Rachel Reeves’s recent ‘farmers’ Budget’ highlighted one key individual driving the policy: academic Arun Advani. His flagship policy of capping agricultural property relief originated in his academic research and has been pushed through NGOs and think tanks before being adopted as Government policy – referring back to those same sources as support. The network operates as something like an Academia-Charity-Government Complex (borrowing from President Eisenhower’s coinage of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex).
The Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick is not the only ‘influencer’ operating in this ‘complex’, matching up their own interests with Government policy. Another such figure, who entered Parliament at the last election, is Torsten Bell, previously of the Resolution Foundation. So is the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) since 2011, Paul Johnson, whose ‘advice’ is not as independent as it seeks to present itself.
The revolving doors between academia, government and industry became apparent during Covid, along with the lack of ‘independence’ between Sage, academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Something similar operates in the field of policy, particularly economic policy. As an example, the Treasury Committee of the Commons sought advice from four expert witnesses in its examination of the final budget of the Conservative Government: alongside the Chief Economist of KPMG, these happened to be Advani, Bell and Johnson. Let’s start with the ‘economic Neil Ferguson’, Arun Advani.
Advani’s specialism is tax: in particular, how to get as much of it out of us as possible. Before his appointment at Warwick he worked as a research economist at the IFS.
He is a whirlwind of activity. Amongst many other things, he is now on the advisory panel of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, the body instituted by George Osborne in 2010 to provide ‘independent’ forecasts on Government finances and forecasts (independent, that is, of the Treasury – the OBR is still funded by Government). He is one of the two Directors of CenTax, the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation, whose mission is to “improve public understanding of tax policy and help to design a better tax system” through “peer-reviewed academic research, agenda-setting policy reports and impartial comment and analysis”. He has been involved in the Green Alliance and the Wealth Tax Commission.
Another of Advani’s passions is to promote the study of “the Dismal Science” (Thomas Carlyle’s description of economics) in schools, through his charity Discover Economics, of which he is Chair. It claims to have “engaged” with almost a thousand schools to date, nearly a quarter of secondary schools in the U.K.
Part of the online engagement is the section Meet an Economist, comprising short profiles and interviews of student and professional economists. Those selected are notably ‘diverse’, another obsession of Advani. One co-authored paper published after the Summer of Floyd looks at the proportion of economics research related to race and compares it to the fields of sociology and political science, finding it wanting. “So what can economics do for racial justice?” it asks. Another co-authored paper (for the IFS) notes that ethnic diversity among academic economists is increasing over time. The share of (non-white) ethnic minority academic economists doing research and teaching has increased from 19% in 2012-13 to 24% in 2018-19. This is higher than in U.K. academia generally (17% in 2018-19) and in the U.K. population (13% among individuals aged 25-64 as of 2011).
However, “attainment gaps” exist in representation of black students, degree results (minorities being 11% less likely to get a First) and academics at Russell Group universities. The unquestioned conclusion is of course that ‘barriers’ must be understood and tackled.
Advani is obsessed about taxing us, and is fond of quoting the statistic that £35 billion of tax in the U.K. was not collected in 2018. The rhetoric of course is about the ‘unfairness’ of this. This level includes both the (illegal) evasion and an element of avoidance that HMRC classifies as “unlawful”; the fact that it is not illegal is indicative that some element is debateable, i.e., matters on which HMRC takes a (maximalist) view but have not been decided in law. However, as Advani notes in this paper, the U.K. tax gap is stable and rather low by international standards: 5.6% compared with 16.4% in the U.S. and 10.6%-12.9% in Canada. The targets of closing this tax gap would, of course, largely fall on the self-employed in sectors such as hospitality, construction and (Advani highlights) agriculture. The guise of ‘fairness’ is useful for challenging natural opponents of the regime.
Advani has hit the headlines recently as a result of the ‘tractor tax’ in Labour’s budget as he has repeatedly pushed the idea of capping agricultural property relief. In a co-authored report for the IFS, he blatantly states that: “It is not clear that protection even for small farms or businesses is a sensible rationale at all.” He has even suggested that farmland could be transferred to state ownership as a solution: “Longer payment periods would allow the effective tax rate to be lower, as would the state taking part-ownership of land and becoming the landlord to tenant farmers.”
