John Harris

Among the would-be PM’s backers are the authors of Britannia Unchained, and their vision of deregulated Britain is terrifying

Seven years ago, a group of Conservative MPs who had taken their parliamentary seats in 2010 brought out a slim manifesto for the future of Britain titled Britannia Unchained. Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss appeared to speak with one voice: that of unabashed Thatcherites, convinced that hacking back tax and regulation and fixating on the demands of “business” was as appropriate for the 21st-century UK as it supposedly had been for the crisis-plagued Britain of the 1970s.

Some of the text was so provocative that it read like trolling. “The British are among the worst idlers in the world,” read one passage. “We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.” To even start to compete with the rising economies of India, China and Brazil, said the authors, we need to avenge the “dependency culture” and “stop indulging in irrelevant debates about sharing the pie between manufacturing and services, the north and the south, women and men”. They advised fellow Conservatives to double down on austerity, and maintain their faith in old-fashioned laissez-faire economics.

Related: Here’s Tory Brexiteers’ real plan for 2019: a leaner, meaner Britain | Tim Bale

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