Hatch Blog

Neoliberalism: the bargain Britain made - and the bill we’re still paying

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:24:33 GMT

There is a fairly good chance you have heard the word neoliberalism used as an insult. It normally appears in political arguments as shorthand for everything someone thinks has gone wrong with capitalism over the last forty years.

There is a fairly good chance you have heard the word neoliberalism used as an insult. It normally appears in political arguments as shorthand for everything someone thinks has gone wrong with capitalism over the last forty years. That makes it sound complicated and ideological, when the basic idea is actually quite simple.

At its core, neoliberalism is the belief that markets are generally better at allocating money and resources than governments are. In practice, that means more private ownership, fewer restrictions on business, lower barriers to trade and investment, less power for organised labour and a greater expectation that individuals should provide for themselves rather than relying on the state.

The state does not disappear under neoliberalism. It changes jobs. Rather than owning the railway, the energy company or the telephone network, government increasingly regulates those industries while private businesses operate them. Rather than deciding where capital should go, it creates a framework and allows investors, companies and consumers to make those decisions.

The theory is not inherently ridiculous. In fact, a lot of it is quite persuasive. Make it easier to invest, reward people who take risks, allow bad businesses to fail, reduce bureaucracy, encourage competition and let capital flow towards productive opportunities. If that creates more businesses, more jobs and more investment, then living standards should rise.

That was the bargain. Neoliberalism was not originally sold as a plan to make a tiny number of people extraordinarily wealthy. The argument was that allowing people to become wealthy would encourage investment, entrepreneurship and innovation, and that the benefits would eventually spread through the wider economy.

For a while, parts of that argument appeared to work.

Why Britain changed direction

To understand why Britain embraced this philosophy, you have to understand the country Margaret Thatcher inherited in 1979. Post-war Britain had a much larger state-owned economy, powerful trade unions, high top rates of tax and governments that intervened heavily in industry.

By the 1970s, that model was under serious strain. Britain suffered from high inflation, weak productivity, repeated industrial disputes and a general sense that the economy was no longer functioning particularly well. The government sought assistance from the IMF in 1976, and the Winter of Discontent at the end of the decade helped reinforce the public impression that something fundamental needed to change.

Thatcher therefore did not arrive with an economic philosophy nobody had asked for. She arrived at a moment when a significant part of the country had lost confidence in the existing settlement. Her answer was a much stronger reliance on markets, private ownership and individual responsibility.

From 1979 onwards, Britain began changing the relationship between government, workers, businesses and capital. State-owned businesses were privatised, trade union power was reduced, financial markets were deregulated, exchange controls were abolished and top rates of income tax were cut. Council tenants were also given the right to buy their homes, creating a major expansion of private home ownership.

The broad message was straightforward: government should stop trying to run large parts of the economy and allow markets to do more of the work.

Some of those reforms addressed genuine problems. Some nationalised industries were inefficient. Industrial relations did need reform. Inflation needed to be controlled, and Britain needed more entrepreneurship and investment. It is difficult to have a sensible discussion about neoliberalism if we pretend none of that was true.

The short-term gains

The new model had obvious benefits. Privatisation raised money for government and transferred commercial risk into private hands. The sale of council housing created large numbers of new homeowners. Financial deregulation strengthened London's position as a global financial centre, while lower tax rates and fewer restrictions made Britain more attractive to entrepreneurs and international investors.

Consumers generally had more choice, access to credit expanded and ownership of property and financial assets became increasingly valuable. For millions of people, particularly those who bought homes or owned shares and pensions, the reforms felt like progress because they were progress.

The problem was not necessarily what neoliberalism achieved in its first decade. The problem was what happened when Britain kept applying the same philosophy long after the original problems had changed.

That is where the story becomes more interesting.

When Britain started to falter

There is no single year when Britain suddenly crossed a line and neoliberalism stopped working. A better way to understand it is as a gradual shift in the balance of the economy.

The first major warning sign appeared in the 1980s, when income inequality widened sharply. That did not automatically mean the economic model had failed. A society can become more unequal while most people are still getting better off. If the economy grows strongly and wages rise across the board, people may tolerate a widening gap between the top and the bottom.

The more important change came later, when ownership of assets became increasingly important relative to income from work. By the 2000s, Britain had become an economy where property, shares, businesses, land and pensions increasingly determined people's financial position.

If you already owned assets, rising prices worked in your favour. If you were trying to buy those assets from wages, they gradually moved further away from you.

Then came the financial crisis in 2008. Britain, like other developed economies, responded by cutting interest rates dramatically and taking extraordinary measures to stabilise the financial system. There were very good reasons for doing that because allowing major banks to collapse would have caused enormous damage.

But there was also a distributional consequence. Lower interest rates and policies designed to support financial markets helped asset prices recover. That disproportionately benefited people who already owned significant quantities of property, shares and other investments.

This is where aggregate wealth can become misleading. A country can become much wealthier on paper without the average person's economic life improving by anything like the same amount. If ten people each have £20 and one billionaire walks into the room, the average wealth of the room suddenly looks fantastic. The original ten people have not gained a penny.

When wealth starts replacing work

For most people, the traditional route to financial security is fairly dull. You get a job, build a career, earn more over time, save, buy a house, contribute to a pension and perhaps start a business. Do that for several decades and, with some luck, you end up financially comfortable.

But once asset prices rise substantially faster than wages, the maths starts to change.

Imagine one person has £50,000 invested and another has £20 million. If both earn a 5% return, the first person makes £2,500 while the second makes £1 million. The percentage return is exactly the same. The outcome is completely different.

The following year the wealthy person does not start again with £20 million. They begin with £21 million, assuming they have not spent the return. Their capital starts earning returns on previous returns. That is compounding, and compounding becomes extraordinarily powerful when the original pot is already enormous.

This matters because labour does not scale in the same way. A person can become more skilled, work longer hours or earn a higher salary, but there is still a practical limit to what one human being can produce. Capital has no comparable constraint. £20 million can be invested while its owner sleeps.

Over several decades, that creates a structural advantage for people who already own substantial quantities of capital.

What do we mean by ultra-wealthy?

For the purposes of this argument, I am using £20 million of net wealth as the point at which somebody becomes ultra-wealthy. This is not an official government definition. It is simply a useful dividing line.

There is a meaningful difference between someone who owns a valuable house and has built a good pension, and someone with £20 million of investable assets.

At the latter level, you are no longer relying primarily on your salary to create financial security. Your assets themselves can produce substantial amounts of income. You may own businesses, commercial property, investments, land or stakes in private companies. You can also access professional investment management, specialist tax advice and investment opportunities that are simply unavailable to ordinary households.

That does not make someone immoral. Wealth is not, by itself, a problem.

The issue is what happens when an increasingly large proportion of the nation's assets becomes concentrated among people whose wealth is already large enough to reproduce itself.

Why concentration matters

A perfectly reasonable response is to ask why we should care if somebody is worth £20 million, £100 million or £1 billion. If they built a successful company, employed people and created something useful, then becoming wealthy is a fairly logical outcome.

The problem is not wealth creation. The problem is concentration of ownership.

Imagine a town with 10,000 homes. If most of those homes are owned by the people who live in them, housing wealth is distributed relatively widely. Now imagine that, over time, a growing proportion of those properties is bought by wealthy landlords, investment funds and companies.

The houses have not disappeared. GDP may not change dramatically. The streets look the same.

But the flow of money has changed.

Instead of mortgage payments gradually creating equity for households, a larger proportion of wages begins flowing towards landlords and investors as rent. Those owners can then use that income to purchase more assets, which generate more income, which can be used to purchase still more assets.

That is how concentration can become self-reinforcing without anyone needing to sit in a room and design it.

Productive capitalism and rentier capitalism

This is where an important distinction needs to be made.

Capitalism at its best is extremely productive. Somebody risks their money to build a business. They create a product people want, employ workers, improve technology, compete with other businesses and hopefully become wealthy if they succeed.

There is nothing particularly troubling about that. In fact, Britain could probably do with more people building successful businesses.

Rentier capitalism is different. Instead of becoming wealthy by creating something new, wealth comes increasingly from controlling assets other people need to access. Property is the obvious example, but the same principle can apply to land, infrastructure, intellectual property and other scarce assets.

Think of it as the difference between building a bridge and owning the only bridge into town.

The first creates something useful. The second can become extremely profitable simply because everyone else has to pay to cross it.

This is where the concern around wealth concentration becomes stronger. If large fortunes are primarily being created through innovation, business formation and productivity growth, then society is getting something in return. If fortunes increasingly grow through ownership of existing scarce assets, then a larger share of the economy can start behaving like a collection of toll booths.

Then inheritance arrives

Accumulated wealth has another characteristic. Eventually it gets passed on.

This complicates the argument that large differences in wealth are simply the natural reward for talent, hard work and risk-taking. You can make a strong case that somebody who builds a £100 million company deserves to enjoy the rewards.

It is more difficult to make the same argument about somebody inheriting £20 million because their grandparents made good decisions several decades earlier.

As large fortunes compound and move between generations, inheritance becomes increasingly important in determining people's economic starting points. That changes the nature of opportunity.

Two people can have the same education, the same salary and work equally hard, but if one receives a substantial inheritance and the other does not, their financial lives quickly diverge. One can buy a house earlier, invest more, take greater risks, start a business or help their own children onto the property ladder.

The advantage then compounds again.

At some point, a supposedly meritocratic economy starts placing more weight on what your parents owned than what you personally produce. That begins to look less like capitalism rewarding enterprise and more like aristocracy with better Wi-Fi.

Inequality is not automatically the problem

It is worth being careful here because inequality itself is not necessarily evidence that an economy is failing.

