Free market can be overruled if necessary to create post-Covid growth, ex-PM advises former rival Boris Johnson must be “muscular” in reshaping the economy to bring about a green recovery from the coronavirus crisis, former prime minister David Cameron has said, calling for an active policy of industrial intervention. Cameron, who as prime minister from 2010 to 2016 oversaw the UK’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, said the lessons from that recession were clear. “My advice would be, from what I learnt, is that as well as the framework [of climate and economic policy], you have to roll up your sleeves and be quite muscular in your interventionism,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “The government has got a strong framework for green energy policy and in green investment, much of which we put in place, but it needs to combine that with active assistance and helping with key green investments that can make a difference,” he said. “There’s every opportunity for this recovery to be a green recovery.” Cameron pointed to the example of his government encouraging the German company Siemens to build a wind turbine factory in Hull. “That is a transformational investment, that only happened because we really helped to make it happen. We cleared all the obstacles out of the way, we helped in lots of different ways. And I think there’ll be lots of opportunities like that [for Johnson],” he said. Johnson has been seen as an instinctively free-market, anti-interventionist Tory in the past, though his response to the coronavirus crisis has shown a willingness to tear up the rulebook. Cameron said that even Conservative prime ministers could overrule the free market when they wanted to. “[Being] Conservative is not intervening everywhere all the time but being quite selective. That’s what Margaret Thatcher was with the motor industry, getting Toyota and Nissan and Honda to come to Britain,” he said. Cameron also wants the... |