The below is a repost of a story featured in the Blind Spot’s paywalled newsletter in June for the purpose of generating a free to share link.
CAMDEM, London — A low-frequency thrum pulses beneath the overlapping shouts of some two hundred mostly-male voices packed into a club in once-trendy Camden — a corner of London that, like many parts of the country, feels like it’s living in the afterglow of better days.
It’s a typically overcast evening in June, and the rhythmic bassline filling the venue isn’t coming from a DJ, but from dozens of young tech workers volleying ideas in sharp, overlapping bursts. Yet, unlike the usual clubland cacophony, the sound is strangely orderly, almost martial, as if someone has programmed an algorithm to control the chaos.
This is Looking For Growth six months on — a cross-party insurgency founded by legal academic-turned-organiser Lawrence Newport after U.K. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s November 2024 Budget convinced him Westminster could no longer deliver.
“We are going to force this country to be better, whether it likes it or not,” Newport tells the crowd of largely 20-something olds.
The group’s co-founder Joe Reeve echoes the sentiment, noting it’s time for young Brits to realize “the cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry”.
Fed up with the visible decline of Britain, the grass-roots movement has taken it upon itself to fix what politicians can’t.
Radicalism here, however, is a far cry from civil disobedience. Intent on no longer “using up what we’ve already got” but developing new resources, the group seeks to tidy, build and fix — all while floating and supporting each other’s business development plans. Signature accessories are cloths and algorithms, not balaclavas or placards.
Tonight, the group is updating its expanding cohorts on its achievements to date. The list is growing: a delivery of a planning infrastructure bill to make it easier to get planning permission, a new website, a real-time growth tracker, and a mushrooming network of young volunteers eager to muck in and clean up the Jubilee line.
Finally, there’s the group’s growing sway with Number 10.
“The government was going to give in to a bunch of green amendments that would basically mean the whole planning bill, which already isn’t that great, would be even more shit,” Newport tells the crowd, before adding that by LFG drawing public attention to the move, “Number 10 backed down and didn’t endorse it.”
But the broader message on repeat is simpler: British decline is not inevitable. It’s a choice. It’s time for everyone to use their personal agency to overturn it.
The call to build
As the gathering gains pace, Newport’s disciples insist they are “apolitical,” or rather anti-political: they convene hackathons, not NEC meetings; they crowd-fund their “Infrastructure Bill” rather than woo lobbyists.
The nod, if anything, is to technocracy, the 1930s movement that called to replace politicians and businessmen with engineers and scientists. Its can-do attitude and contempt for the political process resonated during a time of extreme economic disillusionment.
In London, the crowd woops supportively when Newport points out that Elon Musk — whose grandfather happened to be a key figure in the Canadian faction of the original technocracy movement — retweeted one of LFG’s videos over the weekend.
Many in the room are talented software engineers who have actively turned down lucrative opportunities abroad because they believe “Britain is worth fighting for”.
The blend of homeland upkeep and frontier tech produces unexpected role models in the crowd. One participant namechecks Palantir, the U.S. defence-data contractor most Westminster salons treat as radioactive, as the only type of company he’d consider defecting for.
“Perhaps the smart move would be to flee tail between my legs somewhere where the funding is easy, and risk taking it forward. Instead, I’m here because Britain is my home, and I love her,” says one of the opening speakers.
Across the pond, it’s not just Musk who has taken note of LFG. The group is followed on X by Silicon Valley royalty like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Closer to home, meanwhile, techbro supremo, Dominic Cummings has drifted through earlier meet-ups.
Political affiliations aren’t entirely lacking.
One of the speakers on the night is Mark McVitie, director of the Labour Growth group, an emerging informal faction within the UK Labour Party that champions pro-growth, pro-enterprise economic policies. He jokes that journalists are already dubbing LFG the paramilitary wing of the Treasury. Though he himself begs to differ. “In my opinion, we’re not the paramilitary of the Treasury, we’re the paramilitary wing of the British people in SW1 trying to make their demands happen and come to fruition,” he says, before getting more serious.
“The stakes of another administration failing to meet the demands of the British people are catastrophic,” McVitie tells the crowd. “The social matter for this country cannot withstand another betrayal, right? That’s where we’re at.”
Having asserted it’s five minutes to midnight on the future of Britain, he tells the room everyone present is in the vanguard trying to do something about it. He closes with the group’s emerging rallying cry: “Let’s f****** go!”
Present too is Katie Lam, the 33-year-old Conservative MP — fast becoming one of LFG’s most useful Commons conduits. Working her signature tradwife aesthetic, she tells the crowd the last time the country had meaningful growth was in the 1990s.
“I was 16 when the financial crisis hit. I am now 33, all I have ever known is a low-growth economy,” she says. “Governments cannot create economic growth. They don’t create wealth. They can only spend it, but they can facilitate or inhibit growth.”
“We as a country have two options. We grow or we die.”
The orderly crowd signals enthusiastically that it’s prepared to take on the burdensome task of ensuring it’s the former, not the latter.
