As part of the Brexit debate, we are being told by the “remainers” that we need to protect home producers, which is what the EU’s Single Market has done for the past 40 years. In other words, imports are a bad thing and dumped goods are the worst of all. American President Donald Trump is saying much the same thing – that US industry should be supported, by keeping out imported...

Vacant buildings and sites used not to be subject rates, the UK national tax on business property. The Rating (Empty Properties) Act 2007 removed this exemption. We were sceptical about the legislation at the time and events have proved us right. Property owners have been trying to challenge the legislation and have now got their way. The owner of a building in Sunderland took the Valuation Office...

The importance of geography – review of a book by Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography. The separation of economics and geography as academic discplines is one of the reasons why economic problems seem so intractable. Geography goes a long way to explaining phenomena such as regional economic imbalance and the Brexit vote. This book sounds as if it is worth looking at.

I have just been engaged in a correspondence in the FT. I argued that Brexit needs to begin by getting ourselves outside a tariff wall. I was challenged with this comment “The EU’s tariff wall is what is protecting us. Countries like the US can decimate the British wheat farmers. Japan can decimate the UK car industries (by switching the production back to Japan from the UK) and the...