Guest Opinions.
Independent commentary on UK policy and public finance, contributed by guest authors. Editorially curated. Views are the author’s own.
GBTT publishes guest opinion to widen the debate around tax, spending, housing, welfare and public finance. Authors are selected on the basis of expertise and the quality of argument rather than alignment with the GBTT editorial line. Where a guest piece diverges from GBTT’s own published position, the piece carries an editorial note to that effect. Every figure cited is sourced and every claim is referenced.
Published files
15 pieces · newest firstThe Oldest Mistake in Economics
From Ancient Egypt and Diocletian’s Rome to the Reign of Terror, rulers have tried to fix prices to protect the public — and made things worse every time. Ben Ramanauskas argues that prices are signals, not targets: cap them, freeze them or shame them and shortages follow, as the energy price cap and the CMA’s pandemic ‘profiteering’ warnings both showed. With Andy Burnham’s new government reaching for the same lever, the case is for supply-side reform — planning, energy and tax — over meddling with the visible price.
The Boriswave Settlement Time Bomb
Reports suggest the Home Office may water down its plan to make migrants wait longer for Indefinite Leave to Remain. With up to 2.2 million people from the post-2021 ‘Boriswave’ approaching the five-year settlement mark — and one cohort alone estimated by Reform UK at a £622 billion lifetime net-fiscal cost — this is exactly the wrong moment to blink.
Stamp Duty: Britain’s Most Damaging Tax
Economists judge a tax by the damage it does for every pound it raises — and by that test Stamp Duty Land Tax is the worst on the books. It is a one-off toll charged the moment a family tries to move: a two-point rise in the rate cuts a household’s annual chance of moving by up to a third. It traps empty-nesters in houses they can’t leave and young families in flats they’ve outgrown, thins out the market, and raises comparatively little. Ben Ramanauskas argues the next Chancellor should scrap SDLT immediately — a rare reform backed from the Adam Smith Institute to the IPPR.
The Wrong Way to Rescue British Steel
The Government has restricted steel imports and placed British Steel under extraordinary state direction while leaving it Chinese-owned — at a cost the NAO warns could exceed £1.5bn by 2028. It is the wrong rescue. Ben Ramanauskas sets out three things ministers should do instead: deploy targeted trade remedies aimed at China rather than blunt tariffs, work through the OECD to coordinate pressure with the EU and US, and fix the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world — the one lever wholly within Britain’s control.
The OBR Has Run the Numbers on Britain’s Borrowing. It Is Terrifying.
The OBR’s Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report 2026 has only risks and no sustainability. Health spending is projected to rise from 8% to 13% of GDP by 2075-76, the State Pension from 5% to around 9%, and debt moves onto an unsustainable path — above 600% of GDP in adverse scenarios and approaching 1,000% in the most extreme. Debt interest already costs £110bn a year, the third-largest area of public spending. The case for means-testing the State Pension, abolishing the Triple Lock and chasing productivity — not kicking the can.
The Standard That Invented a Crisis
There are 1.34 million households on the social housing waiting list — the number behind Labour’s 1.5 million homes target and an entire sector’s case for expansion. But 52% of those households hold no priority status at all, and the largest priority category rests on a decency standard so wide it would find category 1 hazards in Buckingham Palace. Strip out the incentive-driven registrations and the definitional inflation, and the verified floor of acute need is 130,000–338,000 households. Nobody in the sector is incentivised to look.
Don’t Tax People for Leaving Britain. Give Them a Reason to Stay
Team Burnham is rumoured to want a UK exit tax — a levy on unrealised gains triggered the moment a resident leaves. It is bad economics dressed as fairness. It asks people to pay cash today on gains they have not banked, turns mobility into a one-way ratchet, and warns off the very talent Britain needs to attract. Norway tightened its regime in 2022 and again in 2024 to a 37.8% effective rate — and 261 wealthy residents left in 2022, 254 in 2023, many for Switzerland. The honest answer is not a tollbooth at the border. It is to make Britain worth staying for.
The EU Scale Up Fund Is No Cure for Britain’s Growth Malaise
Ministers are building the case for Britain to pay into the EU’s €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund — €1bn of public money via Horizon Europe, €4bn private, managed by EQT. But Britain opted out of the EU’s direct equity instruments when it rejoined the €95.5bn Horizon programme, so reversing that would likely need a treaty change: years of bargaining for a modest stake in a fund whose pipeline British firms are barred from joining. The Commission is a founding investor and will not be a passive one. Britain’s answer is to back its own companies and capital markets.
Theatre and Tyranny
Brussels and Westminster are assembling the architecture of total control: message scanning, digital identity, an age check at every door. Age verification, digital ID, facial age estimation and on-device message scanning are one canvas, not four stories. For now the only thing slowing it down is that the people building it cannot agree with one another — the Online Safety Act VPN amendment stuck in Lords-Commons ping-pong, BritCard’s mandatory element collapsed under a 2.9m-signature petition, and Chat Control’s fifth and final round on 29 June still short of a qualified majority. Relying on your captor’s incompetence is not a strategy; the answer is to build a parallel that needs no switch.
The Price of Playing It Safe
Britain has confused civilisation with insulation. We ask the state to protect us from hurtful words, financial losses, imperfect health choices and the normal frictions of life — and accept higher taxes, weaker growth, slower infrastructure and deeper dependence in return. We are not eliminating risk; we are nationalising it. From Hinkley Point C’s £700m “fish disco” to welfare heading for £407bn and debt at 95.1% of GDP, a society that cannot tolerate danger has not made itself safe — only poorer, more timid and more dependent. Risk is the price of agency.
Europe: The Price of Rejoining by Stealth
Labour’s UK-EU reset is sold as pragmatism — a technical tidy-up on carbon markets, food standards and student mobility. Taken together it amounts to a gradual reabsorption into Europe’s regulatory orbit. Linking the UK and EU carbon markets has already added an estimated £5bn in cost to avoid CBAM frictions worth around £800m: billions imposed to avoid millions. And it is happening just as the Draghi report admits the European economic model is running out of road.
Echoes of Antiquity I: Iron and Rust
Rome debased the denarius to fund pay and bonuses for its soldiers — enriching its political base and scorning all others — until the currency lost c.98% of its value over a century. Diocletian blamed greedy profiteers and capped prices; the caps failed within years. It is the ancestor of debt monetization and financial repression. Sterling has lost over 97% of its value since 1945. Inflation is the most pernicious tax of all, and it is always a choice.
Picking Losers
The Business Secretary wants the state to take equity stakes in Britain’s fastest-growing technology firms. Both economic theory and Britain’s own industrial history show what happens when ministers set out to pick winners. From the National Coal Board to British Leyland to ICL, the state has an uncanny record of picking losers. The way to help the tech sector is supply-side reform — not state equity.
The Schoolroom and the Guillotine
Britain runs a single education market. A state monopolist supplies 93% of it, allocates pupils by postcode, suppresses prices, and calls the residue “free”. The fee-paying sector is not the cause of the maintained sector’s failures — it is the predictable response of any market in which the dominant supplier confiscates the means to provide its product. The humanitarian who proposes to redistribute the seven percent has revealed that he believes in choice for himself and allocation for everyone else, and calls this equality. The remedy is to attach the money to the child.
The Scarcity Machine
A social home that costs £200,000 to build is carried at just £85,000 on the RSL balance sheet the moment the keys turn — against an open-market value of £275,000. The £190,000 gap between market value and balance-sheet value is locked by a tenure restriction with no economic justification beyond institutional inertia. We have mistaken managing scarcity for solving it. Here’s what an abundance engine looks like instead.