The End of an Era by Mark Field

Author:Mark Field
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2025-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

However, it was now pretty clear which path I would have to take. With all the spare time I now had on my hands, and at the very moment the financial markets had become the biggest news story, I set about researching many problematic and intractable economic issues. I was fortunate enough to have connections and expertise in the City of London at my fingertips. In addition, very soon the Daily Telegraph, City A.M. and the newly established but already highly influential Conservative Home website were regularly running the fruits of this research. I initiated parliamentary debates and in time published two collections of essays with the slightly provocative titles Between the Crashes (2013) and The Best of Times (2016). For the best part of the next decade, I was indisputably much more commentator than player.

The passage of time all too often treats opinion pieces written in the heat of battle harshly. At the risk of sounding rather immodest, I don’t think that applies to my books. Rereading many of the essays I wrote in the first half of the 2010s reinforces the foreboding I felt even then that economic policymaking was dangerously awry. I was certainly assisted by my City contacts and network, but looking back, I reckon my own judgement as to the likely outcome of events has proved prescient.

As far back as 2013, I was lamenting that the Office for Budget Responsibility ‘has served to entrench rather than challenge conventional wisdom’. Two years on, I was an early outlier in expressing alarm as to the wisdom of relying upon foreign investment to sustain our ever-larger deficit. A recurring theme in my essays even then was the anaemic level of economic growth and the failure to devise any sustainable strategy to counter it. So too the distorting orthodoxy of the Treasury and the Bank of England well before it became fashionable, in certain quarters at least, to do so. Then there was the urgent – and still unresolved – need to turn our finest economic minds to a lasting reform of the public and private pensions system and developing a more effective regulatory and compliance structure to protect the City of London from money laundering and financial engineering. But above all was my repeated warning that the UK was living way beyond its means despite all the talk of austerity, a problem made ever more serious by the reluctance to expand the tax base rather than constantly looking to take more people out of income tax entirely.

One of the first themes in my sights when Labour was still in government was its vastly expanded use of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Most of its much-vaunted ‘investment’ in public services since 1997 had been deliberately placed off the public balance sheet, which in essence disguised borrowing to fund current consumption by gradually repaying capital and service costs for the new hospital wing or upgraded school building over periods as long as twenty or thirty years.

The main reason criticism of

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