On Thursday evening, Indigo at the O2 — a venue in London’s O2 Arena — hosted Looking for Growth, a bipartisan, grassroots movement focused on economic growth and national renewal.
The event, titled “Make or Break”, which was the group’s biggest yet, revolved around growth, building housing and infrastructure, law and order and pushing the UK out of decline.
Speakers included Labour MPs Sarah Coombs and Chris Curtis; Conservative MP Katie Lam; former advisor to Boris Johnson Dominic Cummings; CEO of international talent investor Entrepreneur First Matt Clifford; and poker champion Liv Boeree.
Matt Clifford spoke about the need to ‘make the UK rich again’.
Clifford said: “We used to be the richest country in the world, due to British exceptionalism”, before giving a long list of British inventions, to excited cheers and whistles from the crowd.
He said: “We have broken our relationship with history, risk and success, and should learn to love success, learn to celebrate our entrepreneurs, builders and inventors”.
Sarah Coombs, MP for West Bromwich, spoke about the need to crack down on the increased use of ‘ghost plates‘ — illicit licence plates used by criminals, with reflective coating to prevent recognition by police cameras.
Fines for using these plates are currently £100, which Coombs said need to increase to £1,000.
Chris Curtis MP spoke about the origins of his home town and constituency Milton Keynes, which he described as being built in spite of local opposition — an example, Curtis said, of what can be achieved when we ‘back the builders’.
To counter what many of the speakers regarded as the UK’s systemic inertia, LFG founder Laurence Newport announced that the group was making plans on building a new city on a 45,000-acre pot of land east of Cambridge, currently inhabited by approximately 8,000 people, which the group are currently testing demand and lobbying policy-makers to get backing for.
The crowd skewed young, and largely male, with many in the audience being entrepreneurs, founders or working in tech.
Ed, 35, co-founded Scape Technologies, a computer vision start-up, which he sold to Meta (then Facebook) in 2020.
He said: “People in this room are pushing back against narratives about a declining UK, or a diminishing of ambition.
“LFG is an example of a community that believes we can create positive-sum environment here in the UK, which tends not to be the average view of people here.”
Lucy, 28, had come to the event with little knowledge of the group, she was impressed with what she had heard.
She said: “It seemed tonight that they were saying something that had a concrete direction.
“They have identified a specific problem, and knew what they were going to do about it.”
LFG was founded last year by Laurence Newport, who had previously led the successful campaign to ban the XL Bully dog, and currently has ten chapters across the UK, which organise to influence policy.
Earlier this year, videos LFG filmed of themselves cleaning graffiti off tubes on the London underground went viral.
For more information on Looking for Growth, visit https://lookingforgrowth.uk/.
Feature image credit: Patrick Hess
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