The Budget brought immediate anger from farmers and many others who saw behind the proposals an attack on vital food production and a way of life. The Government’s cause was not helped by its admission that it had not undertaken an impact assessment of the measures, and that the Treasury estimate of the number of farms under the £1 million threshold (72%) was more than double that used by DEFRA (34%). Reeves’s quoted estimate was that ‘only’ 550 farms would be affected. Ministers initially justified the ‘reasonableness’ of the proposals by reference to Advani’s reports for CenTax and the IFS. Meanwhile the BBC has run cover for the Government by citing CenTax on BBC Verify (which is of course circular), and even giving Advani airtime on its Countryfile programme.
With the ‘tax gap’ being hard to close, and given the political difficulty of raising taxes in a sluggish economy, it’s not surprising that Advani is a leading advocate of another solution – a wealth tax. He was one of the three ‘commissioners’ on the Wealth Tax Commission, set up in 2020 to produce a series of research reports about individual wealth in the U.K., suggesting ideas as to how a wealth tax could be implemented. Economics associate professors had to keep busy while their students were banned from universities. The representation of lawyers (Advani’s fellow two ‘commissioners’ are both) is indicative that this is a serious legislative proposal – a strategy for implementation more than an academic talking-shop.
As well as academics, the commission included two contributors each from organisations I will look at next: the Resolution Foundation and the IFS.
Torsten Bell was one of the higher-profile new Labour MPs elected in July. He was parachuted into the safe seat of Swansea West at short notice, incurring some anger from local party activists who were expecting their council leader to be selected.
Bell read PPE at Oxford and went on to work at the Treasury, before working as a Special Adviser to Alistair Darling during the financial crisis of 2008. He was subsequently Labour’s Policy Director under Ed Miliband (it is rumoured that the ‘Ed Stone’ was his idea). His twin brother Olaf (they have a Swedish mother) is a EU Director at the Foreign Office. According to the New Statesman, “no pair of brothers enjoys greater influence in Whitehall” (this was before Bell’s election).
Between his Labour stints, Bell ran the Resolution Foundation. This was set up in 2005 by insurance tycoon Clive Cowdery and is largely funded by Cowdery’s Resolution Trust (which also funds Prospect magazine). He has made a considerable fortune from what is known as ‘consolidation’ in the insurance industry – buying ‘closed’ funds, aggregating them to reduce costs, and selling on at a profit. He is on his third round of doing this. He was also a Director of the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain, and is on the governing council of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a New York think tank started and funded by George Soros. In a interesting Scandinavian parallel with Bell, his mother was Danish.
Inequality, wealth and taxes are at the heart of their advocacy: “The Foundation’s established work programme focuses on incomes, inequality and poverty; jobs, skills and pay; housing; wealth and assets; tax and welfare; public spending and the shape of the state, and economic growth.”
This report, for example, highlights:
One might hope that huge passive gains from wealth would have brought with them higher tax revenues. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case. … While household wealth more than doubled relative to national income over the past half-century, the revenues raised from wealth taxes have failed to follow suit.
Wealth taxes in this context are the extant taxes on assets: capital gains and inheritance tax and stamp duty. “Household wealth in Britain now stands at more than six times national income, largely due to passive gains on existing wealth” (emphasis mine). The report falls short of calling for a wealth tax per se, but like much of the think tank’s research, it provides groundwork for one.
At a time when the quality of MPs appears historically low, Bell is a notable exception. Running an organisation such as the Resolution Foundation is much more powerful that being a backbench MP; he has already been appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Cabinet Office (the heart of Number 10). He has, of course, been a vocal defender of the ‘tractor tax’ measures. Expect him to rise rapidly.
Paul Johnson is another Oxford PPE economist who has spent his working career between the IFS, civil service and regulators. He is a regular media presence as an independent commentator on key fiscal events such as the Budget. He has run the IFS since 2011.
The IFS claims to be “the U.K.’s leading independent economics research institute”, and holds itself to be resolutely non-party political. During the period 2015-2021, it was the second most quoted think tank in Government policy documents after the progressive Joseph Rowntree Foundation; the Resolution Foundation was in fifth place and the IPPR in sixth. (The Conservatives were of course in power for the entire time.) As we have seen, however, it is happy to put out research by obviously Left-leaning professors such as Arun Advani.
