read in the context of the optimism filtering back through Britain’s small business community, the message lands harder still: the country wants to grow; it just needs a government that lets it.
By the close of this decade, he warns, Britain will look less like an advanced economy than a developing one. The flipside, he points out with a wry smile audible in the prose, is that emerging economies have spent decades demonstrating that catch-up growth is largely a matter of copying what works elsewhere. “My analysis shows that delivering it may not be easy, but it is not impossible either,” he writes. “All the solutions have been tried in other countries with similar democratic constraints to ourselves.”
The most uncomfortable passage in the book is also the most revealing. “If that’s the answer, why on earth didn’t you do it when you had the chance?” Sir Jeremy asks himself, with the directness of a man who knows the question is coming. “The truth is that no one starting a job can ever know all the answers. In some ways, I wish I had been given this book on the day I became chancellor.”
Whoever inherits the Treasury in 2028 or 2029, and the polling suggests it will not be a Conservative, would do well to take him at his word. Can We Be Rich Again? is, despite itself, the most useful piece of economic writing produced by a former British chancellor in a generation. It deserves to be read, argued with, and, on most counts, acted upon.
Can We Be Rich Again? by Sir Jeremy Hunt is published by Swift at £25.
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