Who is popular today?

Instead of ‘levelling up’ the economy, they would entrench the power of corporations and deepen market competition
In 2016, a little-known Conservative MP authored a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies, the free-market thinktank founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Looking ahead to Britain’s post-Brexit future, the report argued, the government should seize the opportunity to create a string of free ports across the country to revive manufacturing. These engines of economic growth would reconnect Britain with its “proud maritime history” and act as a “beacon of British values”. The MP in question was Rishi Sunak.
Four years later, Britain has left the EU, Sunak has been promoted to chancellor of the exchequer, and Boris Johnson is shaping the direction of Britain’s economy. If Johnsonism, as Ferdinand Mount writes, “is not a continuation of Thatcherism at all”, Sunak’s 2016 proposal should make us wonder. His recent plan for free ports, based on the 2016 report, reheats an idea that first gained prominence under Thatcher’s government, and reeks of precisely the free-market ideas from which the new government is supposedly distancing itself. Continue reading...