If one person earns £50,000 and another earns £500,000, then both incomes double, inequality has not narrowed. But both people are materially better off.

That is why arguments focused entirely on whether billionaires exist tend to miss the point.

The more useful questions are whether ordinary living standards are rising, whether people can still acquire assets through work, whether markets remain genuinely competitive and whether somebody born without wealth has a realistic chance of building it.

Can young people afford homes without parental help? Can workers capture a reasonable share of productivity improvements? Can entrepreneurs still compete with established owners of capital? Do people believe working hard and doing the right things will materially improve their lives?

Those questions matter much more than whether somebody owns a yacht.

Where Britain may really have gone wrong

Britain's problem is therefore not simply that wealthy people became wealthier. It is that the economic ladder underneath them appears to have become harder to climb.

As asset values increased relative to wages, two people earning exactly the same salary could experience completely different financial outcomes depending on whether they already owned property or received family wealth.

One person might inherit enough for a house deposit at 27. The other spends another decade renting while trying to save one. During those ten years, the first person's mortgage payments build equity while the second person's rent builds somebody else's equity.

If house prices rise, the gap becomes larger. The first person can later borrow against that equity, invest it, start a business or help their children buy property. None of this requires anyone involved to behave badly.

That is the uncomfortable point. The system can generate greater concentration even when every individual person is behaving perfectly rationally.

The mathematics of £20 million

The effect becomes clearer when you return to the £20 million threshold.

Take somebody with £20 million invested and assume, purely as an illustration, an average annual return of 5%. Ignoring tax and spending, that capital grows to around £53 million after twenty years. At 7%, it becomes roughly £77 million.

The owner has not needed to invent another product, build another factory or work another million hours. The original capital has simply compounded.

Now repeat that process across thousands of large fortunes, and allow some of that growing capital to buy property, businesses, infrastructure and land from people with smaller balance sheets. Ownership naturally begins to concentrate.

Again, this does not require a conspiracy. It is the natural arithmetic of capital. Money scales. Human labour does not.

Why this becomes a societal problem

Once wealth concentration reaches a certain level, the consequences extend beyond the bank accounts of rich individuals.

Housing ownership becomes increasingly divided between people inside and outside the asset economy. Inheritance plays a larger role in determining people's prospects. Geographic inequality can become more entrenched, particularly when valuable property and business assets are concentrated in certain parts of the country.

Large differences in wealth also create different relationships with public services. Someone with significant capital can pay privately for education, healthcare, security and transport when public provision deteriorates. That weakens the extent to which wealthy households share the same everyday systems as everyone else.

There is also a question of political influence. Money provides access to professional lobbying, campaign funding, specialist advisers, media ownership and networks that ordinary citizens do not have. That does not mean every wealthy person is buying politicians, but it would be naïve to pretend extreme financial resources create no political advantage.

Perhaps the biggest consequence, however, is psychological.

Capitalist societies rely on people believing the system broadly works. Most people are willing to accept that some individuals will become vastly wealthier than others if they believe those rewards came from creating value and that they themselves still have a meaningful route to advancement.

What becomes dangerous is a society where increasing numbers of people conclude that work matters less than ownership and that their financial future was substantially determined before they were born. At that point, the problem is no longer simply inequality. It is legitimacy.

So did neoliberalism fail?

Not entirely. That is what makes the argument uncomfortable again.

The reforms introduced from 1979 onwards addressed genuine weaknesses in Britain's post-war economic model. Competition matters. Entrepreneurship matters. Private investment matters. Profit incentives matter. Markets are often extremely good at organising economic activity.

The mistake was turning those useful principles into something closer to a religion.

Britain gradually began treating market outcomes as though they were automatically good outcomes. House prices rise, so homeowners are wealthier. Asset prices rise, so pension funds are stronger. Foreign capital buys British infrastructure, so Britain is attracting investment. Private investors acquire essential assets, so capital must be being allocated efficiently.

Each decision can make perfect sense in isolation. Add them together over several decades and you can end up somewhere much stranger.

You can have a country that looks extremely wealthy on paper while a large part of the population struggles to acquire the basic assets previous generations accumulated much more easily.

The real argument Britain needs to have

The debate should not really be capitalism versus socialism. That argument is too crude and, frankly, about forty years out of date. The better question is what sort of capitalism Britain wants.

If someone becomes extremely wealthy by building a company, developing technology, employing thousands of people or finding a way to make the economy more productive, good. We should probably be trying to create more people like that.

If increasingly large fortunes are generated by owning existing assets, extracting income from them and passing those assets down through generations, then we should at least question whether the economic incentives are producing the society we want.

There is a significant difference between wealth creation and wealth extraction.

They can look remarkably similar on a balance sheet.

Over forty years, they create very different countries.

WTF?! ...Is inequality?

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:36:45 GMT

Over the past few months, I have been looking more closely at inequality.

I have been looking at how wealth accumulates, how ownership creates more ownership, and how the gap between people who live from their work and people who live from their assets keeps getting wider.

The more I have looked at it, the more I have realised that most conversations about inequality are confused before they even begin.

People mix up income and wealth. They talk about a consultant earning £200,000 as though they are economically comparable to somebody sitting on a £2 billion fortune. They talk about taxing “the wealthy”, but then immediately start worrying about doctors, small-business owners and somebody’s fictional grandmother living in a draughty mansion she cannot afford to heat.

Meanwhile, the genuinely vast fortunes barely enter the conversation.

So, WTF is inequality?!

At its simplest, inequality is the gap between what different people have. But that definition does not tell us much, because some degree of difference will always exist. Some people earn more, some save more, some inherit money, some build successful businesses, and some spend every spare penny financing a car that sounds like a lawnmower being attacked by a bear.

The problem is not that everybody has a different number in their bank account.

The problem is when the gap becomes so large that money stops being merely something you spend and starts becoming a machine that generates more money, more influence and more control. At that point, we are not talking about one person having a nicer holiday than another. We are talking about fundamentally different relationships with the economy.

One person has to keep working to remain wealthy. Another person can stop working entirely and become richer each year simply because of what they already own.

Those people are not standing on different rungs of the same ladder. They are in different buildings

Income is a tap. Wealth is a reservoir

The first mistake in almost every conversation about taxing wealthy people is that income and wealth are treated as though they are the same thing.

Income is money flowing in over a period of time. It includes salary, business profits, dividends, rent and interest. Wealth is what you already own after deducting what you owe: property, investments, land, businesses, cash and other assets, less mortgages and debts.

Income is the tap. Wealth is the reservoir behind it.

Someone earning £250,000 a year has a high income. They are likely to be comfortable, although perhaps slightly less comfortable than the headline number suggests once tax, mortgages, childcare, school fees and a lifestyle that now apparently requires three types of fridge are taken into account.

But that person is not necessarily ultra-wealthy. They may have a large mortgage, limited savings and a lifestyle heavily dependent on their continued employment. If their income stops, their financial position gradually deteriorates. They still need to keep turning up.

Now compare them with somebody who owns £200 million of assets. That person does not need to earn their fortune again every year. Their existing fortune earns on their behalf. At a 5% annual return, £200 million generates £10 million of growth in a single year. They could spend £1 million during the year and still finish £9 million richer than when they started.

This is why endlessly adjusting income-tax bands will not solve extreme wealth inequality.

We can increase tax on salaries, push more people into additional rates, and collect more from professionals and successful business owners. That may raise revenue, but it does not directly address the hundreds of millions or billions already sitting in shares, land, investment funds, trusts and private companies.

High-income people and ultra-wealthy people may occasionally be the same people, but they are not the same economic group.

A surgeon earning £200,000 is not in the same position as somebody whose assets rise by £20 million while they sleep. A successful accountant with a decent pension is not comparable to a family that has owned tens of thousands of acres for several centuries. Somebody who sold a business for £5 million is not operating in the same world as somebody who could lose £5 million behind a sofa and decide it was not worth looking for.

Grouping all these people together is extremely useful for the genuinely ultra-wealthy. Mention a wealth tax and they can immediately hide behind doctors, dentists, entrepreneurs and somebody’s elderly aunt.

The debate becomes about whether ordinary success is being punished rather than whether enormous accumulated fortunes should make a greater contribution.

Britain is unequal, and the numbers probably understate it.

Official figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest that the wealthiest 10% of households hold around 41% of household wealth in Great Britain. The wealthiest 1% hold roughly 10%, while the least wealthy half of households hold about 9% between them.

Even those figures should be treated cautiously.

Surveys of household wealth have a fairly obvious weakness: the richest people are not always easy to find, and they are not necessarily enthusiastic about completing a detailed questionnaire explaining the ownership structure of their trusts, companies, property portfolios and offshore investments.

Research from Warwick and others has argued that survey-based statistics substantially underestimate both the amount owned at the top and the overall concentration of wealth.

In other words, the official picture already shows a deeply unequal distribution, and the real picture may be worse.

To give the numbers some context, median household wealth was estimated at approximately £294,000 in the ONS’s 2020–22 data. The £20 million threshold proposed later in this article is around 68 times that amount.

A person with £20 million is not merely “doing quite well”. They do not have a slightly larger pension or a nicer kitchen than the average household. They hold wealth equivalent to the total net assets of dozens of ordinary families.

That does not make them evil, but it does make them different.

The great compounding machine

The greatest advantage of having money is not that you can buy better things. It is that money creates more money.

Take £20 million invested at an average annual return of 5%. After 20 years, assuming the return compounds and no money is added, the original £20 million becomes just over £53 million.

