British politics does not reflect the three economic interests in the country and have not done so for over 100 years. There are three factors of production, land, capital and labour. In reality these boil down to two−land on the one side−and capital and labour—wage earners—on the other, since capital is “stored labour”. Before 1914, the Conservatives represented the landowning and banking (rent...

What is a Chancellor to do when he inherits something that should have been there in the first place? The 45% higher rate of income tax was one of Gordon Brown’s mistakes. It does not, on the whole, tax the rich, because income tax is a burden on employers. The higher rate just makes it more expensive to employ higher level managers and executives; they are reluctant to accept more responsibility...

There is a lot of talk about the current inflation, which is being blamed on lack of competition. My suspicion is that that the current inflation is partly due to the amount of money that was pumped into the system during the Covid epidemic and partly the effect of a dozen years of Quantitative Easing, which was intended to cause a certain amount of inflation but failed to do so. It may be that...

A lot of words have been written about the Chancellor’s wife and her avoidance of tax through non-domicile status, while she receives large amounts of income generated in India. Most of the outrage is misguided. A country’s government has no legitimate claim on income generated in another country. It is up to the Indian government to levy taxes on income, received from activities in India, for the...