Can We Get Rich Again? the former chancellor offers a refreshingly self-aware diagnosis of what has gone wrong in the British economy, and a valuable prescription that SMEs, in particular, should read with interest.
He could just as easily call it. A great political reminder, a few well-respected knives slipped between the shoulders of former Cabinet colleagues, a funny thread or two from Davos and the spring meetings of the IMF, and a little bragging about stopping the ship after the Truss-Kwarteng mini-Budget. Sir Jeremy Hunt, now freed from the red box and with more time on his hands, could produce precisely the kind of worthy but illegible volume gathering dust on the shelves of a Westminster bookshop.
Because of his great fame, he did not. In Can We Be Rich Again?, the former chancellor has instead set himself the most difficult task of working, disarmingly honest about his role in the mess, what went so wrong with the British economy, and how it is being fixed.
It’s a question that shouldn’t feel provocative
That the title itself reads like a joke is, in fact, a damning indictment of how far we’ve come. Are you rich? In an economy where output per capita has not changed since before the pandemic, the Office for Budget Responsibility’s March 2026 outlook puts real GDP per head at an average of 1.1 percent per year between now and 2030, compared to the 2 percent enjoyed before the financial crisis, the average voter has never been down for a long time.
Sir Jeremy will have none of it. “We still have a lot to do,” he wrote, with the breezy confidence of a man who has just remembered that he is no longer guilty. Britain, he reminds the reader, maintains the integrity of its institutions, strong property rights and a sensitive legal system. It is the most open of the major economies and the largest technological system in the world, behind only the United States and China. Bind those gains, he says, and Britain’s economy could grow again. The diagnosis is in line with the IMF’s concluding statement for 2026, which recommended a broad orientation of the government’s investment and reform agenda while warning that “credibility will depend on continued implementation.”
The eight-point plan, called for
What elevates this book above the usual centrist-Tory lament is that Sir Jeremy has done his homework. Each of his prescriptions is evaluated against the estimated effect on GDP, lending the manifesto a refreshing absence of magical thinking.
The two opening shots are familiar enough: lower taxes, and adopt a new fiscal policy that forces debt to grow slower than output. Then there are the supply-side reforms, eight of which form the core of the book. Fix a welfare system that has parked too many working-age adults in long-term illness. Relax planning rules so Britain can build something, anything, again. Increase public sector productivity. Give local mayors the power and budget to rebuild their districts. Embrace artificial intelligence rather than trivialize it. Restart oil and gas production in the North Sea. Fixing an education system that has spent decades failing with 50 percent of school leavers not going to university. And, perhaps close to the heart of this magazine’s readers, rightly promote trade.
Use the whole package, Sir Jeremy thinks, and Britain could add three percentage points a year to its growth rate, a compounded gain of around 20 per cent over ten years. That is not an easy change. It is the difference between a managed recession and a highly developed virtual economy. For founders and owner-managers, the difference between scale and survival, the intense Business Matters reported in detail in its coverage of SME expansion plans.
Quibbles, especially small ones
It’s not hard to pick out details. In the long run, AI may show less flexibility than promised by its most vocal evangelists, although the initial productivity numbers, Business Matters recently reported a study that suggests that SMEs using AI can unlock productivity gains between 27 and 133 percent, do not argue otherwise. Politicians have been promising to fix vocational training for the better part of a century, often without compromising the results.
More importantly, Sir Jeremy remains, in terms of attitude, a leading man. He sadly underestimates the ferocity of resistance any reformist chancellor will face in what Liz Truss memorably called the “anti-growth coalition”, which divides judges, quangos, NGOs and the Whitehall lifers known to their critics as “the Blob”. After five years of a Labor administration that has fed and watered that environment with some enthusiasm, it will be denser, better funded and more confident than when he was in 11 Downing Street.
A book Hunt wishes he had been given
These, however, are constraints. Sir Jeremy is unlikely to return to office, and the book never pretends to be a blueprint for the Treasury. Its true beauty is in marshalling, in one place and with the proper rigor of analysis, every reliable lever available to revive Britain’s growth, and in making the unfashionable case that none of this is too difficult. Read in the context of rebounding optimism among Britain’s small businesses, the message comes hard: the country wants to grow; it just needs a government that allows it.
He warns that by the end of this decade, Britain will look less like an advanced economy than a developing one. The flipside, he points out with a wistful smile that can be heard in the prose, is that developing economies have spent decades demonstrating that sustainable growth is a matter of copying what works elsewhere. “My analysis shows that delivery may not be easy, but it’s not impossible either,” he writes. “All solutions have been tried in other countries with similar democratic problems to us.”
It is the most uncomfortable passage in the book and the most revealing. “If that’s the answer, why on earth didn’t you do it when you had the chance?” asked Sir Jeremy, with the understanding of one who knows the question is coming. “The truth is that no one starts a job without knowing all the answers. In a way, I wish I had been given this book the day I became chancellor.”
Whoever inherits the Treasury in 2028 or 2029, and polls suggest it won’t be a Conservative, would do well to keep his word. Can We Get Rich Again? nevertheless, it is the most useful piece of economic writing produced by a former British chancellor in a generation. It deserves to be read, debated, and, in many respects, acted upon.
Can We Get Rich Again? by Sir Jeremy Hunt published by Swift £25.
