OPINION
Tech bros are missing the point about growth (Image: Getty)
The Green in Clerkenwell is the sort of place where a pint costs what your grandad still thinks a house should, and last Monday it was rammed with blokes who looked like they’d just walked off the set of a BBC drama about ‘ambitious young men in fintech.’ Barely any women, and no one who looked like they’d ever worked a day in a job that required steel-toed boots. It was a room full of middle-class London tech bros nodding sagely at each other while clutching awful tasting craft beers, talking about ‘unlocking growth’ as if Britain’s economic stagnation was something that could be fixed by a nice TED Talk, or a podcast appearance.
They wore jumpers that screamed “my dad paid my rent until I failed to get my pre-seed funding.” They spoke of economic decline as though they’d discovered it last week, as though entire towns hadn’t been economically gutted since before they were born. It was like watching a bunch of City boys in chinos earnestly discuss the working class as if they were an exotic species they’d just spotted on a stag do to Newcastle.
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It was of course a social hosted by Looking for Growth (LFG),a band of frustrated tech bros and bored Tories who think all problems can be fixed with a few infrastructure buzzwords, a couple of tweets, and a round of overpriced pints in a central London gastropub.
Their current solution to the growth crisis in the UK? A 30-page ‘National Priority Infrastructure Bill’ - a title that sounds important but means absolutely nothing to anyone outside an SW1 think tank.
Here’s the problem with the LFG lot: they’re right that Britain is in decline, but they have the wrong people leading the charge. We cannot keep handing the economic narrative to a bunch of blokes whose only lived experience of hardship is their Deliveroo driver arriving late.
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Growth is not going to come from bored middle-class, right-wing Londoners who got tired of complaining about politics on Twitter and decided to start a ‘movement.’
It’s going to come from rebuilding the industries we once relied on, the kind that created real, tangible prosperity, not just stock options for founders.
There is a fundamental truth about growth that the LFG crowd either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about: it cannot be dictated from the same London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle that has hoarded wealth and opportunity for decades.
You cannot drone on about ‘building the future’ while ignoring the fact that whole swathes of the North and Midlands have been systematically hollowed out by decades of underinvestment. It’s not that young men in fintech don’t have ideas, it’s that their ideas only serve people exactly like them.
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Real growth isn’t more data centres in Zone 2. It’s bringing back heavy industry, manufacturing, and real engineering — things Britain used to be world-class at before we decided our economy should be built entirely on speculation and software.
Governments have banged on about ‘levelling up’ for years, while every big project gets funneled to the same golden triangle, leaving the rest of the country to pick through the scraps. Meanwhile, towns like Scunthorpe, Mansfield, and Stoke-on-Trent get a Greggs opening and are told it’s an ‘economic boost.’
If the LFG lads really cared about growth, they’d stop hosting events in gastropubs and start making a case for investment in northern infrastructure that actually matters. HS2 was supposed to do that before it got gutted like a fish by politicians with no spine.
We need proper railway connections between northern cities, not just another floating cycle lane in Islington. We need steel plants and industrial hubs, not another co-working space full of chinless men named Hugo.
Governments love to talk about ‘innovation’ as if it only exists in shiny new sectors, but here’s a radical idea: what if we innovated by making things again? What if, instead of throwing endless incentives at failing software start-ups, we invested in advanced manufacturing, in green energy projects in the North Sea, in making Britain the place where things are actually built rather than just thought about?
The best economies are not built on the whims of people who get bored easily, they’re built on industries that provide stable, long-term prosperity.
We need an economic message that resonates beyond the M25. Telling a bloke in Sutton-in-Ashfield that AI is going to unlock ‘incredible new opportunities’ means nothing when his job prospects are nil and his town centre looks like a set from a post-apocalyptic film. You want people to believe in growth? Give them something real to hold onto.
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Stop talking in the abstract about ‘reforms’ and start talking about investment in actual jobs, in actual infrastructure, in actual communities.
And for the love of God, stop letting Londoners dictate what the country needs. Growth doesn’t mean anything if it’s just a fancier way of making the capital even richer while the rest of the UK gets left behind. Britain will not be saved by another think piece on ‘unlocking potential’ written from a WeWork office in Shoreditch.
It will be saved when we realise that prosperity needs to be built, not just theorised. So here’s the real challenge: you want to make Britain great again? Get out of the gastropubs, get your hands dirty, and start fighting for real, tangible industry. Otherwise, you’re just another bunch of tech bros cosplaying as revolutionaries while the country burns around you.