Looking For Growth campaign (Illustration by Tracy Worrall)

11 min read2 hr

Keir Starmer claims to stand with “the builders, not the blockers”, but Dr Lawrence Newport is not convinced.

“There’s a bunch of blockers in government,” he says, arguing that the plans for growth on which the Prime Minister has staked his legacy are “the kind of thing that will raise the eyebrows of civil servants” but are in fact “extremely unambitious”.

“It certainly is better than what the Tories were doing, because they were doing nothing. It is an improvement on baseline. But look at: how do you solve the problem? They’re not looking at it through that lens.”

What about the Planning and Infrastructure Bill? It reduces opportunities for legal challenges to major infrastructure projects, introduces new ways to bypass planning obstacles, allows mayors to develop on greenfield land and overhauls environmental regulation.

Newport is worried the measures could still be watered down, however, with Labour giving in to changes that would “yet further dilute their already diluted plans”. He is battling against environmental activists – what he calls “the vegetable lobby”.

“They’re not being radical enough,” he adds of ministers. “And because of that, they will get punished. They will continue to slump in the polls and continue to feel decline and for all of us, the country gets worse.”

Newport is the 34-year-old former academic who runs the Looking For Growth (LFG) campaign with his younger brother James Newport, an ex-Treasury official, and Joe Reeve, who worked in Silicon Valley before setting up Future House, a private members’ club for “techno-optimists” who want to “Just F***ing Build Something” (as the neon sign in its Hackney venue reads).

Launched only in December, LFG fast dominated the chatter in Westminster and the online political world. Six months later, there are now 15 ‘chapters’ across the country and they have been invited into No 10. Labour, the Conservatives and Reform are seeking LFG’s approval, with representatives – Chris Curtis MP, Katie Lam MP and Zia Yusuf respectively – all speaking at its conferences.

“I want to make it clear: we are not a think tank. This is a movement that’s about getting things done,” Newport tells The House. “Some people have said to me, ‘They’ve been pursuing growth relentlessly for 20 years’. But they haven’t been doing it relentlessly for 20 years – they’ve been talking about it.”

Crush Crime, Newport’s other campaign project, which highlights stats such as just 10 per cent of offenders being responsible for half of all crime in Britain, was effective in thinking up stunts to get attention. One saw them buy a bike, put GPS tracking on it, and chain it outside Scotland Yard in a spot well-covered by CCTV. The bike was soon stolen. They reported it, told the police they could show them exactly where it was, but the only outcome was a text 24 hours later saying the case was closed.

They’re optimising for: will people around my dinner table think well of me if I do this thing?

LFG is cooking up similar actions designed to go viral. They have already scrubbed chewing gum off bins in public places, and cleaned graffiti off the Tube with Tom Harwood from GB News. At the end of the month, LFG will host a hackathon in which coders can sign up to build tools over 48 hours, then put what they have made to a team of judges and potential investors. “The idea would be to pick up where the state is failing, which, at the moment, is a lot of places.”

LFG first garnered attention with its own proposal for a piece of legislation, the National Priority Infrastructure Bill, which looks to prevent repeated legal challenges, remove environmental rules and set strict time limits on the planning process. The group claims credit for some policies having already forced the government to act – on judicial review reform, for example.

“Here’s an actual act that, if passed, would enable you to build nuclear power stations, data centres, cables within a month,” Newport says, with a click of his fingers.

“How have you made an infrastructure bill go viral?” stunned wonks asked LFG’s three co-founders after its release. The bill is just 14 pages long – simplicity is clearly central to its appeal. With Newport, everything is “obviously bad” or “obviously good”. These are the broad brush strokes that make his campaigns so eye-catching. The basic assumption at play: Whitehall is bad at doing things, and it would be quite easy to do them a lot better.

“Just a few months ago, when they announced 0.1 per cent growth, that was praised as a surprising success. That’s the most favourable thing they can come up with!” Newport exclaims.

“It’s cowardice, it’s a lack of leadership, it’s an inability to make decisions – even when they’re shown to be popular… They’re optimising for: will people around my dinner table think well of me if I do this thing? That’s what politicians are optimising for. It’s not even really for votes. It’s: does my social circle think this is OK?”

If he sounds like Dominic Cummings, that is no coincidence. The former chief adviser to Boris Johnson, a critic of “the blob” as well as the ex-PM he calls “the trolley”, has spoken at an LFG conference and offers advice to the group.

“I come to him a lot. He knows his stuff,” Newport confirms. He first got to know Cummings last year: “We bonded over campaigning and having death threats.”

Death threats because LFG is not Newport’s first rodeo. He first came to prominence two years ago, after deciding to get XL Bullies – a large type of American Bully dog – banned in the UK. While on paternity leave from his job as a lecturer at Royal Holloway, he had noticed these huge, ferocious dogs around, so he did some research on fatal attacks and publicised it.

The closer it got, the more I was like, I can’t do this again. Not to me, not to my son

“That started out of pure frustration,” he recalls. “That was a blog post that went viral, then a YouTube video that didn’t go viral, but a victims’ group contacted me off the back of the video, said, ‘You’re the only person with any credentials that will talk about this. Will you do something?’ I said I’d only do it for, like, two weeks.”