Now take £20,000 invested at the same rate for the same period. That becomes just over £53,000. The percentage return is identical. The length of time is identical. The result is not remotely comparable.

The person starting with £20,000 has gained around £33,000. The person starting with £20 million has gained around £33 million.

This is compounding.

It is normally explained using a cheerful chart in a pension brochure, showing how putting away £150 a month might eventually allow you to retire with enough money to pay the gas bill and buy biscuits from the branded aisle. But compounding becomes much more powerful when the starting figure already contains seven, eight or nine zeros.

The ultra-wealthy also have access to a completely different range of investments. An ordinary saver may have cash, a workplace pension, perhaps an ISA and some equity in their home. Someone with hundreds of millions can invest in private equity, development land, commercial property, venture capital, infrastructure, private credit and companies that never become available to ordinary investors.

They can spread risk across countries, currencies and asset classes. They can pay for the best legal, financial and tax advice. They can borrow against their assets rather than selling them. They can wait ten years for an investment to pay off without worrying about whether the boiler will survive February.

Most importantly, they can afford not to panic.

When markets fall, ordinary people may have to sell. They lose their job, their mortgage increases, their business struggles or they need cash for an emergency. The ultra-wealthy can often do the opposite. They can buy assets cheaply from people who need money immediately. This means downturns can widen inequality rather than reduce it. People with weak finances are forced to sell at the bottom, while people with strong finances acquire more assets at discounted prices.

None of this requires a conspiracy or a room full of billionaires stroking white cats. It is simply what happens when the people with the most money have the greatest ability to wait, diversify and take advantage of opportunities. The machinery naturally rewards those who already own the most.

Then asset prices join the party

Large fortunes need somewhere to go.

Once somebody has paid for their home, cars, holidays and obligatory temperature-controlled wine room, the remaining money is generally invested. It flows into shares, property, land, private companies, infrastructure, bonds, art and anything else that may preserve value or produce a return.

When large amounts of capital compete for scarce assets, prices tend to rise. That is excellent news when you already own those assets. It is less helpful when you are trying to buy them for the first time.

The Bank of England has previously explained how policies such as quantitative easing raise government-bond prices and encourage investors to move money into other assets, including shares and corporate bonds. Low interest rates have also supported higher property and asset values.

Inequality is not the sole explanation for rising asset prices. Housing supply, planning restrictions, monetary policy, international investment, population changes and interest rates all matter. Economics is rarely a murder mystery where one suspicious-looking butler committed every crime. But wealth concentration determines who benefits most when assets rise.

A homeowner sees their equity increase. A renter sees the deposit they need moving further out of reach. A landlord owns an asset producing rent and long-term capital growth. A tenant receives an email beginning, “Unfortunately, due to current market conditions…”

The owner of shares benefits when the market rises. The person without spare capital is told that investing is the key to freedom, normally by somebody filming a 37-second video while leaning against a rented Lamborghini.

This creates a feedback loop. Existing owners become wealthier as asset values rise. Their increased wealth allows them to purchase more assets. That demand pushes prices higher, making it harder for new entrants to buy without more debt or family support. Eventually, ownership becomes less dependent on what you earn and more dependent on whether your family owned assets before prices increased.

The easiest route to becoming wealthy is increasingly to have wealthy parents , which is an unusual interpretation of meritocracy

Why is inequality actually bad?

At this point, someone will usually claim that worrying about inequality is simply jealousy. It is not. I am not jealous of people with tropical diseases, but I am still in favour of reducing tropical diseases.

The objection to extreme inequality is not that one person has a larger television than another. It is that extreme concentrations of wealth distort opportunity, political influence, economic activity and public trust.

It damages genuine opportunity

People do not begin from the same starting line. Someone from a wealthy family can take an unpaid internship, move to an expensive city, start a business, survive that business failing and try again. They can receive help with a house deposit, access better educational opportunities and wait for the right job rather than accepting the first one available.

Someone without family wealth may have to take whatever work pays immediately because the rent is due on Friday. They cannot spend two years building a business without income because their landlord has demonstrated limited interest in being paid in entrepreneurial potential.

Both people may be intelligent. Both may work hard. Both may have good ideas. Only one is allowed to fail safely.

This is why extreme inequality undermines the idea that economic outcomes are simply a reflection of effort or ability. The amount of risk a person can take depends heavily on the cushion underneath them.

It turns economic power into political power

Money does not only buy houses, cars and private islands. It buys access. It funds lobbying, political donations, advertising, research organisations, legal challenges, media outlets and campaigns. It gives an individual the ability to keep an idea in the public conversation long after everybody else has run out of money.

We may formally operate on the basis of one person, one vote. But one person with one vote, four newspapers, a television station, a social-media platform and several million pounds available for political donations is participating rather differently.

This does not mean wealthy people should be excluded from politics. It means we should recognise that extreme wealth produces influence that ordinary voters cannot match.

When wealth becomes heavily concentrated, political influence tends to follow it.

It can weaken the economy

Extreme inequality is not merely a question of dividing an existing pie. It can affect how successfully the economy functions.

The IMF has warned that excessive inequality can damage social cohesion, increase political polarisation and weaken sustainable long-term growth. OECD research has also identified a relationship between inequality and poorer economic performance, particularly where lower- and middle-income households fall behind. That is not surprising.

A functioning economy depends on millions of people being able to consume, invest, develop skills, start businesses and take calculated risks. When large numbers of households spend most of their income on housing, energy, childcare and debt, they have very little left to spend elsewhere.

You cannot run an economy indefinitely by selling increasingly expensive assets to an increasingly small group of people. Eventually, somebody needs to buy actual goods and services.

It corrodes trust

Most people will tolerate significant differences in income and wealth when they believe the system is broadly fair. They are less enthusiastic when nurses pay tax automatically through PAYE each month while somebody with a £300 million portfolio has a team of advisers explaining that their gain technically arose in a structure owned by another structure located somewhere with palm trees.

A society can cope with some people being much richer than others. It struggles when wealth appears detached from contribution, responsibility and any meaningful obligation to the country that protects it.

Capitalism needs limits on excessive concentration for the same reason football needs rules preventing one team from owning both goals. Without those rules, it stops being competition and becomes property management.

So what would a wealth tax actually do?

The proposal is relatively simple: an annual tax of 2% on net wealth above £20 million. That does not mean 2% of everything somebody owns. It does not mean 2% of their salary, and it does not mean tax is charged from the first pound. It means 2% of the amount above £20 million.

Assuming the threshold applies to an individual, somebody worth £19 million would pay nothing. Somebody worth £21 million would pay 2% of £1 million, which is £20,000.

Someone worth £50 million would pay 2% of the £30 million above the threshold, producing a bill of £600,000. Someone worth £200 million would pay 2% of £180 million, or £3.6 million. A billionaire would pay 2% of the £980 million above the threshold, producing a liability of £19.6 million.

These are large tax bills because these are large fortunes.

Return to the person with £200 million earning 5% on their assets. Their wealth has increased by £10 million during the year. After paying a £3.6 million wealth tax, they have still gained £6.4 million before allowing for spending and other taxes. They remain extremely wealthy. Their lifestyle is not under serious threat. Nobody is towing away the yacht while they sleep. They are simply becoming wealthier slightly more slowly. That is partly the point.

A wealth tax is not only intended to raise revenue. It acts as a brake on the automatic concentration of wealth. Not a handbrake, admittedly. More one of those irritating speed bumps positioned outside a school.

What would count as wealth?

For the tax to work, it would need to apply broadly.

Relevant wealth would include property, land, shares, investment funds, private-company interests, cash, bonds, valuable art and other substantial assets. Beneficial interests in trusts and similar arrangements would also need to be included, because otherwise the entire tax base would disappear into trusts before the legislation had finished printing.

Debts would be deducted, because the tax should apply to net wealth. A person owning a £20 million building with £19 million of genuine borrowing is not in the same position as somebody holding £20 million in cash.

One of the more complicated areas would be private businesses. A founder might own shares notionally worth £50 million without receiving millions in cash each year. That does not mean the shares should be excluded. If private-company wealth is ignored, every billionaire in Britain will become a deeply concerned and tragically illiquid entrepreneur by lunchtime.

But sensible payment arrangements could be introduced. Tax might be deferred until shares are sold. Bills could be paid in instalments. In limited circumstances, the government could potentially accept a small equity interest instead of forcing an immediate sale. These are practical design issues, not reasons to abandon the tax.

Private businesses are already valued during company sales, divorces, investments, insurance claims, probate disputes and inheritance planning. Assets only seem to become completely impossible to value when somebody suggests taxing them.

How much would it raise?

The honest answer is that nobody can know the precise amount until the detailed rules are written. The revenue would depend on whether the threshold applied to individuals or households, which assets were included, how trusts were treated, what anti-avoidance rules were introduced, how businesses were valued and whether certain payments could be deferred.

Anyone offering a number accurate to the nearest pound is either guessing or wearing an exceptionally shiny suit. However, existing research allows us to estimate a sensible range.

Modelling produced for the Wealth Tax Commission suggested that an annual tax of roughly 1.12% on wealth above £10 million could raise around £10 billion under its lower-avoidance assumptions, using wealth data from 2016–18.

A more recent proposal associated with economist Arun Advani and promoted by Tax Justice UK estimated that a 2% tax on wealth above £10 million might raise approximately £24 billion annually after behavioural responses.

The proposal here uses a higher threshold of £20 million. That would reduce both the number of taxpayers and the revenue raised, but it would not necessarily cut the revenue in half because wealth is heavily concentrated at the very top. Much of the taxable wealth is held by people far beyond either threshold.

