Dominic Cummings’ new nerd army Britain’s Young Turks are looking for growth

Staff at London’s O2 Indigo club, a glitzy venue for live music and comedy, must have raised an eyebrow on Thursday night as the space filled with software engineers, start-up entrepreneurs, lawyers and civil servants, young men with neat haircuts and ironed shirts under their fleece jackets. Nor would they have expected this sedate audience would begin whooping when one of the speakers, the venture capitalist Matt Clifford, reeled off a long list of British discoveries and inventions, including gravity, the theory of evolution, computer science and the postal service. But much is unusual about Looking for Growth, the nascent movement that wants to reverse Britain’s decline through a peculiar blend of activism and policy wonkery. This was its largest event to date.

Clifford’s speech was genuinely rousing, even for someone who is sceptical of the message, borne forth in Looking for Growth’s name, that economic growth is the straightforward key to most of the country’s problems. As Clifford pointed out, Britain was once the most prosperous nation in the world. But its innate genius for innovation has been tragically stifled in the 17 years since the Great Financial Crisis, “the biggest economic disaster in the history of our country”. We still have it in us, though, to Make Britain Rich Again. By the end of the evening, as one speaker after another echoed this call, it had almost come to feel like a patriotic duty.

I heard various motives for being there among the 1,300-strong crowd. One young woman hoped to meet people of a “centre or centre right” persuasion, a group she felt was significant but voiceless among under 35s. A group of muscle-bound blokes was mainly interested in the star speaker, the political strategist and blogger Dominic Cummings, and his insights regarding the German master of realpolitik, Otto von Bismarck. But most said they were frustrated with the malaise they felt around them every day, and responsive to Looking for Growth’s message, spread through X and Instagram, that they did not have to passively accept it. A TfL employee told me that London’s rail infrastructure is disintegrating as Britain gets “poorer year after year”. A soon-to-be-qualified architect complained that “it’s a bureaucratic nightmare to lay a single brick in this country”.

This mood of exasperation was amply reflected onstage. Marc Warner, founder of an AI firm, described how he had helped the government create a world-leading system for testing wastewater to monitor Covid, only to be locked out of the subsequent procurement process. According to Warner, Britain now trails Malawi in this particular field. All the infamous cases of planning absurdity, from the HS2 bat tunnel to the 350,000-page application for the Lower Thames Crossing, were repeatedly wheeled out to be pelted with rotten fruit. By the time Cummings came on, the audience was ready for a characteristically dramatic assessment. Britain, he said, has reached a treacherous point in the lifecycle of modern states, where “a gap opens up between the elite and its institutions and reality”, a process of ideological self-delusion which usually grows worse until “the elite falls into the gap”.

The genius of Looking for Growth has been to create a sense of grassroots energy around a programme that is really focused, like Cummings’ attacks, on Whitehall and Westminster. Its recipe for achieving growth is planning reform, a large-scale build out of housing and infrastructure, and a supercharged tech sector centred on artificial intelligence. But most of the movement’s attention has come from more emotive issues of law and order and the state of the public realm. Its leading figure, the former academic Lawrence Newport, rose to prominence in 2023 when he successfully pressured the Conservative government to ban XL Bully dogs. His next campaign, Crush Crime, demanded action on mobile phone and bicycle thefts, repeat offenders, court backlogs and grooming gangs. Since Newport launched Looking for Growth last December with his brother, the former Treasury civil servant, and AI researcher, Joe Reeve, their greatest impact has come from a widely publicised campaign to clean graffiti from public transport and town centres.

One might say these initiatives demonstrate that many of Britain’s problems do not, in fact, require economic growth to be fixed; they require some civic pride and for the state to perform its basic functions properly. But as one perceptive audience member told me, the grassroots work can win converts to the growth mission. There is, he said, “a learned helplessness in this country”, and once people realise they can make a difference on small, immediate issues, they may develop an appetite for bigger changes. And the movement is trying to bring the same element of participation to its ambitions on planning reform. In January, it published a National Priority Infrastructure Bill, focused on nuclear power stations, electricity cables and data centres, which supporters were encouraged to submit en masse to MPs and government ministers. At Thursday’s event, Newport promised a raft of new initiatives, including a “hit list” of important projects for YIMBY foot soldiers to force through the planning process.

