Order matters in government more than almost anything else. A government that leads with growth can afford its ideology later. A government that leads with ideology has to pay for it before the money exists, usually by taxing and borrowing against an economy that has not yet grown. Britain has just watched the second approach in action, and the lesson is worth stating plainly: get the sequence right, or you lose both the growth and the goals you wanted the growth to fund.
I want to be fair about intentions here. The aims of the current government, fairer schools, better public services, less poverty, are decent aims that many people share across the political divide. The problem is not the destination. It is starting the journey by reaching into the pockets of the people you need to create the wealth, before you have done anything to help them create it.
What leading with ideology looked like
The early signals landed together and they landed hard on employers. Employer National Insurance rose to 15 per cent from April 2025, with the threshold at which it starts falling to 5,000 pounds. Twenty per cent VAT was placed on private school fees from January 2025. The minimum wage went up again. Take each on its own and you can argue the case. Deliver them as a block, at the start, and the message businesses hear is that this government sees them as a source of revenue first and a source of growth second.
The result was predictable. The business community, the very group whose confidence you need to invest and hire, felt cold. Confidence is not a soft, sentimental thing in economics. It is the difference between a company that expands and one that waits. Lose it early and you spend the rest of the term trying to win it back.
The markets are always watching
There is a hard constraint that no amount of good intention removes. Every significant decision a government makes is judged by the markets that lend it money. Britain carries a large deficit and a debt burden near the size of the whole economy, with a heavy schedule of borrowing to refinance each year. In that position, if you cannot show that a policy is funded in a way the markets accept, your borrowing costs rise and the room for everything else shrinks. Growth is what widens that room. Ideology, funded by borrowing, narrows it.
This is why the sequence is not a slogan. Grow first, and you generate the tax receipts, the confidence and the fiscal space to do the rest. Try to do the rest first, and you find the money is not there, the markets are nervous, and the growth you needed never arrives to bail you out.
The honest counter-argument, and my answer
The fair objection is that growth-first can become an excuse to never get to fairness at all, and that some measures cannot wait. I take that seriously. But the answer is not to abandon sequence, it is to be disciplined about it: create the conditions for growth, keep the wealth-creators with you, and then use the proceeds to tackle child poverty and health inequality from strength. Those goals are easier to reach in a growing economy, not a stalled one. Fairness funded by growth lasts. Fairness funded by borrowing does not.
Britain can still choose this order. The preconditions are here: deep capital, strong universities, a leading position in European venture funding. What has been missing is a government willing to earn the growth before spending the proceeds. Get that sequence right, and almost everything else the country wants becomes affordable. Get it wrong, and nothing does.