Based on those models, a reasonable working estimate for a 2% annual tax above £20 million would be somewhere in the region of £15 billion to £20 billion a year.

A central estimate of roughly £17 billion annually seems defensible.

That is not an official Treasury forecast, and it should not be presented as one. Any government introducing the policy would need to update the modelling using current administrative records and detailed asset data.

Still, £15 billion to £20 billion is not an insignificant amount. It equates to roughly £290 million to £385 million every week.

It would not solve every problem facing the country, but perhaps we can retire the idea that it is loose change found down the back of the national sofa.

But won’t all the wealthy people leave?

Some will. Anyone claiming that absolutely nobody would leave is selling a different flavour of nonsense from the people predicting that Mayfair will be completely abandoned by Tuesday afternoon.

Taxes affect behaviour. The important questions are how many people would leave, how much tax would be lost, which assets and businesses would actually move, and whether the policy would still raise substantial revenue after those responses.

The available evidence does not support the usual mass-exodus pantomime.

Research by the London School of Economics involving people in Britain’s top 1% by income or wealth found that family, careers, culture, education, healthcare and social connections were powerful reasons to remain in the UK. Tax mattered, but it was rarely the only consideration and often was not decisive.

Research into changes to the UK’s non-dom rules has also found more limited migration responses than dramatic newspaper headlines might suggest.

Studies of wealth taxes in Sweden and Denmark did find that taxation affected the movement of wealthy individuals, but the estimated effects were relatively modest. A one-percentage-point increase in the top wealth-tax rate was estimated to reduce the long-term number of wealthy taxpayers by less than 2%, with relatively small wider effects on employment, investment and economic output.

So, yes, there would be some reaction.

No, the country would not be left with one confused barista and several thousand abandoned mansions.

Wealthy people have lives. Their children attend schools. Their partners have careers. Their businesses employ people. Their families and friends live nearby. They benefit from British courts, universities, culture, financial markets and professional services.

Moving an entire life to save tax is more complicated than changing broadband provider. It is also worth considering who often supplies the most dramatic warnings about wealthy people leaving: wealth managers, tax advisers and relocation consultants. These are all respectable professions, but their services become considerably more valuable when wealthy clients are frightened. Nobody asks a dentist whether Britain needs more fillings and assumes the answer is completely disinterested.

Design the tax properly and the leaving threat becomes weaker

A serious wealth tax would need rules preventing somebody from moving abroad shortly before the assessment date and immediately escaping the charge.

Possible measures could include a departure charge, a continuing liability for a fixed period after leaving, or permanent taxation of UK property and land regardless of where the owner lives.

Many countries already use versions of exit taxation. It is not especially revolutionary to say that gains and wealth accumulated while somebody benefited from a country’s infrastructure and legal system should not disappear from the tax base following a strategically timed photograph from an airport lounge.

Anti-avoidance rules would also be essential. These would need to cover trusts, foundations, connected companies, artificial debts and transfers between spouses or family members.

HMRC would also need proper funding, experienced staff and access to reliable information.

There is little point announcing a tax aimed at people with twelve lawyers and then sending one exhausted civil servant armed with Excel 2007.

Why are some billionaires supporting the far right?

This part needs to be handled carefully. Not every billionaire supports the far right. Not every person supporting a right-wing party is motivated by tax. And there is no publicly available memo called “Operation Distract the Peasants”.

What we can observe is an increasingly visible alignment between some extremely wealthy individuals and nationalist, populist or far-right political movements.

Elon Musk publicly expressed support for Germany’s AfD. French billionaire Vincent Bolloré has used his media empire to promote a harder-right political agenda and closer cooperation between the traditional right and Marine Le Pen’s movement. In Britain, Reform UK has received very large individual donations, including a reported £9 million donation from Christopher Harborne.

The motivations will not be identical. Some wealthy supporters genuinely share the ideology. Some oppose regulation. Some want lower taxes. Some want political influence. Some may simply have reached the level of wealth where buying another house becomes repetitive, so they decide to purchase a political movement instead.

But the alignment is politically useful because far-right politics is extremely effective at redirecting legitimate economic anger.

People are right to be angry. Housing is expensive, wages have often struggled to keep pace with living costs, public services are under pressure, and many younger people cannot imagine buying the kind of home their parents purchased on ordinary incomes.

The important question is where that anger is directed.

It can be directed upwards, towards concentrated ownership, monopoly power, tax avoidance, political influence and fortunes so vast that they have almost no relationship with work.

Alternatively, it can be directed sideways or downwards: towards migrants, benefit claimants, minorities, civil servants, university students, “woke” museums, or some unfortunate person trying to use a gender-neutral toilet.

Anything, essentially, except the ownership structure of the economy. This does not require a coordinated conspiracy. It only requires aligned incentives.

A billionaire does not need to attend a secret meeting and agree to divert the public’s attention. They only need to support political movements that focus public anger on cultural enemies while leaving the concentration of wealth largely untouched.

It is the political equivalent of shouting “Look over there!” while reversing a lorry into the vault.

Wealth taxes are becoming popular

Polling conducted by YouGov for Oxfam in March 2025 found strong public support for higher taxes on the very richest, including support for a 2% tax on net wealth above £10 million.

That creates a problem for people who do not want wealth taxed.

The old argument that wealth taxes are merely the product of seven communists meeting in a pub becomes harder to sustain when large majorities support them. So the argument changes.

First, we are told that assets are impossible to value. Then we are told that everybody will leave. Then we are told that the country depends entirely on a small number of billionaires waking up each morning within the M25.

Eventually, we are told that taxing enormous fortunes will somehow damage ordinary workers more than continuing to tax wages, spending and smaller businesses.

Ideally, before anyone examines those claims too closely, the conversation moves to a boat, a flag, a statue or a cartoon.

Culture wars are cheap. Wealth taxes are not.

That makes culture wars an excellent investment.

Isn’t this punishing success?

No. Success is not a protected tax category.

We tax employees with higher salaries more than employees with lower salaries because they earn more. We tax profitable companies more than loss-making companies because they have profits. We charge more tax on larger transactions because the amounts involved are larger.

A wealth tax does not say creating value is bad. It says that once private wealth reaches a level far beyond any plausible personal need, continued access to the society protecting that wealth comes with an additional contribution.

Nobody creates a £500 million fortune alone. They rely on educated workers, roads, courts, limited-liability laws, banks, energy networks, police, stable currency, contract enforcement and customers whose ability to spend often depends on public services and public investment.

Even the most talented entrepreneur is operating inside a system built and maintained by millions of other people.

The completely self-made billionaire is rather like the completely self-made lasagne.

Someone built the kitchen.

A wealth tax is not the whole answer

A 2% annual tax above £20 million would help slow the compounding of the largest fortunes. It could raise substantial revenue and make the tax system less dependent on earnings and everyday spending. But it would not solve inequality on its own.

The UK would still need to examine capital-gains tax, inheritance tax, property taxation and the taxation of income generated from assets. It would need better housing policy, stronger competition rules, broader employee ownership, investment in public services and more effective enforcement against avoidance.

It would also need to stop treating every tax relief as a treasured family pet that cannot possibly be put down, regardless of whether anyone remembers why it was introduced.

A wealth tax is one part of a broader rebalancing. But it is an important part because it deals directly with the accumulated stock of extreme wealth.

Income taxes collect water from the tap. A wealth tax deals with the reservoir.

The actual WTF

The radical position is not suggesting that someone with £200 million should pay 2% of the portion above £20 million.

The radical position is believing that fortunes can compound indefinitely, ownership can become increasingly concentrated, asset prices can move further away from wages, and democracy will remain completely unaffected.

A 2% tax above £20 million would not abolish wealth, entrepreneurs, ambition or success. It would not leave billionaires queuing outside Greggs asking whether anybody has a spare loyalty stamp.

It could raise somewhere in the region of £15 billion to £20 billion a year while slowing the automatic concentration of economic power.

The wealthy would remain wealthy. Successful people would remain successful. Britain would remain open for business. It might simply become slightly less open for extraction.

And that is the real answer to the question: what the f*** is inequality?!

Inequality is not simply that one person has more than another. It is what happens when having more becomes the most reliable way of getting even more, and when the people who benefit most from that arrangement gain enough influence to convince everybody else that changing it would be terribly unfair.

The WTF is not that anyone wants to tax fortunes above £20 million. The WTF is that we have built a machine that compounds wealth faster than opportunity, called the result meritocracy, and then acted surprised when people became angry!

Lloyd

The Finance Guy

The Government just accidentally made the best argument against high taxes

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:28:25 GMT

The Government has announced its new "Great British Summer Savings" scheme. The basic idea is that certain family activities over the summer holidays will attract a reduced rate of VAT, making days out cheaper... encouraging people to spend more money.

On the face of it, that seems perfectly reasonable. Families get a bit of help during the most expensive time of the year, and businesses in hospitality, leisure and entertainment hopefully see a few more customers through the door. Nobody is likely to object too strongly to that.

What I find more interesting, however, is the thinking behind it.

The Government is effectively saying that if you reduce the tax burden on something, people are more likely to buy it. If a family day out costs less, more families will go. If tickets are cheaper, more tickets will be sold. If spending becomes more attractive, spending increases. That isn't a particularly controversial position. In fact, it's probably one of the least controversial economic arguments imaginable.

The awkward question is why that logic seems to apply only when taxes are being reduced.

If cutting VAT encourages spending, surely increasing VAT discourages it. If reducing the cost of something leads to more economic activity, increasing the cost must have the opposite effect. It is difficult to argue one without implicitly accepting the other.

