From The Daily Mail: The number of new trees planted across the UK per year is set to rise to 143 million by 2035 in a massive bid to meet climate targets. The ambitious programme, easily the biggest in 50 years, will see a doubling of the planting of woodland to almost 80 million in the next four years. Due to be published in the next two weeks, the plan will controversially turn swathes of...

Lola emailed me a link to this regurgitation of the press release: New modelling shows that the average homeowner who did take up the scheme could make hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pounds, depending on where they live – after building costs and costs of finance. One worked example in the paper shows how a post war cul de sac in Barnet could voluntarily decide to uplift. This would...

The idea keeps popping up. Article in The Independent.

If people hold any theory at all about the cause of unemployment, it is usually based on the explanation put forward by Keynes in the 1930s, that the underlying cause is lack of aggregate demand. Most of those who refuse to buy that idea come up with other theories: workers have priced themselves out of jobs, technology has abolished the work or that the Chinese are undercutting everyone else. As...

Another Conservative MP, David Cowan, has come out in favour of LVT

A land value tax should appeal to both of Britain’s main political parties, says Samuel Brittan in the FT

Review of annual Tory Reform Group’s Mackmillan Lecture by Nick Boles MP on website of Cambridge University Conservative Association.

Fred Foldvary continues to produce penetrating and provocative analysis in The Progress Report, which is always worth looking at.

If there are three factors of production, land, labour and capital, one might logically expect three political parties reflecting these three interests. Over simplifying wildly, one could say that in the nineteenth century, before labour got the vote to any significant extent, there were two main parties reflecting the interests of land and capital. Once labour got the vote, the UK saw the rise...

Land Value Tax is not a tax, any more than paying to use a car parking space is a tax. It is a payment for a benefit received: the exclusive use of a plot of land and whatever benefits that go with that use. The principle is to use land rent as the main source of public revenue. Yet it has always been referred to as LVT. A point that comes up regularly from some of our supporters is this damages...