Under Labour, things are not going to get any better. You cannot tax your way to prosperity. Small fixes and helping hands don't change the fact that the fundamentals are broken, and are getting worse all the time. Redistributive policies make you poorer in the long run. An increase in minimum wage mean prices go up and fewer people are employed. Meanwhile, taxes, red tape and regulation deter anyone from starting or expanding businesses. If being bigger and more successful means more administrative burden and more tax, there is no incentive to do better. Not forgetting that if energy is expensive then everything is expensive, and the more expensive it is, the less competitive we are. You can't export things if you can't afford to make them. This is why the economy is stagnating. Our economic woes are self-inflicted. We are stifling our own growth, making infrastructure more expensive, and killing jobs in the process. As such, there is no recovery without addressing the fundamentals. Britain is over taxed, over regulated, over its head in debt, and more of the same is only going to make matters even worse. You could have said this at any point in the last twenty five years. Britain cannot afford its spending, much less its welfare burden. The reason the country is so dilapidated is because we have hollowed out state capacity in order to maintain our lavish welfare systems. We cannot go on as we are without some major reforms. Reforms that will be painful. I believe we are rapidly reaching a crunch point at which all of these factors converge - where we can't borrow any more and the economy cannot sustain our expectations of government. We are set to be much poorer - and colder. Fixing this will require a complete reassessment of every base assumption of the last two decades. You cannot power a first world economy with windmills. We cannot have a quarter of the workforce claiming benefits. We cannot treat every ailment as a disability. We can't keep punishing innovation with regulation and tax. We cannot keep asset stripping the armed forces to pay for welfare. We cannot afford feed and cloth every hapless biped who rocks up with their hand out. This, though is the central division in our politics. Labour would have us carry on as we are. Burnham will use out money to buy off his client groups, while keeping us shackled to the EU so that there can be no reform. We simply bleed out over the next decade. This is what @robertjenrick's latest measures are designed to address. What Reform neglects to state, though, is that much of Jenrick's agenda puts us on a collision course with the EU because much of the Brexit deal is centred on non-regression. We are locked in to the status quo, just as we were as members of the EU. As such, the Brexit question was never satisfactorily resolved. Burnham wants us to remain shackled to this corpse. We only need look to the rapid deindustrialisation of Germany to see how that pans out. Climate rules are destroying the European car industry - the beneficiary of which is China. Britain can only reindustrialise if we break from the dogmas of EU. This is what made it necessary to leave in the first place. Since Brexit though, little has been done. We could have repealed the galaxy of EU directives that make everything more expensive and inefficient - but we didn't. The Westminster blob simply doesn't have the will to put us on the right track. Brexit was kicked into the long grass. To a point, it's understandable. There isn't a popular consensus for making many of the necessary reforms. The dogmas are too deeply entrenched - both in politics and the wider population. The Tory party itself was and is captured by the green blob, and Kemi Badenoch remarked only as week that "of course we still need renewables". The Westminster mindset is anti-growth and anti-prosperity. That's ultimately the result of thirty years of green propaganda. They will oppose any reform that liberates the economy. Until this is addressed, we are circling the drain, in a state of badly managed decline until we can barely even keep the lights on, and Britain finds itself bankrupt and defenceless. What’s interesting about Jenrick's reform measures is that they mainly remove artificial inhibitors on growth. Britain’s stagnation is wholly self-inflicted (with a little help from the EU. We’d be a lot better off even even half of them were implemented, but the left would fight to the death to stop any one of them being implemented. That is the fundamental division in our politics now. It is continuity Brexit politics, up against a ruling class that will tolerate no deviation from the status quo. As @SebMilbank put it this morning, "Much of this is because they have no actual vision of the nation's future, beyond an end of history secular humanist internationalism". Moreover, conceding the need for reform means admitting they've been wrong about absolutely everything for the last half century.