Yet tax rises are often presented as though they exist in a completely different universe. We are frequently told that businesses will absorb the costs, consumers won't really notice and economic behaviour will remain largely unchanged. The same people who understand perfectly well that incentives matter when taxes are cut sometimes appear remarkably reluctant to acknowledge that incentives matter when taxes are increased.

Business owners don't usually need an economist to explain this to them because they see it happen every day. Small changes in price affect customer decisions. Small changes in costs affect profitability. Margins that look insignificant on paper can make a significant difference in the real world. Every business owner understands that people respond to incentives because they watch it happen in front of them every week.

None of this means the Great British Summer Savings scheme is a bad idea. Quite the opposite. If the Government wants to stimulate spending during the summer holidays, reducing VAT is a logical way of trying to achieve it. The policy itself isn't really the point.

The point is that the Government clearly believes taxes influence behaviour. Otherwise there would be absolutely no reason to introduce the scheme in the first place.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the announcement is not the temporary tax cut itself, but the admission hidden within it. If lower taxes encourage spending, growth and economic activity, then higher taxes inevitably have consequences too. Most business owners already know that. It's just refreshing to see the Government acknowledge half of the argument.

Lloyd

The Finance Guy

The illusion of rising living standards: Real wages vs real life

Tue, 19 May 2026 10:38:00 GMT

Politicians love a clean number. “Real wages are rising.” It sounds reassuring. It sounds like progress. It sounds like people should feel a bit better off than they did a few years ago.

And yet, a lot of households don’t feel better off. They feel squeezed. Tighter. Like more of their income disappears the moment it arrives.

So who’s wrong? Annoyingly, possibly nobody. The tension comes from the fact that “real wage growth” and “real life” are measuring two very different things.

When economists talk about real wages, they mean wages growing faster than inflation. Inflation, in this case, is usually measured using CPI or CPIH, which track the cost of a representative basket of goods and services. That basket includes food, transport, energy, clothing, electronics and various services. It’s designed to reflect average household spending.

That’s the key word: 'average'. Because average spending is not the same thing as unavoidable spending. The index tells us how much the typical mix of goods costs. It doesn’t tell us how much pressure households feel after paying for the things they can’t opt out of.

Housing, for example, is only partially captured in these measures. Childcare is included, but not with the weight it carries in the real world for many families. And the basket itself reflects what people spend on, not what they must spend on.

So the official question becomes: “How much has the average basket gone up?” But the household question is much simpler and much harsher: “How much do I have left after paying for the essentials?” Those two questions are not interchangeable.

This is where averages start to break down. Inflation blends everything together. If televisions, clothes and gadgets get cheaper, that pulls the overall number down. On paper, that looks like good news.

But you can’t pay your rent with a cheaper television. You can’t offset nursery fees with discounted trainers. So while the index might show moderate inflation, the actual pressure points in a household budget can still be rising sharply.

The issue isn’t that the data is wrong. It’s that it’s answering a different question to the one people are actually asking. Over the past few decades, this gap has widened because the structure of household spending has changed. In the 1970s, housing was typically a smaller share of income. Formal childcare was less common. Many households relied on one income supported by informal care or extended family.

Today, housing is often the single biggest outgoing. Childcare is a major, unavoidable expense for many families. And two incomes are no longer a lifestyle choice in many cases - they’re a requirement just to stand still.

What that creates is something you might call cost concentration. A growing share of income is absorbed by a small number of non-negotiable costs. And when those costs rise, they crowd out everything else. So even if wages increase, it doesn’t necessarily translate into a better lived experience. The extra income gets swallowed before it has a chance to improve anything.

Part of the reason for this is that not all prices behave in the same way. Some sectors become cheaper over time because they get more efficient. Manufacturing and consumer goods benefit from automation, globalisation and scale. That’s why many products today are cheaper, better, or both compared to previous decades.

But the big 'life' costs don’t follow that pattern. Housing, childcare, healthcare and education are far more resistant to productivity gains. A nursery still needs a certain number of staff per child. You can’t automate that away in any meaningful sense. Housing is constrained by land, planning and supply - and on top of that, it functions as an investment asset as well as a basic need.

So you end up with a split. The things you can delay, substitute or shop around for often get cheaper. The things you absolutely need keep getting more expensive. That’s where the disconnect really bites.

This is why two seemingly contradictory statements can both be true. On one hand, the data shows real wages rising and inflation stabilising. On the other, households feel like they have less room to breathe. The gap isn’t ideological. It’s methodological. One side is measuring averages across the economy and the other is dealing with what’s left at the end of the month.

If you want a measure that better reflects real life, you’d look at something like effective disposable income. In simple terms, that’s income minus housing, childcare and core bills. What’s left is what people actually have control over. And that’s the number that determines whether life feels easier or harder. It’s what dictates whether you can save, absorb unexpected costs, or just not worry quite so much.

Crucially, this doesn’t hit everyone equally. Homeowners (particularly those with small or no mortgages) are often more insulated. Older households may have benefited from rising asset values and lower exposure to these growing costs. People without childcare costs avoid one of the biggest financial pressures altogether.

But renters, younger households and families with children are far more exposed. They’re more dependent on earned income, more vulnerable to rising housing costs and more likely to face large, unavoidable expenses each month. So when averages are presented, it’s entirely reasonable for people to ask who those averages actually represent.

To be fair, real wage data isn’t useless. It’s standardised, comparable over time and helpful at a macro level. That’s why policymakers rely on it. It gives a clean, consistent signal about the direction of the economy. But it doesn’t capture how costs are distributed. It doesn’t distinguish between essentials and discretionary spending. And it doesn’t tell you whether a working household has anything left once the major bills are paid. So when it’s used as proof that people should feel better off, it starts to miss the point.

When politicians say to us, real wage growth has increased and expect us to agree – this is the contrition we see building between “us” the citizens and “them” the politicians. It is my belief that without education in what they are doing - playing with data and misrepresenting, they will continue to get away with it.

So when you next hear a stat from a “leader” ask yourself, do you understand that stat? - but more importantly is that stat actually measuring something that means anything meaningful to you in the real world?

Lloyd

The Finance Guy

WTF?! How much tax do we actually pay?

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:28:07 GMT

Sounds simple enough, right? Well… if it were then I would be out of a job…

If you’re as cool as me and want to experiment, go ask your friends and family -

“Hey, you there, Uncle Gaz – how much tax do you pay % wise?”

Now, if they are in that basic-rate band (below £50K or so) they will say:

“20% mate, love it, a very low and reasonable rate”

Then you ask your reasonably wealthy auntie who has two holidays a year, shops in M&S (you know the kind!)

“Hey, auntie, how much % tax do you pay?”

The reply is usually a bit more abusive and direct, a bit like a 'Donald Trump Truth' social post at 2am with lots of CAPITAL LETTERS... but it is something like this:

“Bloody 40%, can’t believe people only pay 20% - the cheek, the nerve!”

OK, so hopefully I have painted the picture of a perfectly normal chat here, and I want to address how actually these two people are completely wrong! And infact, the tax system is made like this so people continue to think this way - let’s get to it!

The numbers for Gaz

So, Gaz is on the average salary in the UK (for all you boffins out there we are using the median £38K, not the mean average (£43K) or the more realistic average of mode (£27.5K) – and the only reason is, the numbers are just not as interesting!)

So £38K.

We have the following:

Employer National Insurance Class 1 Secondary - £4,000 - 10.5% effective rate

PAYE/Income Tax - £4,286 - 11.3%

Employee National Insurance Class 1 Primary - £1,714 - 4.5%

Employee Pension - £1,150 – 3%

Employer Pension - £700 – 1.8%

Total - £11,614 tax (or 30.6%)

The numbers for M&S Auntie

So, M&S auntie (mainly because I could not think of a Woman’s name to play off my playful man’s version Gaz – I digress), she earns £100k.

So, her figures look like this:

Employer National Insurance Class 1 Secondary - £12,550 – 12.6% effective rate

PAYE/Income Tax - £22,412 – 22.4%

Employee National insurance Class 1 Primary - £3,760 – 3.8%

Employee Pension - £3,750– 3.8%

Employer Pension - £2,250 – 2.3%%

Total - £43.6k tax (or 43.6%)

Why employ ER s contributions, Lloyd? - Have you lost your number-crunching mind?

Well no, as 60% - 70% of all employees in the UK work for SMEs, and SMEs do not have the luxury of having endless amounts of cash where they can absorb the cost of employer contributions.

Followed by the fact they are unable to increase their prices easily to consumers. Amazon as an example, however, can pretty much dictate their prices. (I've got no issues with Amazon… well, I do, but that’s not the point!)

For everyone that is a little unsure here, employERs (as in the boss) also must pay taxes on employEE’s - which is actually pretty mental when you think about it. With youth unemployment rising, they jack these %s up - and then blame the younger ones and call them snowflakes. When it might, just might , have something to do with the increase in tax on employing people. But what would I know…

Why pension contributions, Lloyd?

Well since auto-enrolment, you basically don’t have a choice. You can “opt out” to only be re-enrolled back in 3 years later, and unless you really are an admin God and keep opting out on time (which if you don’t is a processing nightmare) you will forever pay your pension contributions to keep the UK’s pension Ponzi scheme alive.

I also left it in to show that after around £50K, your pension contributions for auto-enrollment actually stop and so someone on £50K or £500K pay the same pension amounts (auto-enrolment only, mind)

So, what are you getting at?

Most people actually pay 30% tax effective and everyone else pays around 40%. This whole divide of "I pay more" is actually a lot closer than it appears. Even after removing my pension and employer contributions you still get a difference of the Auntie paying 25% and Gaz paying 15% - again around 10% difference.

