Write for us!Public finance
Agriculture and Rural Affairs in the 21st Century: A Blueprint for Sustainability
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To say that the farming community across the UK has had a challenging time in recent years, would be an understatement. Everything from Brexit to the increasing cost of operating expenses like fertiliser and fuel, to reforms made by Labour to Inheritance Tax, have all massively impacted farmers. The result has been that around 20% of all farms in the UK have ceased to exist over the last decade. I believe that three reforms could begin to address some of the problems that farmers have faced and these could also help us to move towards a more sustainable method of…
Scottish Independence: A Second Bite of the Cherry or a More Fruitful Pursuit?
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I voted Remain in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Since then, I have come to the conclusion that I was young and naïve back then and didn’t completely understand all the arguments. I most likely voted ‘no’ for sentimental reasons: my heart felt more attached to being part of the UK, than Scotland per se. Fast-forward to today and obviously being a lot more mature and educated on the debate surrounding Scottish Independence, I am still content that I would vote Remain again on the grounds that I don’t believe that the SNP’s argument for Independence is persuasive enough to…
Politicians and the Media Need to End Their Obsession With Cutting Welfare
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There is a familiar rhythm to British political life. An election looms, a budget falls short, and within days the headlines arrive like clockwork. Benefit claimants. Welfare bills. The “unsustainable” cost of supporting the poorest people in one of the world’s largest economies. Ministers queue up to talk tough. Editors reach for the same dog-eared playbook. And the cycle continues, largely unchallenged, while the real economic failures that underpin Britain’s stagnation go quietly unexamined. It is time to name this for what it is. The political and media obsession with welfare cuts is not serious economic policy. It is a…
Immigration in the 21st Century: A Fair and Humane Approach
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In recent years, the debate on immigration in the UK has been plagued by the following issues: its alleged impact on public services due it being ‘too high’, the daily illegal boat crossings and the most contentious issue of them all, arguments that detention seekers are afforded too much protection by international human rights law – which guarantees the right to liberty and prohibits arbitrary arrest. Consecutive governments most notably, the recent Conservative one, have talked tough on immigration without reducing overall numbers, or explaining clearly how they are made up (prime example – on average 35% of immigrants, are…
A Liberal Approach to Our Broken Energy Policies: Fantasy vs. Reality of Net Zero 2050
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Ever since the Climate Change Act 2008 was first passed, we have seen an ideological obsession with Net Zero 2050 to the detriment of both the public purse and the supply of our energy. I contend that the obsession with Net Zero at any cost, has had a severe impact on both our economy and our source of energy and I will spell out the course of action that should have been taken over the last twenty years or so. This is a strategy we can still pivot towards as we move towards to 2050. Net Zero – an unhealthy…
Welfare in the 21st Century: From Hand Down to Hand Up
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The total welfare bill in the UK, has risen from approximately £100 billion in the early noughties, to £333.6 billion in 2025-26, a more than a threefold increase in just over twenty years, It now comprises 10% of our total GDP. It is expected to hit £400 billion by the end of the decade, according to a recent report by the Centre for Policy Studies. This unsustainable growth in welfare spending needs tackling. In this article, I am going to advocate a welfare system which is simpler, fairer and ensures that working pays better than welfare dependency. Simplification Currently there…
A Liberal Approach to Solving the Housing Crisis: A Free‑Market Solution
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The housing crisis in the UK has become characterised by a severe shortage of supply, record homelessness and soaring rents. Consecutive governments (both Labour and Conservative) have failed to solve many of the issues due to a lack of concerted effort to analyse beyond the headline issues and come up with solutions which favour the free market – this is precisely what aim to do in this article. I will be focusing on three of these deeper issues: Planning restrictions Planning restrictions severely constrain housing supply, creating structural deficits that drive up property prices. In the UK, restrictive land designations…
A Track Less Discovered: A Novel Approach to Railways in the 21st Century
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The Labour Government’s latest attempt at reforming railways in Britain by bringing them back into public ownership, without actually spelling out in detail how this will work in relation to the Great British Railways project, suggests a lack of imagination on the part of the government. It’s time we moved beyond the complication of having a rail franchising system operating within a state-owned railway structure. Britain can and should be more ambitious and therefore opt instead for ‘Open Access Rail’ throughout the system. The bankrupt Rail Franchising System Ever since the inception of rail privatisation in 1996 under John Major’s…
Who Gets Heard? Why British Governments Listen to Business — and What It Costs the Rest of Us
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Earlier this month, the government quietly closed one of the more brazen rackets in modern British public life. For years, bots and third-party companies had been bulk-buying driving test slots from the DVSA and reselling them to desperate learner drivers for up to £500 eight times the official price of £62. New rules now mean only the learner themselves can book, change or cancel their test. Simple. Effective. Long overdue. But here’s the question worth sitting with: why did it take so long? This wasn’t a hidden problem. The Driving and Vehicle Standards Agency knew. Ministers knew. The waiting lists…
A Liberal Approach to Restructuring Local Government in England
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A few years back I was tasked by my party, namely The Liberal Party, in my capacity as chair of the policy sub-committee, to formulate policies for local governance. This was a subject I had not studied before and I soon realised what a fragmented and disjointed system it is. Hence, the need for reform. England has in some places up to four layers of Local Government (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have one by contrast, namely unitary authorities) but by the same token, England is one of the most centralised states, certainly in Europe if not the OECD.…
Time for a Liberal Approach to Fiscal Policy
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Fiscal policy in the UK needs a massive overhaul and indeed a fresh pair of eyes – a liberal, specifically Keynesian approach, would I believe, be a successful approach to treating the ills of the decaying UK economy. Taxation in the UK has become synonymous with overcomplexity and opaqueness: it’s time for a rethink. The British tax code is an incredible 24,000 pages long. To put that into perspective, Hong Kong’s is a mere 350 pages. Ironically, the complexity of the UK Tax Code appeals to the very rich, who can afford to employ advisers who help them to exploit…
Guns, Wealth and Welfare – Who Carries the Burden for Defence?
