The recent mainstreaming of wealth taxes as a political tendency in the UK has demonstrated an appetite for solutions to inequality. Although there have been successful debates, won with logic as much as rhetoric, a tangible wealth tax policy is still in its infancy.  The Green Party, the main policy vehicle for the Wealth Tax, is seeking between 1% and 2%  of tax on assets held over £10 million per annum. Yet who exactly pays, and how they pay, remain unanswered questions. W

September of last year marked Zack Polanski’s irruption into the highest echelon of British politics. The Green’s new leader, imbued with the gifts of personality, pitch and popularity, bestowed upon the party an attribute they had yet to enjoy – a brand. Polanski has swiftly turned himself into the Greens’ main asset; sharper than his predecessors, more media-savvy, more combative and far less embarrassed by the prospect of harnessing populism for his party’s good. Polanski,

Every Thursday, I embark on a cross-London journey from South West to North West London, for a jazz choir that I love being a part of. All members are older than me, with the second youngest member of the group being our thirty-something Musical Director, a music teacher at a special needs primary school.  Being the choir baby has its perks, but London’s youth at large are restless. We make up 53% of London, but London doesn’t work for us . Radical political change is unavoid

In recent weeks, eyes and ears have been focusing on the Middle East. Starmer’s hesitancy to go in behind the Americans and Israelis with all guns blazing has gone down well with the public, and his opposition to the right of him have taken a real misstep.  It is a safe bet to assume that he will see a small rise in his favourability ratings in the coming weeks. However, Starmer would be foolish to think that this uptick will steady the ship. Whilst this has all been going on

“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” These were the words of Donald Trump, the self-described “President of Peace”, as he railed against America’s interventions in foreign lands  instead of “fixing the roads in this country…fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals.” America First! He promised his voters, vowing to improve the lives of ordinary Americans above all else. And yet, barely a year into his second presidency, a combination of T

Politics have become quite boring today. This is not to say that the news is uneventful  – five minutes of doomscrolling will quickly put paid to that idea. And the humanitarian cost of it all is mounting rapidly in a crescendo that should alarm us all. But for the most part the politics  in the West today continues to conform to a number of routines and rituals that contain little new within them; they are ripples from stones already dropped into the pond. We can see this in

Trigger Warning - mention of suicide & violence & sickening greed / minor spoiler alert “You know what it is,” says Ash. “It’s the free jazz. If that gets out…” In the concluding episode of Joseph Bullman's new docuseries Dirty Business , Ash speaks in hushed tones with James about the burglary of his home. In the midst of his disquieting investigation into Thames Water's conduct in the River Windrush, his lighthearted jest feels misplaced. It calls back to one of the opening

Student loans are in the news again. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to freeze the repayment threshold of Plan 2 student loans for 3 years after April 2027 has caused an uproar  among students who will now face higher repayment costs. This only adds insult to injury for those who borrowed from the government’s Student Loans Company between 2012 and 2023. As it stands, the vast majority of students will already be unable to pay back their Plan 2 student loan before the 40-y

In 2016, Lord Heseltine spent several months in the Tees Valley area, producing an extensive 91 page report titled ‘ Tees Valley: Opportunity Unlimited ’. He concluded, despite the fact that “Four miles of the south bank of the Tees is a scene of desolation, a memory of industrial activity now gone...” that the “Tees Valley has an exciting future.” A decade on from this report, how are things looking for the region? In 2024 Lord Houchen was voted in as Mayor of the Tees Valle

Across Europe, a striking consensus has taken hold. Quiz a passerby on the streets of Paris, Berlin or London on the state of society and you are likely to hear all too familiar lamentations concerning the declining state of both government performance and social cohesion. The cost of living continues to rise whilst wages stagnate and public services buckle, politics is brittle and the future looks more precarious than the past. This transnational belief , one which has been

If we were to ask whether the UK Wealth Tax Movement was successful last year, an instructive litmus test might be the frequency with which the topic appeared in BBC headlines. This is undoubtedly a major feat, but only half the battle.  Commentators everywhere, like coiled springs , raised their concerns about how effective and feasible the tax would be, rattling off the list of unintended consequences. The media asserted – the Wealth Tax cannot be introduced until all conce

From the federal United States to the hyper-centralised UK, and even in the tightly state-directed system of China, local government is increasingly constrained and hollowed out. The slow-building emergency in government debt is not only on a national level but on a local level too. Across advanced and emerging economics, local governments have taken on growing responsibilities without the fiscal tools to fund them, undermining service provision and political trust without tr

Donald Trump’s unprecedented attack on the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, has been met with an equally unprecedented defence composed of Ex-Fed chairs, central bank governors, and titans  of global finance. Central to this alliance’s criticism of Trump is an ominous warning of disaster to come should the Fed’s independence be violated. For example, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde emphasised the role central bank independence played as a “corner

On December 9 th  an inconspicuous press release  by Huntington Ingalls Industries   (HII) and Babcock International quietly announced a huge shift in US defence procurement. For the first time the US nuclear submarine program will manufacture significant components outside the states. The announcement confirmed that complex hull assemblies for the new US navy’s (USN) Virginia block VI nuclear submarines  will be produced in Babcock’s Rosyth dock in Scotland.  For defence obs

From a distance it is hard to see why Vladimir Putin did not accept December’s peace plan for the Ukraine war, to prevent it entering its fourth year. The deal would have forced Ukraine to secede far more territory to Russia than the actual inroads made. Ukraine would have to hold elections, be forbidden from joining NATO, and reduce the size of its army. These were all crucial war aims for Russia before the beginning of the ‘special military operation,’ so it is mystifying

Economic woes, largely originating in our productivity problem , underscore much British political discourse today. The productivity problem  boils down to the notion that the amount of additional value generated per average UK work hour underwhelms compared to our economic peers  and superiors, like France, Germany, the USA , and perhaps soon Poland .  The UK has recently seen record work absence  due to sickness , is consistently low on comparative worker engagement  scores

Ahead of the 2026 Scottish Parliamentary elections, Frederick Graham examines eighteen years of Scottish Nationalist rule and the state of Scottish politics.  In Westminster and Europe, recent election cycles have revealed an increasingly consistent pattern: governing parties have become exposed to sharp electoral punishment. This trend has cut across ideologies. After four years the centre-left “traffic-light” German coalition was decisively punished at the ballot box. Acros

In his Debt: The First 5000 Years , anthropologist David Graeber provides a series of insights that, when properly understood, challenge the central tenets of conventional economic thought. Most significantly, Graeber’s claim that all money is debt, and by extension a social relation, fundamentally undermines decades of economic orthodoxy which claims that the government must balance its books and, more generally, that ‘one must pay one’s debts’ . Indeed, if all money is debt

To Have or To Be?  turns fifty in a few days. Written by Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist, it analysed the corrosivity of ‘late capitalism’, an epoch most obviously characterised by consumerism. Consumerism comes with constituent attitudes. It encourages us, for instance, to value assets based on their saleability. Entrenched in our consciousness, via the unconscious, Fromm argued that many of these attitudes altered our understanding of ourselves, our contemporaries

Like Barbie, Trump has a great day every day. And who wouldn’t?! Waking up in his golden Dreamhouse (ballrooms sold separately), Trump gets to decide his truth, the truth, on any given matter at any given time! In Trump Land anything can happen!  The latest from Trump Land is that the American economy has never ever been better! Kicking off the battle for the 2026 midterm elections at a rally in north-east Pennsylvania – his first in five months – Trump united the crowd behin