Whichever way you look at it, Davos’s four for 2026 (#4426), helpfully compiled by Reuters, are pretty much all Trump.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Davos-watching. It’s political bird-spotting for grown-ups: similar cast, similar talking points, year after year. You know the global policy-consensus crowd – of which I’ve written before.
This time, though, the mood felt different. Less ‘global co-operation’ and more WTF. Is Trump a genius, a nutter, or something more unsettling – a man who understands the system well enough to pull it apart for sport? I’ll be frank – me and my golfing buddies can’t decide. Regular readers may remember my brief flirtation with the ‘I’m With Javier’ (doyen of the Children of the Iron Lady) T-shirts a couple of years back. Not a strong seller, as it turned out, but give it time; perhaps I was simply ahead of the market.
All of which might be dismissed as exceptional Davos dinner theatre were it not for the fact that the wider global mood is darkening elsewhere too. Strip away the panels and platitudes and there’s a growing sense that the world is becoming genuinely unsettling. That army chap’s ‘World War Three is just around the corner’ speech at the
Guernsey Finance shindig the other week was illustrative of the sense of impending doom.
And then, as Davos closed, the Doomsday Clock moved to 85 seconds to midnight – the closest it has ever been. Closer than during the Cuban missile crisis in ’61. Closer than the deployment of Pershing and Cruise in ’83. And whatever you do, if you’re of a nervous disposition, don’t watch Katherine Bigelow’s House Of Dynamite on Netflix. (Actually, do – it’s excellent.)
It couldn’t have been better professionally choreographed – just on cue for the start of the Government Work (sic) Plan debate here in Guernsey. And dear reader, you might well be wondering what’s changed in the Government Work Plan since before Christmas, when we were told it was now all about economic growth. The honest answer is that it’s become even more so – if only that were possible. Growth is now declared to underpin everything and belong to everyone.
Growth is now everywhere, woven through the document as an ‘enabling condition’, a ‘cross-cutting consideration’ and a ‘whole-of-government responsibility’. What’s been added, in effect, is a layer of bureaucratic placebo designed to give the appearance of seriousness without any of the discomfort that genuine strategy would require.
And this is where the problem lies. Economic growth isn’t something you can wish into existence with better wording or embed safely in a document so that it never has to be tested. Growth is not a vibe. It is the result of choices – often uncomfortable ones – about what to prioritise, what to sequence, and what not to do. When those choices are avoided, growth doesn’t quietly take care of itself; it quietly goes elsewhere.
The reason growth matters is not ideological; it’s practical. Growth is what turns hard choices into manageable ones. It’s what allows governments to fund public services without endlessly ratcheting up taxes, to invest in infrastructure without mortgaging the future, and to accommodate change without turning every decision into a zero-sum fight.
As Robert Lucas (Nobel laureate) once put it, when you start thinking seriously about economic growth, it’s hard to think about anything else. It is the foundation of long term human welfare – because everything else flows from it.
We talk endlessly about fairness, sustainability, resilience and outcomes, but far less about the underlying engine that makes those things affordable. There’s a sense that growth is faintly embarrassing – too crude, too material, too redolent of a world we’re supposed to be moving beyond (that is according to certain types).
Part of this, I suspect, reflects a lingering attachment to a certain socialist intuition: the idea that societies can become steadily poorer and yet somehow happier, fairer and more cohesive at the same time. It’s an appealing thought, particularly if you’ve never had to explain to voters why public services are being cut, taxes are rising, or opportunities are narrowing. History, however, is not especially kind to the idea that declining prosperity produces social harmony. More often it produces frustration, retrenchment and a politics of blame – a point the UK increasingly seems to have reached. I’m reminded of Churchill’s old maxim: socialism is where the misery is shared equally.
Our local debate about growth has become oddly defeatist. We’re told the pressures are all demographics. Or it’s the decline of finance. Or there are forces beyond our control. And yes, those things matter. But Guernsey is a small island economy, which is precisely why we’re supposed to be fleet of foot. We have access to most of the levers that matter: tax, regulation, migration, planning and skills. Shrugging and saying ‘There’s nothing to be done’ isn’t realism; it’s surrender.
That matters because our economic performance is weak. Not rhetorically weak, but measurably so. And yet the Government Work Plan – the central organising document for government business – offers no serious growth strategy to address it.
Stripped of the rhetoric, it isn’t really a plan at all. It’s an inventory – a list of things the State intends to be busy with, lightly prioritised, weakly sequenced, and largely disconnected from any coherent view of how the economy is supposed to grow.
Government business is not neutral. Every initiative absorbs scarce capacity – political, administrative and economic. Time spent here is time not spent there. Yet the work plan largely sidesteps those trade-offs, preferring breadth over focus and motion over direction. Despite all the talk of growth, there is no clear articulation of what kind of economy we are trying to build, where growth is expected to come from, or what trade-offs we are prepared to make to support it.
The most worrying aspect is how familiar this all feels. These same avoidance behaviours have been on display for years.
I was reminded of what the alternative looks like recently passing through Manchester. You can see it quite literally in the skyline: cranes everywhere, towers rising around Deansgate, Salford and the old industrial fringes that were once written off as terminal decline. Manchester was given a familiar list of excuses – deindustrialisation, skills deficits, poor health outcomes – and chose instead to back itself. It isn’t perfect. And I still don’t quite understand why Andy Burnham wanted Keir Starmer’s job. But Manchester has made choices, stuck with them and outperformed expectations. It’s now one of the fastest-growing parts of the UK, with growth rates roughly twice the national average. Decline, it turns out, isn’t destiny.
