The Prime Minister and Chancellor are desperate for growth. They seek it in so many unlikely places, expecting to find it in an EU reset or to be gifted to them by a loving China.
They need growth to repair the big hole they have dug in the nation’s finances by spending too much. They need growth to bring in more taxes to pay runaway public sector bills.
They need growth to cheer people and to let the private sector have a pay rise a bit closer to the public sector’s good real increases.
Growth is all around them. The USA is growing at four per cent, four times the UK, and China at five per cent, five times. All this century, the US has been growing at more than twice the UK rate.
Never here Keir travels often to the US but seems unable to understand what they are doing right and what we are doing wrong.
He presumably hears the President, who gives him good free advice as to how to grow an economy more quickly. Sir Keir either does not understand or, for some other strange reason, has no wish to follow the US success.
The President says you should drill, baby drill, to become self-sufficient in energy and to have cheaper energy to foster competitive businesses at home.
He tells him to onshore more manufacturing production, so the country becomes less dependent on imports.
He tells him to allow free speech and to avoid overregulating digital business so the UK could enjoy more of the US-driven digital revolution and the massive investment in chips, online services, and artificial intelligence. He tells him to cut back on net zero and big government to free the private sector to fly.
The Mandelson scandal must not distract us from Keir Starmer's suicidal banning frenzy - John Redwood | Getty Images
Sir Keir, during his brief visits to the UK, gets on with doing the opposite. He bans all new exploration and development drilling, which would otherwise increase UK oil and gas production.
He tells the car manufacturers to close all their successful petrol and diesel car factories by 2030, to rely on Chinese battery car imports. He helps our most successful pharmaceutical company divert some of its crucial investment and research from the UK to China.
He passes EU-style excessive regulation of digital companies, imposes a special tax on them and limits free speech in a way which antagonises the major US digital investors.
He doubles down on an extreme version of net zero, to ensure more of our steel, ceramics, building materials, petrochemical and other high-energy-using industries are priced out of the market and progressively close.
Sir Keir then goes to China. He does a magnificent job of boosting the Chinese economy, already doing well by running a huge trade surplus with the UK.
He approves longer stays for UK people in China without a visa, to boost Chinese travel and tourism receipts from UK travellers. He does not negotiate any reciprocal advantage for the struggling UK hospitality industry, weighed down by his higher National Insurance, business rates, and other taxes, and by recent increases in alcohol duties and energy costs.
He promotes a multi-billion-dollar investment in Chinese pharmaceutical research and production by AstraZeneca and comes away with no inward investment to create jobs in Britain.
The most likely outcome of his actions will be a larger trade deficit with the Chinese, increasing their goods sales to us by much more than we manage to send to them. That will mean China trade will subtract from UK GDP growth, not add to it.
Sir Keir’s main passion is to align us more closely with the EU. Does he not see that the EU group of advanced economies are the main ones in the world that can usually be relied on to grow even less quickly than the UK? Has he not read the Draghi Report into the failures of the EU economy this century?
One of the EU’s most important economic policy figures is rightly critical and sees just how big the gap has grown between US and EU performance. US GDP per head is now double that of the EU.
We run a large trade deficit in goods with the EU. Starmer’s policies are deliberately cutting back on the areas where we have in the past exported a lot, including oil, gas, refined oil products, and petrol cars.
The net result of his efforts to align us will be to boost EU exports to us and to widen the deficit further. Joining their carbon trading scheme will put up our energy prices further, and copying their carbon border tariff will make things dearer to UK consumers from non-EU sources.
If more bureaucracy and more EU rules delivered growth, we would have grown much faster from 2007-16 when we were fully in the EU and implementing a blizzard of new rules. If extreme net zero policies generated jobs and growth in the UK and EU would be well ahead of the US by now.
It is such a tragedy to see Starmer and Reeves taking so many steps to ban, slow, damage or impede UK business. Tax after tax, ban after ban, regulation after regulation make the problem worse. Sir Keir’s travels will end with a bigger trade deficit and more import dependence.
The more President Trump sees of him, the more he sees policies to disagree with. The more China sees of him, the more the UK will lose in the negotiations.
The more the EU sees of him, the more he will surrender our independence. His policy leads to permanently slow growth, and to increasing dependence on EU and Chinese imports for everything from electricity to cars and from solar panels to food.
That will still leave him with the headache of how to pay all those large and growing public sector bills when economic growth does not take care of the problem.