So the Treasury has cut VAT on theme parks, and we are meant to applaud this as a ‘pro-growth strategy’. Families are spending more on rollercoasters and candyfloss, and this is supposed to signal economic virility. Let us not mistake a sugar rush for a renaissance.
This is the same government that once built empires, cathedrals, and industrial might. Now we celebrate a few more quid spent on Disneyfied escapism. We have become a nation of children, shrieking with delight as we are buffeted by g-forces, while our productivity languishes and our infrastructure crumbles.
Compare this to the Victorian era. Did they cut duty on pleasure gardens to stimulate demand? No. They invested in railways, sanitation, and the great museums. They understood that true growth comes from the hard graft of invention, not from subsidising amusement. We are now in the late Roman phase: bread and circuses. Or rather, cheap chips and tame thrills.
This policy is a tacit admission that we have nothing better to offer. We have no grand industrial strategy, no space programme, no plan to rebuild our manufacturing base. So we slash VAT on theme parks and call it a victory. The Treasury pats itself on the back as families queue for log flumes, oblivious to the fact that their real wages have stagnated for a decade.
And what of the ‘British family’? They are not fools. They know that a day at Alton Towers is a temporary tonic, not a cure. They sense that this is a gimmick, a cheap substitute for the kind of sustained investment that might actually secure their children’s future. But they take what they can get. Who can blame them?
The intellectual decadence here is staggering. We have forgotten that economies are built on more than consumption. They are built on capital goods, on research, on the kind of patient accumulation that Adam Smith described. Instead, we have a government that mistakes a tax break on theme parks for high policy. It would be comical if it were not so tragic.
I recall the words of John Maynard Keynes, who warned against the ‘practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences’. This is precisely our condition. We have adopted a shallow, consumerist model of growth that celebrates the ephemeral. We have lost the sense of national purpose that once drove us to build the National Health Service, the welfare state, the motorways.
What next? A VAT cut on video games? A subsidy for ice cream vans? The logical endpoint is a society that defines prosperity by the volume of entertainment consumed. We will be a theme park nation, full of gaudy attractions but hollow at the core.
I do not write this to spoil anyone’s fun. Enjoy the rides, if you must. But do not mistake this for a serious economic policy. It is a distraction, a palliative for a country that has given up on greatness. The Treasury should be ashamed. We should all be ashamed.
