Writing

A Chancellor under Andy Burnham would need to reassure gilt markets while funding an ambitious agenda. What bond investors watch for, and how the choice shapes borrowing costs.

The UK does not invest less than its peers; it gets far less for what it spends. Cutting a 65% infrastructure cost premium through planning reform and stronger state capacity would deliver European levels of investment without spending more.

Britain's climate accounting counts only emissions produced on British soil. That pushes production to dirtier grids abroad, raising global emissions while scoring the loss as a domestic win.

Falling entry-level hiring is read as early evidence of AI displacement. The post-pandemic shift to remote work fits the pattern better than the capability frontier does.

Superhuman AI doesn't automatically replace workers. Firms exist because markets can't solve coordination, incomplete contracts, and tacit knowledge, and those frictions don't dissolve at the speed of a model release.

What AI learns first matters more than what it ultimately can do. The shape of the capability curve, and the tacit knowledge it keeps failing to grok, is the binding economic constraint, not the frontier.

For the first time in a generation, UK youth unemployment is above the EU average. The culprit isn't AI or mental health; it's the rising cost of employing young workers.

Three years after ChatGPT, employment in the UK's most AI-exposed occupations has grown, not shrunk. Adoption is narrow, concentrated in a fifth of tasks, and dominantly augments rather than replaces.

The Carbon Price Support was built to kill coal. Coal is dead, but the tax lives on, padding electricity bills and penalising the switch to heat pumps and EVs.

Youth unemployment is rising sharply, but AI isn't the cause. Minimum wage hikes and employer taxes have made young workers too expensive to hire.

Reviving Help to Buy would inflate prices and enrich developers. In a supply-constrained market, demand subsidies are a transfer to landowners, not first-time buyers.

Britain's migration system has lost public consent and weakened the public finances. A contributory framework would tie settlement to demonstrated lifetime fiscal contribution.

Students take on lifelong debt without course-specific earnings data. Universities should be required to publish what their graduates actually earn, by course, before students sign up.

The UK faces a £20bn fiscal hole. Fourteen growth-oriented reforms can close half of it without raising headline taxes or breaking manifesto commitments.

Stamp duty taxes mobility and aspiration. Letting buyers opt into an annual property tax instead unlocks the housing market without breaching the Government's fiscal rules.

An exit tax punishes scale-ups for succeeding, drives founders abroad, and raises almost nothing. The wrong solution to the wrong problem.

The Government no longer trusts the basic economic data its policies depend on. Fixing it means reforming both ONS data sharing and the institution itself.

We asked 100+ economists and policy experts which growth reforms the Government should prioritise. The answers cluster narrowly: housing, energy, planning.

Ten low-political-cost reforms, from closing niche tax reliefs to tackling evasion, would raise £4.21bn a year. None require breaking a manifesto pledge.

Britain bans the text-and-data mining every frontier lab abroad relies on. A licensing regime won't enrich British creators, whose earnings were falling long before AI, but it will keep the UK out of training any model that matters.

An interactive toolkit for policymakers designing UK innovation policy: cost-benefit calculators, programme comparators, and case studies of what works abroad.

Government can shape markets without owning them by designing the rules of the game. Mechanism design turns competing interests into collectively useful outcomes, and Britain barely uses it.

Britain can't build, and Heathrow is the test case. The Government has a menu of legislative shortcuts to deliver the third runway in one Parliament rather than three.

Forcing pension funds and ISAs to buy British won't fix capital markets. The shortage of investable UK companies is a symptom of a high-cost business environment; mandates don't change that.

Inflation hurts ordinary households more than the headline rate suggests, because the squeeze sits in housing and energy. The fix is supply, not demand suppression.