I'm in the @NewStatesman today arguing why rejoining the EU Customs Union won't fix Labour's growth woes. The basic reason: UK and European stagnation predate Brexit, and the real challenge is competing with US and Chinese dynamism. Brexit didn’t cause our economic problems, but it did create an excuse for them. The EU debate sucked the air out of our idea space, particularly on the left, which means we haven't properly interrogated the root causes of our economic malaise. Europe as a whole suffers from a lack of dynamism. Our largest companies are much older than those in the US, and weighted towards legacy sectors (finance, luxury goods, oil, pharma, automobiles), many of which have seen poor productivity growth compared to America's digital services and AI, or China's advanced manufacturing. Crucially, dynamism is not the same as innovation. Britain, like many European countries, has no shortage of entrepreneurs and inventors, scientists and creators. The challenge is continually re-allocating talent and capital towards evermore productive uses, in effect turning ideas into profitable companies that can take on incumbents and scale. For this, market structure, regulation and underlying infrastructure are more important than ingenuity and skills. We do not build enough housing, particularly in productive cities, and especially in London. This means workers can’t afford to move to good jobs, and wages are inflated to cover high rents, increasing cost and reducing business investment. Britain has some of the highest electricity costs in the world, in part due to our failure to build transmission infrastructure and nuclear power. We have not built a reservoir since 1992, or a runway since 2001, or high speed rail since 2007. Physical infrastructure is important for dynamism because it effectively levels the playing field. Productive firms cannot take on established incumbents if they face prohibitive costs to expansion. The net effect is dampened investment and firms that would rather scale in the US–or not at all.