The writer is former chief economist at Goldman Sachs and was a UK Treasury minister
It is now over 12 years since the Conservative party regained power. As members ponder their fourth leader during that time, the country urgently needs their choice — and our next prime minister — to have a credible vision of how to address considerable challenges.
Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, the remaining candidates, must reflect on how they would put the UK on a more constructive path than that taken after the economic devastation of the 2008 financial crisis — backdrop to the party’s initial election win two years later.
Since then, the UK’s gross domestic product figures have been disappointing, though not spectacularly so. Employment growth has been surprisingly positive, even if much of it is low-paid. But it is also highly unproductive — the annual productivity rate of growth has been about a third of where it was the…