He knew some people in No 10 – then under Rishi Sunak – so “sent them a two-pager explaining the issue” and waited a couple of weeks. “They said, ‘Yes, we agree, but they’re not going to do anything unless it’s a national issue’. I was like, okay, cool, I’ll do that then.”

It was a success: there were just 77 days between the start of his campaign and Sunak announcing the ban on TV. But Newport was not satisfied. “It should’ve taken one day. It was obvious,” he says. “The Bully thing was like watching myself learn, oh my God, this entire thing doesn’t work.”

He also learnt that being in the public eye comes with major downsides. “They found my sister-in-law’s social media, even though it wasn’t under the same name, so they could find a photo shoot taken of my son and try to work out details about him; how old he was. I don’t know. It just became absolutely horrendous.”

When giving evidence to a select committee, the parliamentary authorities – concerned about his safety – proactively advised him to use a different entrance to Parliament. People emailed his employer, trying to get him fired as a lecturer. After all this, he “went under the radar” and quietly did consultancy work for a year.

LFG and Crush Crime – which began in November, a successor to his Bully campaign – have not attracted the same ire, but he had been worried about the potential for abuse before launching. “The closer it got, the more I was like, I can’t do this again. Not to me, not to my son.”

There is talk in Westminster of LFG becoming a political party. But Newport says no.

“I’m not interested. What I want this thing to be is a movement. If you think about how successful green movements have been in this country: there hasn’t been a single Green government, but there have been many green governments. There wasn’t a single Woke Party, but there’s a lot of woke policy.”

Would he stand as an MP? After a long pause, he replies: “I have seen some very nasty sides to what it means to do things publicly… If you ask me now, no.” He talks about the need to “increase talent density” in politics, so what’s the plan if he and his friends refuse to put themselves forward? “I don’t know how to solve that one yet.”

The slow rate of progress would likely be a huge source of frustration if he did enter Parliament. Newport studied law but decided it was not for him 10 weeks into the degree, then did a PhD in history, next entering academia. But he left lecturing after attendance rates dropped to 10 per cent, and he found himself talking to empty rooms. He was already dejected, having found only one or two students a year who were not there simply to pass exams.

“Just write it in the first person. Just do it,” he would urge his students. “A few of them would do it, they’d get their papers back, and they’d get good grades anyway. And they’d get that little boost of agency: oh my God, I can do stuff, the rules aren’t real!” But instigating these small acts of rebellion was not enough, and he left after two years.

While his comments and choice of campaigns hint at a right-leaning perspective, Newport will not reveal much about his own politics. “The other week, someone said, so and so is more of a Hayekian, and I am more of a – I was like, ‘Guys, the moment it gets to this level of discussion in politics, I don’t need to be here. The problem is, right now, the basics are so wrong. That’s why I’m here.”

He also says he would not hitch his wagon to a party unless, say, Starmer adopted the LFG bill wholesale. For now, he is enjoying the competition to win the endorsement of LFG: “It’s all to play for.”

One such interested party is the Labour Growth Group (LGG), a caucus of Labour MPs who lobby government to build, build, build. It started out as the brainchild of new MP Josh Simons, who previously headed Labour Together, and got the nod from No 10. It is now co-chaired by two other new MPs, Curtis and Lola McEvoy, and insiders insist it is not a government mouthpiece. Basically, although chief of staff Morgan McSweeney likes the group, he does not actually embody the government: their priorities still need fighting for.

There are notable similarities between the LFG’s Newport, who grew up in southern coastal towns, surrounded by evidence of economic decline, and the LGG’s director and sole staffer, Mark McVitie.

McVitie says he woke up to “the silliness of Sensible Adultism” when he volunteered for the People’s Vote campaign for a second EU referendum and was shut out of discussions because, he felt, he did not go to the right North London dinner parties. Similarly, Newport protests that too many politicians just want “invites to the right parties”. Neither went to private school or Oxbridge.

The Labour Growth Group, which gets good media coverage and feeds into No 10 via meetings and notes, is now further expanding its ability to influence with ticketed events. In early June, it held the first LGG dinner, sponsored by a firm planning to build a large data centre in Hertfordshire and selling places for £95 each. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones was the guest speaker.

Insiders maintain this is not a bid to sell access to ministers and cosy up to corporate interests but standard practice for Labour factions and broadly equivalent to MPs fundraising for themselves via dinners. The House understands LGG has consulted lawyers about reporting requirements and will be declaring as a limited company.

“Those guys are fantastic – the country would be in a much better position if the Labour Growth guys had a much more direct say,” Newport says.

Both LFG and LGG are up for a scrap against Labour MPs like Chris Hinchliff, who rails against “wave after wave of planning deregulation” that he says adds up to a “developer-led housing model based on private profit rather than public need”. But both campaigns are currently more focused on breaking down barriers for infrastructure – LGG because it is happy with the government’s scale of ambition on housing; LFG because it hasn’t got to it yet, its techno-optimists having prioritised data centres first.

So, does Newport care, for example, about housing being beautiful? “I very much care about making the country beautiful,” he replies. “If you make it awful, ugly, terrible, people don’t want more of it.”

As our conversation comes to an end, he even says he would knock down Millbank Tower, which hosts our offices: “It’s a horrible building!”