So, when your next looking real cool and chatting about the taxation system, give a thought that actually no matter if your paid £38K or £100K you are paying very similar amounts of tax.

What about Rupert?

Ahh yes, I forgot good old Grandad Rupert. He did quite well in his long life. He is around 70 years of age, saved up, took advantage of the growing house prices in the 90s, had a few kids, saved well in his 9-5 job at the office selling paper. He built up quite a little pot of income.

He currently has this stashed away in a Trust, ensuring that generations to come can keep this wealth without that pesky Inheritance Tax. He has even purchased a gravestone in Guernsey and Cayman just to be sure.

He puts his £5m in an offshore Trust, purchases offshore bonds that pays a minuscule 5% (£250K) of initial capital tax deferred each year. And in his retirement he went away for 5 years, claimed non-resident on his boat (he may have settled in Guernsey - you never know!) around the world and declares a huge trust dividend tax-free as he was not a tax resident in the UK.

"But what happens when he runs out of that money?" I hear you ask...

He rings the bank and loans against the trust, as a loan is not 'income'.

No income. No tax.

Lloyd

The Finance Guy

WTF?! Is Money

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:37:14 GMT

If I were to say...

“Almost all the money in the economy was created out of thin air - and that’s not a bug, it’s how the system works”

What does that make you think? Conspiracy, people pulling strings from behind the veil? Well, it’s not the conspirators, but what money actually means is a complex subject. One that I will tackle in this blog.

WTF is money?

Money is best understood as a ledger system for tracking value and not an actual thing itself. Historically, money has existed only as accounting entries before the coin was even introduced. It is similar to a darts scoreboard; is the scoreboard valuable? No, but the board tracks performance, and enables the game to function.

This is all well and good, but to fully understand money we need to go back and revisit when money was first introduced. Some theories dictate that there was a bartering system, but trading a cow for two chickens becomes difficult when you throw a 3 ^rd person into the mix. You need to value these items to make sure of a fair deal. Would you trade a shiny Charizard for a Slowpoke? If you don’t understand the items on the trade, you won’t understand the value. You need a universal language or a universal scoreboard. (FYI if you didn’t get that analogy then you were not brought up in the 90s and therefore understand the need for a universal scoreboard!)

History of money

That scoreboard back in 3000BC was the silver value. Mesopotamia used Silver as a scoreboard of value. Your cow is worth 1 piece of silver, therefore you could trade that cow with any other person, regardless of if they actually wanted the cow. Interestingly, they have found drawings which show debts recorded on clay tablets from 3000 years ago. Temples and palaces actually served as modern-day banks. Not sure if they resemble anything of the sorts these days...

It wasn’t until around 600BC that a place called Lydia (now known as Turkey) first minted coins. These coins did not start 'money', all it did was enable trust as the state stamp guaranteed weight and purity, and the coin did in fact resemble the weight of actual silver.

Governments implemented taxes to create demand for currency in that statedom. It wasn’t until 1 ^st AD the Roman Empire did something known as “currency debasement”, which means they took out the silver from the silver coin, relying solely on the convertibility of the currency by the state. This meant that now a coin is like a government-issued token saying, “We accept this back in taxes”. Handy when you need people in a state to work, why would they work? – To pay their taxes of course.

Around the 7 ^th Century, China enters the mix with paper-based currency, and around the 17 ^th Century Goldsmiths issue receipts for stored gold. Which leads nicely to the birth of banking. And here's where things really start to kick off!

When the first banks started to emerge, they realised that not everyone withdraws gold at once, so they begin lending more money than they actually had stored - known as 'Fractional Server Banking'. This in turn, kick started the financial revolution in terms of humanity growth.

A simple example is this - you deposit £1k int the bank, the bank lends out £900. The monetary system now has £1,900. So overnight wealth, and by extension, productivity, has increased by £900.

This leads to “bank runs” which decimate banks and in 1944 - the famous Bretton Woods Agreement was introduced, which pegged USD currency to gold and all other currencies pegged to the USD. But… 30 years later in 1971, Nixon changes the USD to a fiat currency – or, in basic terms, he removes the ability for USD to be converted into gold therefore unpegging it from the gold reserve. This is the final evolution of the standard money in today’s society. It is not really anything; you can’t convert it, but you can spend it with the trust that the state will accept it in taxes.

Now the history of money has been explored, let’s backtrack to the creation of money. Banks do not print money, but what they do is give out loans. When they do this, they effectively print money but in the form of a debit and credit on a electronic banking system. The nearest to this that any of us will see with significant value is mortgages. The bank creates the debt, lends us the money so we can buy our house. The bank may not “have” this money... they don’t need to.

Interestingly 95% of all money created is by bank loans. The other 5% is done via the Central Bank and (thank god!) we are not part of the Euro, we still have the ability to create GBP when we want. Post 2009, and even 2020, the Bank of England did QE (Quantitative Easing) which when explained, sounds mad! They basically print a s**t load of money and then buy their own government bonds. This injects some serious cash into the economy in the hopes of kick-starting economic growth or from 2009 and 2020 to recover from a serious free fall.

So, being a sovereign currency issuer means the 'power to create our own money'. Which leads onto the most asked question of all time - why not just print more money?!

Well, we have the power to print money, but when we do this it increases the quantity of cash in the economy, and supply and demand dictates the more money in the economy, the less demand and therefore, less valuable. That is why the UK will always meet its debt. However, the pain of meeting such debt is passed onto the people as their savings and wealth are devalued by the Government printing more and more money. Thankfully, we have not got there yet and this is why inflation target rate is 2%. Meaning we can print what we like but we aim to get inflation to a healthy 2%.

So I have touched on a few concepts about money, but another very popular question is: if every country is in debt, then who owns that debt? Well, surprisingly the answer to a degree of 80% of all worldwide debt is owned by us. Or more specifically. anyone that has a pension. If you think about it, it makes sense. Pension companies make very long commitments, they'll say "yes, pay money in and we will pay out in 50 years' time" so they need reliable investments that will hold for 50 years. In then comes the Government gilts. Basically, it's an IOU between the investor and the Government. So, pension companies naturally buy these up in droves.

Summary

So in summary, WTF?! Is money, well - it is not really a thing. It is not pegged to a physical material and most of the money in the world is actually debt and has never been printed. This has had a great impact on humanity by increasing productivity by robbing future growth and paying it out today in debt. I hear you all saying “But Lloyd, WTF?! Is Money”, the answer to your question WTF?! Is money, it is this; just a shared illusion we all agree to take very seriously.

WTF are Quangos?!

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:57:49 GMT

Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations (better known as 'Quangos') sit in an unusual position within the UK state. They operate at arm’s length from ministers, yet spend public money and exercise public authority.

Over time, they have become responsible for a wide range of functions; healthcare regulation, environmental oversight, infrastructure planning, cultural funding and more. Supporters see them as expert, stable and insulated from political turbulence. Critics view them as expensive, unaccountable and symptomatic of a state that has grown increasingly fragmented.

It is worth stepping back to examine what quangos were designed to achieve - and why, in practice, they are now attracting growing concern.

What Are Quangos?

Quangos are publicly funded organisations that carry out government functions but are not directly controlled by elected ministers. They commonly fall into one of four categories:

Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs)
Executive Agencies
Public Corporations
Advisory Bodies

Their structures vary, but they share three consistent features:

They spend taxpayers’ money
They exercise public power
They operate at arm’s length from direct democratic control

There are hundreds of these bodies across the UK. Collectively, they employ tens of thousands of people and manage budgets running into many billions of pounds.

The Intended Value of Quangos

1. Technical Expertise

One of the strongest arguments in favour of quangos is expertise. Areas such as nuclear safety, financial regulation or medicines approval require deep technical knowledge. Ministers are generalists and political office can be short-lived. Quangos, in theory, provide continuity and specialist capability.

The logic is straightforward:

Better-informed decisions
Greater long-term consistency
Institutional memory beyond electoral cycles

In principle, that makes sense.

2. Political Independence

Quangos are also designed to keep certain decisions away from day-to-day political pressure. This applies particularly to:

Safety and regulatory standards
Official statistics
Grant-making in science and the arts

The intention is to protect objectivity and maintain public confidence. Decisions should be evidence-led, not politically convenient.

3. Administrative flexibility

A further justification is operational freedom. Compared with government departments, Quangos often have:

Greater autonomy over recruitment and pay
Faster internal decision-making processes
A more focused operational remit

The expectation is that this flexibility improves delivery and reduces cost.

That is the theory.

Where the model breaks down...

Over time, however, structural weaknesses have become more visible.

The Democratic Deficit

1. Accountability in name only

Quangos exercise real authority, yet their leadership is appointed rather than elected. Board members and senior executives are typically drawn from professional, political or regulatory circles, and removal after poor performance can be difficult.

When failure occurs, responsibility becomes blurred:

Ministers point to operational independence
Quangos point to ministerial constraints

The result is a gap in accountability. Power is exercised, but democratic control is diluted. That weakens public trust.

Cost, duplication and bureaucratic expansion

2. Rarely abolished, often expanded

Quangos have a tendency to persist. Once established, they are seldom dismantled. Instead, they:

Acquire additional responsibilities
Increase staffing levels
Develop further layers of governance and compliance

Even when policy priorities shift, institutions remain in place. In many cases, functions overlap with those already performed by central departments or local authorities. Oversight structures are then required to supervise the quango itself, eroding any efficiency gains.

Senior executive pay can also exceed comparable civil service roles. When combined with administrative growth, this can make arm’s-length delivery more expensive rather than less.

