Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street on 20 July promising to rewire the state. Six weeks later, at his first Prime Minister's Questions, he described what he now leads as "a government grounded in fiscal responsibility".¹ 

Politicians of all parties have spent decades telling the British public that the national debt is a burden on future generations, a reckless legacy we are imposing on our children and grandchildren. ...

Why the world’s largest and most important market is not safe for widows and orphans The claim that markets are the best and most trustworthy way to allocate resources rests […]

Much of the conventional economic wisdom prevailing in financial circles, largely subscribed to as a basis for governmental policy, and widely accepted by the media and the public, is based on incom- ...

What Trump's administration is doing to dismantle US democracy could happen here. We must future-proof our constitution to prevent that. I've just asked my MP to attend a parliamentary briefing on wh...

We run three bodies to count the money and none to assess whether the economy can do the work.

Mutual misunderstanding and panicky commentary mask a joint desire to see the UK economy doing better

On central bankers, bond markets and the heated and irrational campaign to block the election of a progressive politician

Mohamed Mansour, born in Egypt, gave more than £5 million to the Conservative Party in 2023.¹ Gary Lubner, born in South Africa, gave Labour and the Co-operative Party more than £6.6 million across th...

The Labour government that entered office in July 2024 with a majority of 172 seats is, less than two years later, facing a leadership crisis without modern precedent. Over one hundred Labour MPs have...

For a brief period after the financial crisis of 2008, the question of whether mainstream economics had failed was openly asked, including by economists themselves. Ronald Coase, a Nobel laureate, wro...

Some reforms take years to deliver. These policies could be deployed almost immediately.

On Saturday, Rachel Reeves announced seven new towns and blamed three decades of housing unaffordability on the planning system. "For decades," she said, "this country's planning system has been a direct obstacle to building new homes, ramping up costs and pricing young people out of the housing market." Planning reform, she promised, would fix it.

The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC) published a report last month advising EU officials to prepare for a world 2.8 to 3.3°C hotter than preindustrial levels by 2100. ...

It seems that whenever a government announces that they have run a deficit over a given financial period, media commentators and opposition politicians react with the same tired metaphors. We are "maxing out the national credit card." We are "burdening our grandchildren." We are "living beyond our means." What almost nobody mentions is the other side of the ledger.

Last week I gave a talk on public finance, and during the Q&A at the end, a physicist in the audience who is working on fusion research said something along the lines of “I still find our monetary sy...

The Treasury tells us there is no money. The Bank of England tells us it operates independently. The OBR tells us the deficit must be closed. They have been projecting these shadows on the wall for so...

Modern Monetary Theory isn’t a potentially risky radical fiscal plan but simply a description of how the British state already spends