The IFS itself is largely tax-funded, through several sources (individual departments and the Economic and Social Research Council, an arm of the Government’s U.K. Research and Innovation). In 2023, public money amounted to 73.5% of its funding. Most of the remainder is from charitable trusts, the largest of which last year were the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation. Interestingly, even USAID made a small contribution.
The IFS should probably itself be described as radically orthodox; for this it can come under fire from hardline Leftist organisations such as the Progressive Economy Forum: “The claim of ‘independence’ explicitly refers to no links to political groups. Crucially, however, this does not prevent political bias.”
It is correct to state that that political bias is real; maybe we can take some small comfort from the fact that outright neo-Marxists may object. But nonetheless the academy has a Leftist bias, even if the wilder shores of cultural ideology are less obvious in economics than some subjects.
A recent research paper from the U.S. has even managed to demonstrate correlation between political ideology and research output. In order to get around the fact that most economics professors do not state party affiliation, the researchers used a large database of public donation information and petition-signing as a (pretty sound) proxy for political positioning.
Do the methodological conventions of academic economics, such as formal modelling, quantitative analysis and peer review successfully filter partisanship from academic economics research? … We show that empirical results in several policy relevant fields in economics are correlated with the predicted political ideology of the author(s), with predicted liberals (conservatives) reporting elasticities that imply policies consistent with more interventionist (laissez-faire) ideology. … For example, we find that going from the most Left-wing authored estimate of the taxable top income elasticity to the most Right-wing authored estimate decreases the optimal tax rate from 77% to 60%.
It should be the goal of any social science to approach as value-free a position as possible, even whilst acknowledging that it is impossible in practice. In reality, consensus Leftism operates across the board. It is not surprising that this results in quantifiable differences in supposedly hard research outputs; it is more surprising that some academics are demonstrating the fact. In areas such as wealth and tax policy, advocacy wears the coat of academic rigour.
Johnson will soon be leaving his long-standing role at the IFS; he was recently announced as the next provost of Queen’s College, Oxford.
The drive to a wealth tax
There is no shortage of think tanks and compliant academics pushing similar policies; for example the IPPR (largest donor: Soros’s Open Society Foundations) recently published a paper on ‘Big Wealth’, which takes the need for a wealth tax as a given, but also states (somewhat chillingly) that “the relevant policies for tackling both the quality and quantity of wealth must very much include, but in no way be restricted to, tax”.
Labour stated before the election that it had “no plans” to introduce a wealth tax. Then again, it had “no plans” to modify agricultural property relief.
Nothing we have seen in any of these reports or statements challenges the fundamental reasons as to why Government spending is at an all-time high outside wartime, and whether it could be reduced. It is, rather, a baseline from which spending will only increase owing to the Net Zero agenda, increasing health and welfare payments and the need for other infrastructure investment (a passion of Torsten Bell). With the political will and economic possibility of more cash coming from taxes on income and spending, the focus will be ever more on wealth.
The difference is between traditional ‘wealth taxes’ (such as capital gains tax) and a ‘wealth tax’: levelling a fixed charge on capital assets without any gain being realised. The motive for the changes in agricultural property relief could be many things, from political ignorance of the reality of family farms, to a visceral hatred of the class enemy (the word kulak has been used much in the last few weeks). One thing it is, though, is a method of bridging a debate from wealth taxes to a wealth tax: an alteration which on the surface is a just a modification to the current tax regime, but which has the effect (in some cases) of being a direct tax on assets (particularly land). Whatever happens, it has set an agenda.
Which brings us back to Arun Advani. In this podcast, he sets out his case in superficially reasonable terms (and to unquestioning hosts, the most incisive question is “Why is it not happening?”) A wealth tax of 1% on assets over £10 million would, he claims, affect only the richest 22,000 people in the country, and raise some £11 billion. What he does not say is that the U.K. deficit for 2023-4 was £41 billion, and gross debt £2.7 trillion. And bad though the Conservatives were, this is before Labour’s plans have got going. You can be sure that if a wealth tax were introduced, it would likely extend rapidly.