Policy drift and technocratic influence

3. Influence without mandate

Although quangos are not elected, they frequently shape policy through guidance, frameworks and recommendations that ministers are reluctant to reject. Over time, this can shift practical decision-making towards technocrats rather than elected representatives. Expertise is essential, but governance without a mandate carries risk:

Risk-averse policy shaped by institutional caution
Priorities reflecting organisational incentives rather than voter concerns
Reduced clarity over who is ultimately responsible

The distinction between advising and deciding can become blurred.

Cultural concentration and institutional capture

4. A Closed Ecosystem

Senior roles across quangos, the civil service, consultancy firms and advisory networks often intersect. While experience is valuable, a relatively closed network can develop.

That can encourage:

Groupthink
Resistance to structural reform
Limited external challenge

Rather than acting as independent checks, some bodies risk becoming part of a managerial consensus that is difficult to scrutinise or change.

The wider impact on the state

Taken together, the growth of quangos contributes to:

Fragmented governance
Diffuse responsibility
Higher long-term operating costs
Reduced democratic clarity

From a business perspective, this matters. Complexity increases compliance burdens. Overlapping authorities create uncertainty. Slow, layered decision-making affects investment and planning. When accountability is unclear, reform becomes harder.

Conclusion: Reform, not removal

Quangos are not inherently problematic. In clearly defined technical roles, particularly where impartial regulation is essential, they can serve a useful purpose. The issue is scale and oversight. Without stronger democratic accountability, clearer sunset provisions and a willingness to reintegrate certain functions into directly answerable institutions, the system risks entrenching a permanent layer of governance that sits beyond effective scrutiny.

The question is not whether quangos should exist at all. It is whether the current balance serves taxpayers, businesses and voters as well as it should.

Summary and New Clients!

In principle, Quangos were created to deliver expertise and stability. In practice, their expansion has created cost, complexity and blurred accountability. Like many areas of public administration, what begins as sensible reform can become structural overgrowth if not regularly reviewed.

For business owners, understanding how these bodies operate - and how regulation is formed - is increasingly important. Governance structures affect compliance costs, funding decisions and long-term planning.

If you would like support navigating regulatory change, improving financial resilience, or simply gaining clearer oversight of your own business structure, we are always happy to help.

Lloyd

The Finance Guy

A new year, a new beginning... maybe?

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:23:00 GMT

A new year always feels like a reset button. Clean slate. Fresh start. New momentum.

And yet, if you look at the latest monthly economic figures, they don’t exactly scream boom time. But equally, they don’t back up the loudest doom-mongers shouting 'recession' from the rooftops.

So where are we?

Somewhere in the middle. Not doom. Not boom.

But vibes matter, probably more than we like to admit. And there is one chart doing the rounds in government circles that explains a lot about where the UK economy is heading… and arguably where UK politics is heading, too. The chart in question tracks consumer confidence.

These surveys are effectively the UK lying back on an economic psychiatrist’s couch and answering questions like:

How do you feel about the economy?
How are your personal finances?
Are you likely to buy something big?

The most widely used measure is the GfK Consumer Confidence Barometer, which has been running for decades. It’s not perfect, but it’s consistent, optimism minus pessimism gives you a net confidence score.

What’s interesting, and genuinely quite striking, is when you split consumer confidence by age group.

For decades, the pattern was simple:

Younger people are more optimistic
That optimism fades with age
Everyone broadly reacts the same way to big events

Brexit? Everyone dips. Pandemic? Everyone dips harder.

Ukraine war and energy prices? Another sharp drop across the board.

Even the Liz Truss mini-budget in 2022 shows up very clearly. Confidence collapsing across all age groups. A brutal 45 days.

And up until late 2024, all age groups move together.

Then something changes. From late 2024 onwards, confidence diverges sharply.

Under-50s start to feel more positive
Under-30s soar to confidence levels not seen since before Brexit

But look at the other side:

Over-50s confidence drops hard
Over-60s slide back toward Truss-era lows

So what on earth is going on?

One possible explanation (and this is where it gets uncomfortable) is that the usual relationship has flipped.

Historically, how you felt about your finances influenced how you voted. Now, how you voted influences how you feel about the economy.

That divergence happened around the 2024 General Election.

Younger voters, broadly more liberal and more likely to have voted for the current government suddenly feel more optimistic. After years of Brexit, Covid, energy shocks and political chaos, they feel relief. Maybe even hope.

Older voters, many of whom backed Conservatives or Reform, feel the opposite. For them, the country feels like it’s fooked, Confidence collapses, even if the numbers don’t fully justify it.

Correlation isn’t causation… but it’s hard to ignore.

Another factor? Social media - my favourite topic. Algorithms love outrage. Doom sells better than stability.

If your feed is constantly telling you the UK is finished, broken, unrecognisable — eventually that seeps into how you feel about your finances, regardless of reality.

There’s evidence of this elsewhere too.

In the US, during the switch from Trump to Biden:

Democrat voters’ economic confidence surged
Republican voters’ confidence collapsed

Same economy. Different politics. The Biden team even coined a term for it: “the Vibecession” ('bad vibes, decent data').

There’s also a very real economic reason for the age split. This rebound in younger confidence lines up with when the Bank of England started cutting interest rates.

Rate cuts: Help first-time buyers, Help jobseekers, Help people with big mortgages, But they hurt savers.

And who holds most of the savings? Older generations. That might explain another oddity in the data…

The UK savings rate is still unusually high, almost pandemic-like.

That drags on GDP, even though, Wages are rising, Inflation is falling, employment remains strong. In simple terms: the people with the money aren’t confident enough to part with it.

Businesses don’t look as gloomy. Interestingly, this confidence split shows up in company results too.

Despite plenty of noise about tax rises and National Insurance:, Many retailers are trading well, Sales and profits are holding up, Pub groups are a good example:

Mitchells & Butlers saw like-for-like growth of 7.7% over Christmas
Fullers reported an “outstanding” festive period, up 8% on last year

Hardly the apocalypse. Yes, prices are still high. But inflation is coming back toward 2%.

Regulated price rises are being restrained. Rate cuts are filtering through slowly.

And a mortgage price war may not be far off.

So… doom or opportunity?

The government will be desperate to draw a line under recent chaos and push the narrative toward: investment, infrastructure, stability.

Heathrow expansion. Northern rail projects. Long-term planning (finally).

On paper, there’s a platform to defy the doom.

The real question is this: If economic confidence has become politically charged, driven more by how people feel than by what the numbers say, does that become a brake on recovery?

Because confidence, like spending, is contagious. And right now, Britain is split.

Lots to digest.

As ever, if you want to talk through what this actually means for you or your business, give me a call.

Lloyd

The Finance Guy

Budget 2025

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 11:05:53 GMT

Here we go... the highlight of my year squeezed into a 6:30am eastern time wakeup, Starbucks coffee from the capitalism capital that is America. I did the only thing one would choose to do. Login to BBC player, stream live the budget sit back and take it all in - here’s how it went.

(Please note these are my own interpretations of the UK budget 2025 as seen on TV and should not be acted on without discussing first with Hatch Accountancy)

The beginning

Racheal Reeves, the juggernaut of the current government, the thing 2 to thing 1 that is Starmer. She played the same tactics that Trump does. It is either Joe Biden or Chinas fault; Racheal does the same by blaming Tories or the EU. Good to feel that politics is the same wherever you are. Blame the predecessor or something that was out of your control.

As she goes into the discussions of what she has done, something struck me as odd - let's see if anyone can spot it, remember these are the things she is super happy to have achieved to date - she says:

Reformed the planning system
New Trade deals with America
Change of VISA system
Overhauled the fiscal rules
Stability on public finances

Now, I do follow UK politics and economic policy extremely closely, as it is a passion of mine but also involved my job, and potentially then this is super obvious to me and maybe not others so let me just breakdown what her opening speech really says:

Reformed the planning system - Not been actioned or changed but may do in the future. This could help building, but probably not as people will still hold onto land to grow the value and not build out the houses.

New Trade deals with America - USA put a tariff on us, don't worry guys we got it down to 10%. So, it’s basically a win, and I will call it a trade deal - when it is not.

Change of VISA system - Pretty sure Borris Johnson overhauled the system, but we will tweak it and call it a really big change

Overhauled the fiscal rules - Rishi Sunak was the one to put into place the guardrails and today’s incarnation is a take on his fiscal rules

Stability on public finances - the house of commons laughed when she said this, that is all you need to know.

The same convoluted truth hidden in lies, but somewhere there might be truth in their lies.

As every year, they breakdown the GDP to debt ratio. This year, they decided to use the PSNFL, a new way of looking at public debt to ratio. The benefit of this... it's not near 100%, it’s nearer to 84%. So basically, that’s our new %. There was a lot of chiming about how the debt is reducing. By 2% in 5 years. Bringing it down to 82% by 2030 from 84%. I am just thrilled by this news, but then she must ruin it and speak

“There will be a surplus in 2030”

No, no there will not. There has not been a surplus since 2000-2001. And whatever your fancy excel spreadsheet says, I as an economist/accountant/excel expert can tell you, in 2030 we will not have a surplus unless you redistribute. Which there is no policy of that.

She continued to talk up Entrepreneurs, the bank bone of the economy – spoiler alert, she does not really do much to help them. So more of a “thank you” at the beginning of the budget. Aww that’s nice.

And then the numbers. A staggering 1.5% growth on average each year over this parliament. Okay that’s good, positive. Let’s just do the simple math here.

Base rate – What we pay interest on, around 4%. So if growth + inflation is above the base rate all good. Inflation is 2% + 1.5% gets to 3.5%. Emm Oh. That’s fine, surely the ex-chequer for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northan Ireland can spot this mathematical issue and put our minds at ease.

