Letters: We must sing again

Growing pains

Sir: James Forsyth (‘Rewiring the state’, 4 July) shocked this loyal Spectator reader with the following: ‘Even before Covid, this country was in a productivity crisis and it’s nigh-on impossible to improve productivity without government involvement. Increasing productivity requires improvements to be made to physical and digital infrastructure and to the skill base, and those need public investment.’

James clearly has not studied the sources of productivity growth (or lack of it). In the 50 years to 2008, the UK experienced around 2 per cent p.a. growth in real Gross Value Added per hour worked — which is what politicians generally mean when they talk about productivity. Since then, productivity growth has effectively stalled. The source of this growth was a combination of rising shares of GDP in high productivity sectors, together with falling shares in low productivity sectors. The source of the recent stalling appears to be the weakness in productivity of the previous drivers — particularly banking and financial services.

The picture is complicated, but the evidence is overwhelmingly that government expenditure is a brake on productivity growth. Increasing capital intensity and technological innovations are the two principal drivers of growth, but capital intensity refers to private capital, not government infrastructure capital. If the government is serious about growing productivity, then it should address its role in the impediments to growth, not waste money on token infrastructure spending.
Neil Record
Chairman, Institute of Economic Affairs

The magic of Evensong

Sir: Once, as a ten-year old-chorister, I asked the precentor what would happen if nobody came to Evensong. He looked at me as if it was a ridiculous question. ‘We should sing it anyway,’ he said. The offices of the day were, until months ago, some of the last remaining rituals of time and reflection which we shared with every day of our lengthy past.