The cosy questioning of the expert witnesses in the Select Committee is comprehensible in the light of the shared assumptions of its participants (politicians included). The purpose of this has not been to scare you about the prospects of a wealth tax (though you should be), but to give one example of how policy is generated, how ideas are normalised and how consent is manufactured by an interlinked network of academia, think tanks and Whitehall. The Blob is too innocent a name; it is a Hydra.
Mat Brown is a writer and former investment banker. He writes about politics, geopolitics and culture on the substack Dogmatic Slumbers and is working on a book on Armenia. This article was first published on TCW Defending Freedom.
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Eww gross! Well I knew not to worry but now having read this I’d say that unless you’re a gay male with a sex addiction who doesn’t believe in using condoms then you’ve even less cause for concern. Next!
”One of the 229 people diagnosed with mpox in Ireland during the recent outbreak had 75 different sexual partners in the 21 days before they developed symptoms of the disease, a new study has revealed.
The review of cases also found that 96.5 per cent of confirmed infections had been sexually transmitted. All but three of the infected patients were men, and 98.6 per cent identified as gay, bisexual or men who have sex with men (gbMSM).
The youngest patient was 16 and the oldest was 68, and more than one in four (28.3 per cent) were HIV positive, according to a new study conducted by experts with the HSE and Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HSPC).”
https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/health/mpox-patient-75-sexual-partners-29455892
Haha, quite! https://x.com/FatEmperor/status/1824051900347510916
Thanks for this.
I do however blame the WHO as they play their part in this shitshow by giving a stamp of approval to these “emergencies” which enable the vaxx-pushers to make money. If it was just big business pushing it then more people would be cynical, but most people can’t believe the WHO would tell untruths or distort reality.
Agreed.
The WHO is effectively a prostitute organisation providing a veil of $cienctific decency for the pharma company and its employees must know this.
Morning Huxley,
To quote you: “Off-T” – It’s not hard to track you down in these columns, so, given that I seem to read these articles about 24 hours after everyone else – and given that people sensibly don’t often look back at comments they made two days previously – I thought I’d mention something concerning the recent article about the excruciating Miriam Margolyes, specifically in relation to a comment you made in response to a comment of mine on the subject of Charles Dickens. I’ve nothing unpleasant or rude to communicate, but since the Margolyes article is now old hat, do by all means contact me at shersleyken@gmail.com – As I say, nothing unpleasant – I just thought it might be better not to clutter up this space with my irrelevant musings…
If their treaty was ratified we would be Jabbed by mandate don’t you worry ! Steir Karmer will be the first to sign it when it comes up again !
While travelling through Madagascar in a remote area, I mentioned to the two guides, who had limited English to stay away from the Covid vaccine. “I took part in vaccinating in my village” the one guide said. The driver looked worried when I put in plain English “Covid OK” Covid vaccine bad, not good, stay away”…..He looked worried and said I had two. I just told him don’t have any more. The tentacles of Big Pharma seen to get to even the most remote areas. At least the girl I was with didn’t have it and is now educated somewhat on vaccines.
Generally speaking in Europe and America the minorities had the lowest take up of the jab showing they were smarter than the indigenous whites. It may be that in Africa there is corruption at work with money to be made by authorities and local leaders thus leading to the intimidation of people to be jabbed. In the West minorities are exalted above whites and thus they can make up their own minds on whether to take up the jab. The majority of white people in the West it seems are very easy to control by TPTB.
A good analysis. As suggested, it’s quite likely that the usual suspects will promote the sale of a drug that is classified as a “vaccine”, based on the revised definition of the term. Perhaps though, it could be neither safe nor effective, except for the cash balance of the manufacturer.
Flying viruses do not exist. FOI requests demanding a purified isolated virus are never satisfied because none exist. This includes the Mpox virus hoax. Mpox bollocks is simply another rerun of the AIDS scam. Not a single proof exists that an HIV virus exists. Virology is a fraud.
Why the down votes? Do you have a pure Covid or HIV sample. If so a million dollars is yours. No takers after 2 years so far!