Nothing.

So, we are effectively losing 0.5% in cash terms. I would only imagine that the plan here is to wait, get base rate down to 2% and keep growth up. Else interest payments will be higher than growth and that actual growth won’t be growth. So currently we are in a declining economy, but don’t worry Racheal knows how to talk this up, so smoke and mirrors will win over the financial markets. She adopted the age-old trick of “oops” the report was leaked 20 mins before my speech! I’m shocked. Markets are happy – yes? – Okay, will read Speech 1 not speech 2, let’s ask for an investigation so to point the blame away from us.

The BIG changes

So rather than chronological order, Rachel this year made my note taking job a litter harder. So, I will breakdown the big changes which actually matter , the headliners:

Tax Threshold Freeze to 2031. Okay, so hopefully by now most people get fiscal drag, but if not. Then basically locking in the thresholds you pay certain taxes, means over time more people pay more taxes as wages increase but thresholds stay the same. For every year, 1% of GDP is saved or around £30bn. Yes £30 BILLION. You will see later on (in the section - not so big) that they talk up big investment, but it is like £100 million. So where is all these savings going freezing threshold to 2031 that’s like 6 years of £30bn – it’s paying debt.

Salary Sacrifice will be capped at £2k per employee. This is to stop people from avoiding their Employers national insurance. When they put it up last year, they did not foresee a huge explosion of salary sacrifice. But if you ask them, its to level the playing field. Which is odd, because I thought they wanted pension contributions?

EVs taxed per mileage at around 3p per mile. So for 10,000 miles you will pay around £300. This would be seen as fair to most people, but maybe ill-timed when they are trying to phase out petrol. Presumably they wanted to wait but had no choice but to bring in sooner for the cash.

Two Child Benefit cap has been removed and the rape clause. I won’t go into these too much, but suffice to say they are sensible and logical steps to take. Given that 440k children from this move will be pulled from poverty. The only policy I would agree with in this entire budget.

2% increase in dividend tax , minor but will impact most of my clients.

Triple lock has remained. I will keep writing this, as it is my belief that a government not too soon in the future will be left with that hot potato and will need to reform the triple lock. Who will it be? If you don’t know the triple lock is the state pension increase. They get much higher increase than minimum wage historically and so some economists and bloggers – such as myself – would argue that the money is being taken from the younger generation and given to the older – who no longer work but have worked. It’s a impossible philosophical question I will not be answering today – mainly because I cannot.

Remote gambling tax % have increased hugely, 21% to 40%. But in house gambling has remained the same – presumably as they are the last things on the Highstreet. That and the odd tanning shop.

Alcohol, vaping and nicotine all increased as well. All of which is good, but by taxing the very thing you wish to eliminate, buts the government at odds, presumably they don’t want everyone to stop gambling or smoking, else where would they get the tax money from? Also, it disproportionately affects lower earning individuals as the £5 they might gamble as a % of earnings is far more than a higher worth individual. So, one could argue a further taxes on the working people. But that would be against their policies, no?

The small things - but given a lot of attention!

So pretty standard tactic here, talk up the small things like they are big deals.

Let’s take the one closest to my heart - the wealth tax. Did they take high net worth individuals an asset tax? – No. Is the tax of any significant value. No. Right…

So homes over £2.5m and £5m will pay £2.5k and £7.5k increase in council tax. How much is this worth to the UK finances. £5 million. Yup. Great work guys. I could get more by asking for donations on KickerStarter.

Landlord National insurance increase. This is under small things as most landlords have their property in limited companies to avoid the future messing of the government and therefore, they won’t be affected. But if you own your rentals personally, this will increase your burden by 2% and probably lead to you selling your assets.

Motability came under fire, BMWs and Mercedes are premium cars and not allowed under the disability moto rules. Personally, I don’t think people with disabilities are that bothered about the type of car, more the modifications so they can use the car. Seems a very odd thing for labour to make a big deal. It is probably to talk to the right wing politics of what they are doing to “appease” the benefit scroungers – which these people are not. They just want a modified car to travel with to increase social mobility. Being disabled they cannot afford the modified car and ask the government for help. I don’t think they ask for a C63 Mercedes with room for a wheelchair.

Under 25s will have apprenticeships for free! – This is minor, because there are various incarnations of this policy around the UK depending on what sector. So this really will not have a huge impact on small business owners too much but could be a little win for us.

Face to face disability assessments being rolled back, again making a big deal about this, but honestly it was temporary from Covid. They are “looking into” youth inactivity. Great I will wait for that report in 2030 - add to my calendar now.

The government will also “guarantee” yes guarantee that youths will have either school, college or work. Odd thing to say when it is illegal for under 18s to not be doing one of those. So, the government is promising to uphold its own laws? Interesting.

£80m to improve all playgrounds - see what I mean, £80m won’t go far and they have saved £30 BILLION from the freezes. Good idea, probs needs more cash though.

Inheritance tax exemption for blood scandal payments. Which if they paid out in good time would not be a requirement, but as they are taking so long. Inheritance tax is now being asked about the payments, as some people have died before receiving the compensation. Probably be the same for the post office In a few years.

£20k Cash allowance being reduced to £12k and £8k being investments. The government wants everyone to risk their own money on the economy rather than a risk-free bank account - seems a bit off coming from a labour government. This has 'Tory policy' written all over it.

What they should have done

People always ask me, "so Lloyd - you write these blogs and tell us the government is making the wrong move, what is it that you would do?" Pretty simple, fix inequality like the Nordic states have done. Adequately fund public services so tax payers don’t mind paying the tax.

Policies like, simplification of income tax and national insurance. Merging capital gains within income rates. Introducing wealth tax for £20m or more.

Carbon tax to make imports and exports equal playing field. Government should procure everything from itself does not outsource to cheaper labour economies.

The list goes on, one day I will write a book and send a copy to the ex-chequer. Easier said than done though, right?

Summary

And that’s it. Another budget gone by. In all honestly, it’s not that bad. It’s standard tweaks. The biggest thing is the huge increase in taxes via the fiscal drag going into 6 years in the future. That’s unheard of. Most people reading this blog will be paying 40% in 6 years just through the time value of money and inflationary effects.

The money being saved is going towards the increase in public sector pay and investment – which is needed, and loan interest on loans we took out at ultra low rates and are now 4%.

Hopefully an exchequer will be bolder and brighter in the future to really tackle the issues at hand, rising inequality, hoarding and transfer of assets outside of the country, selling off of government assets and the decline of middle class wealth. But that hope is on another day now.

All the best.

Lloyd

The Finance Guy

Hatch Blog

Neoliberalism: the bargain Britain made - and the bill we’re still paying

There is a fairly good chance you have heard the word neoliberalism used as an insult. It normally appears in political arguments as shorthand for everything someone thinks has gone wrong with capitalism over the last forty years.

Why Britain changed direction

The short-term gains

When Britain started to falter

When wealth starts replacing work

What do we mean by ultra-wealthy?

Why concentration matters

Productive capitalism and rentier capitalism

Then inheritance arrives

Inequality is not automatically the problem

Where Britain may really have gone wrong

The mathematics of £20 million

Why this becomes a societal problem

So did neoliberalism fail?

The real argument Britain needs to have

WTF?! ...Is inequality?

Over the past few months, I have been looking more closely at inequality. ﻿

So, WTF is inequality?!

Income is a tap. Wealth is a reservoir

Britain is unequal, and the numbers probably understate it.

The great compounding machine

Then asset prices join the party

Why is inequality actually bad?

It damages genuine opportunity

It turns economic power into political power

It can weaken the economy

It corrodes trust

So what would a wealth tax actually do?

What would count as wealth?

How much would it raise?

But won’t all the wealthy people leave?

Design the tax properly and the leaving threat becomes weaker

Why are some billionaires supporting the far right?

Wealth taxes are becoming popular

Isn’t this punishing success?

A wealth tax is not the whole answer

The actual WTF

The Government just accidentally made the best argument against high taxes

The Government has announced its new "Great British Summer Savings" scheme. The basic idea is that certain family activities over the summer holidays will attract a reduced rate of VAT, making days out cheaper... encouraging people to spend more money.

The illusion of rising living standards: Real wages vs real life

Politicians love a clean number. “Real wages are rising.” It sounds reassuring. It sounds like progress. It sounds like people should feel a bit better off than they did a few years ago.

WTF?! How much tax do we actually pay?

Sounds simple enough, right? Well… if it were then I would be out of a job…

The numbers for Gaz

The numbers for M&S Auntie

Why employ ER s contributions, Lloyd? - Have you lost your number-crunching mind?

Why pension contributions, Lloyd?

So, what are you getting at?

What about Rupert?

WTF?! Is Money

If I were to say...

WTF is money?

History of money

Summary

WTF are Quangos?!

Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations (better known as 'Quangos') sit in an unusual position within the UK state. They operate at arm’s length from ministers, yet spend public money and exercise public authority.

What Are Quangos?

The Intended Value of Quangos

1. Technical Expertise

2. Political Independence

3. Administrative flexibility

Where the model breaks down...

The Democratic Deficit

1. Accountability in name only

Cost, duplication and bureaucratic expansion

2. Rarely abolished, often expanded

Policy drift and technocratic influence

3. Influence without mandate

Cultural concentration and institutional capture

4. A Closed Ecosystem

The wider impact on the state

Conclusion: Reform, not removal

Summary and New Clients!

A new year, a new beginning... maybe?

A new year always feels like a reset button. Clean slate. Fresh start. New momentum.

So where are we?

So what on earth is going on?

So… doom or opportunity?

Over the past few months, I have been looking more closely at inequality.