I think the writer misses the main issue with what's going wrong in the UK, and in the US, Europe and her in NZ (Australia is saved a bit because its wealth is so much related to extractive industries). And that's neoliberalism, Thatcherism, that our economiess are now hollowed out shells of what they once were, productive industry offshored, and the retreat into what has been called a "service economy". The phrase is itself oxymoronic. That is not a functioning economy. North Sea oil provided the extractive industry and energy resource that helped the UK for a while overcome the logical stupidity and dead end of Thatcherism, but this is mostly gone, since when the UK, the US and Europe are living on tick. The US has begun to understand this with its Inflation Reduction Act, a euphemistic term for a more protectionist and industrial investment economy, working hard against the interests of competing countries, including Europe. The US is out for itself, and Europe and the UK still don't understand that their "ally" is shafting them.

Basically the UK no longer makes enough wealth, you cannot tax your way out of that, though the UK could buy a few years of help with an effective wealth tax and dealing effectively to the taxation of multinationals. - there's room for tax on aviation fuel and fares too. . I think the government actually recognises this with their "Growth growth growth" , but the way they are going about trying to correct it with "free ports" and kowtowing to international corporate interests is exactly the wrong way to go about it and the whole ideology of growth is now reaching the limits of the landscape and the planet to accommodate it.

Nothing other than a fundamental re-examination of capitalism, socialism, economy and society, and its relationship to nature, to our ecological limits, to our planet, is going to work. We have reached the end of unrestricted growth and our attempts to continue it will ultimately kill us and the planet we live on. We need urgently a New Ecological Enlightenment. But it's not going to happen, we will ultimately fight rather than do what is right. We will first fail, and then wail.