The effort to involve people is one thing that separates Looking for Growth from an organisation like the Tony Blair Institute, which shares many of the same concerns with tech, state efficiency, and modernisation. Another is the movement’s patriotic emphasis. Its central story is less about progress per se than about national renewal. Clifford was not the only speaker to celebrate Britain’s history as the first industrial nation, leading the world in living standards for over a century. As Newport put it, Britain “birthed the modern world” in the industrial revolution, a feat of a magnitude that no other country has matched. Tory MP Katie Lam ended the night by demanding “the growth that every generation for 200 years came to see as their birth right” and claiming that “our leaders are failing us but our people are as great as they ever were”. Even the Labour speaker Chris Curtis — who devoted a long aside to attacking Lam’s recent comments on immigration, without actually naming her ­— gave a patriotic account of sorts, using Milton Keynes as a symbol of the country’s post-war spirit.

The movement’s sense of itself as a popular, apolitical crusade for common sense is misleading, though. Its followers represent a relatively thin, highly educated and successful slice of British society. It has broken through because it has access to skills, contacts and media support which the political system is responsive to. It may draw inspiration from Britain’s past, it is really closer to the modernising elite factions which appeared in the late stage of civilisations such as Edo Japan, Qing China, Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire. These groupings saw the rise of technologically advanced Western powers in the late-19th century and realised that their only hope of survival was to seize control of their own states and force them to undergo rapid, radical reforms. Likewise, Looking for Growth is contemporary Britain’s answer to the Young Turks: an elite tendency urging a hidebound establishment to look at Silicon Valley, Shenzhen and Dubai, and to recognise the lateness of the hour. As Clifford put it: “we are here to save our country.”

Even if this is a non-partisan cause — in addition to Curtis and Lam, Reform’s Danny Kruger appeared via video message, inviting talented individuals to join his own party — it cannot remain, as Newport claims, merely an influential background force in politics, like the woke tendency or the environmental lobby. The nature of the changes it seeks to make will inevitably, sooner or later, force it to develop a fuller political stance. Will it let the free market rip, as its more Thatcherite members would prefer, or will it try to build strategically important industries in Britain, even at the expense of short-term growth? Will it prioritise new projects or first address the accumulated social problems of regions that have been left behind for decades? How will it respond to the inevitable drawing away of government resources and attention by pensions, healthcare and benefits? How will people be trained for the new growth industries, and what will happen to those who cannot be? How will it justify immigration that may be needed for labour and skills? How far is it willing to go in removing the ability of locals to block unwanted developments, a right that many regard as part of the social contract?

In other words, growth for growth’s sake can only get you so far; there are always questions of which growth, and for whose benefit. And even before that, the movement faces a more basic conundrum. With the current Labour government appearing increasingly chaotic and incapable of carrying through anything consequential, when will there actually be a political force worth exerting influence on? At this week’s event, Cummings himself sketched a probable scenario which is difficult to refute. By next year, and especially after the May local elections, both Labour and the Conservatives will likely be discredited. The likely route to a mandate for change lies with a professionalised Reform Party, or some other, as yet unknown entity.

This is why Looking for Growth’s message of British exceptionalism is potentially so significant. Through their alliance with Donald Trump, the tech giants pushing through the AI boom in the US have shown that populist, nationalist politics can function as a vehicle for an agenda of deregulation and massive infrastructure building. It would not be surprising to see a similar pact forming in Britain in the coming years. A story of national renewal would be one way to sell radical policies in aid of growth to at least some disillusioned voters.

Asked for his own judgement on Britain’s prospects, Cummings claimed there is a “black pill” in the fact that few societies escape the dynamics of decline that the country now appears trapped in; the “white pill”, on the other hand, is that Britain’s system has proven surprisingly resilient and adaptable in the past. He then implored the Looking for Growth membership to put aside their start-ups and to help rejuvenate the establishment. Whether and how they respond to this call will be of some consequence to the country’s future.

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