Jamie Nutt

William Hague has put his finger on why voters keep reaching for new parties. They look at governments that appear unable to perform the basic functions of a state — securing a border, getting houses built — and conclude the offer on the table is exhausted. His diagnosis of the two responses is right, too. The left reaches for redistribution, regulation and more public provision, and eventually runs out of other people's money. The populist right blames elites, globalisation and supranational bodies, and promises that a strong enough leader can simply will the problem away — which is nostalgia dressed up as a plan. But there is a third failure mode, and Andy Burnham's government supplied a textbook example this week. When a government cannot deliver growth, it substitutes moral positioning for it. The trade ban on Israeli settlement goods will not make a single Briton better off. The settlements export very little, and mostly agricultural produce; the direct economic content of the measure is close to nil. The wider relationship is what matters: UK-Israel trade ran at around £6bn in 2025, with £3.5bn of that British exports, and Israel is a serious market for British technology, financial and professional services. That is the asset now in play. Britain has put £3.5bn of exports at risk to interdict a trickle of avocados and wine. This is the part that ought to trouble anyone who wants Britain to grow. A country with its fiscal position does not have the luxury of using trade policy as a signalling device. The UK are a mid-sized open economy whose comparative advantage lies in services, finance and technology — precisely the sectors that depend on being seen as a stable, commercially predictable jurisdiction. Every time a British government demonstrates that market access can be adjusted for reasons of domestic party management, it raises the risk premium on doing business here. That premium is paid in foregone investment, and it is paid quietly, over years, by people who will never connect it to a statement made in the Commons. Hague is right that the left runs out of money. What he might have added is how it gets there. Not usually through one great act of profligacy, but through a long accumulation of decisions where the moral satisfaction was immediate, domestic, and free — and the cost was distant, commercial, and someone else's problem. Renew conservatism to fight the hard right thetimes.com/article/063dbb0…