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The argument for democratic reform on defence, taxation and the social contract. Britain is in the middle of a debate about defence spending. On the surface, it looks like a straightforward question of national security; how much should the country spend, and how quickly? But scratch beneath that surface and a far more uncomfortable set of questions emerges: who actually benefits from military power, who is being asked to pay for it, and what does the answer reveal about the kind of society Britain truly is? The answers are not flattering. The welfare-for-weapons trade-off In early 2025, Chancellor Rachel Reeves…
From Blair’s ‘Tough on Crime/Tough on the Causes of Crime’ to Placing Sticking Plasters Over Gaping Wounds Under Starmer — How Britain’s Shoplifting Crackdown Exposes a Justice System Built to Protect Property Over People, and Power Over Accountability
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On Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood before the USDAW shop workers’ union and declared an end to the shoplifting “free-for-all.” It was the kind of speech that plays well in a headline cycle: tough, purposeful, protective of honest working people against those who “cheat the system.” The government announced stiffer penalties for shoplifters, 3,000 additional neighbourhood police officers, a £5 million specialist intelligence unit targeting retail crime gangs, and a new standalone offence for assaulting a shop worker. The statistics underpinning the announcement were, at best, modest. According to the Office for National Statistics, shoplifting offences fell from 516,611…
The Glass House Secretary General – George of the Bungle
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George Robertson’s attack on the Starmer government ignores the seeds sown during his own tenure, or the 28-year trend that all parties have followed. When Lord George Robertson of Port Ellen took to the podium in Salisbury earlier this month to deliver the Edward Heath Annual Lecture, he did so with the moral authority of a man who had served as Secretary of State for Defence, who had led NATO for four years, and who had personally authored the current government’s Strategic Defence Review. His language was unsparing. Britain, he declared, was “underprepared, underinsured, under attack and not safe.” The…
The Road not Taken
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In the autumn of 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished road service licensing for local bus services outside London (commonly called deregulation). The logic was market orthodoxy: competition would drive down costs, encourage innovation, and serve passengers better than the inefficiencies of public ownership ever had. Almost four decades later, the verdict is in, and it is damning. Bus journeys across England have fallen from 4.6 billion in 2009 to 3.6 billion in 2024. Outside London, bus mileage has collapsed by 29% compared to 2005. In the north of England, the decline is starker still: Transport for the North reports that…
A Plan for Young People
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In this I want to propose an approach to two issues – youth unemployment and pensions for younger people. Youth unemployment has recently hit the news. As of the final quarter of 2025, the unemployment rate for 16-24-year-olds stands at 16.1%, the highest in a decade and now exceeding the EU average of 14.7%. Total UK unemployment is at 5.2%, a five-year high, but young people are disproportionately affected, with entry-level hiring stalling amid higher payroll costs from the 2025 National Insurance (NI) hike to 15% and minimum wage increases. Meanwhile given the UK’s declining birth rate, England and Wales…
This Stupid Tax Rule is Harming the Country and Needs to Go
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The Labour Government from 1997 to 2010 did many harmful things to the tax system. Although Gordon Brown when Chancellor of the Exchequer had a stellar reputation with much of the media, I always considered him a poor Chancellor. The reason is that he kept endlessly tinkering with the tax rules by introducing stealth taxes that he hoped people would not notice, but which had harmful side effects. However, blame for possibly the worst such stealth tax must be shared between Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and the late Alistair Darling who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer who announced…