This could qualify as an appendix/update to the book “The Real Anthony Fauci”. It’s not a new phenomenon.
Great article David. Context is everything. Thanks for the reference to TB and Malaria. It reminded me that one of the outcomes of Chickenpox is death! But Chickenpox isn’t a novel virus from darkest Africa
To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.
To be fair, this did make me laugh;
https://x.com/Greg__Snow/status/1824543138108805468
Hope image is big enough to see and read.
BINGO
Its a pharmaceutical monkey business.
The person pictured used to be a voluptuous blonde transgender woman before the vaccine.
But it is clearly better than dying from Monkey Pox.
Monkey pox lockdowns obviously will be no problem for the inhabitants of Surrey who can hang out in their leafy tree-lined avenues.
Having read books such as Virus Mania and Dissolving Illusions, and numerous critical reports on vaccines, I am now convinced that ALL vaccines are pure poison, even (or especially) those generally accepted as being safe and essential, e.g. against polio.
The adjuvants are certainly poisonous (e.g. mercury, aluminium compounds), in addition to which the main component of any vaccine is the pathogen, supposedly responsible for the disease against which the vaccine is issued.
I am, of course, aware that the world’s doctors are taught from day 1 of their medical training that vaccines are essential to a healthy life, and that this message has been dutifully and convincingly communicated over the decades to all patients, but it would be interesting to hear the matter being discussed with such critical personalities as Mike Yeadon, who used to work for Pfizer, possibly on vaccines, I am not sure.
Not true.
The maximum time any doctor spends studying vaccines is between 30 to 45 minutes of the many years they spend studying.
And a great many if not most learn nothing about vaccines in their years of education and professional training – that’s right – not even 30 to 45 minutes.
What we so often see is the obligatory statements in journal published medical papers that vaccines have saved millions of lives. But when you look for the reference to the evidence these claims are based upon it either does not exist or is a reference to another paper saying the same thing based on a reference to another paper making the same claim without evidence – and so on and so forth.
In other words, if you write about vaccines or disease etc and want to get published, you have to include obligatory statement about how great vaccines are.
It is of course misinformation.
Doctors know a lot about all kinds of diseases but when it comes to treating them they know very little other than the name of the drug to prescribe and nothing about alternative effective treatments.
And even then they know very little about the adverse effects of the drugs they advise their patients to take.
How many people have toenail fungus? It seems quite a few.
If they want to get rid of it their GP will prescribe toxic antifungals which the patient is expected to take for six or more months and which can affect fertility and conception should be avoided.
No doctor will tell their patient, buy a bottle of oregano oil from a good supplier of OTC supplements and put a tiny drop on the affected toes once a day or two days.
The toenail fungus will be dead in a matter of a few days or a couple of weeks and the patient will have to wait for the nail to grow out back to normal.
It is interesting that when any case of bird flu is discovered, an immediate extermination programme is started on anything with wings in the surrounding area. This cannot exactly promote natural resistance within birds’ ranks and leads one to imagine the involved biologists would likely want to act similarly with a human outbreak of flu!
Fully agree!
Dr John Campbell gave a commentary on the MPox scare-a-thon yesterday. Basically, if you’re not in the DRC, nothing to worry about.
Advice from attorney Jeff Childers to the British people. Please read. 0posted in today’s coffee and covid substack..
This week, the UK Guardian ran a story about the controlled demolition of Great Britain, headlined “Sutton man, 61, who chanted ‘who the f—— is Allah’ is jailed for 18 months.”
Retired railroad conductor David Spring, 61, learned this week that protesting is only protected for people protesting under government-approved narratives. They gave the former conductor a year and a half in prison for what he said. The British judge scolded David, saying “What you did could and it seems did encourage others to engage in disorder.”
Eighteen months! The good news is David can now enjoy being a pen pal with our January 6th political prisoners in America.
Along with many other British, David was upset about illegal immigrants being housed for free —well, at taxpayer expense— in swanky London hotels. It was a good thing David meekly apologized to the court for losing his temper, or else they might have thrown him off a roof for insulting the prophet.
Conservatives in Britain need to get smarter. Protests won’t work. Memes will get them arrested. So they need to learn how to protest without protesting, to politely sandbag their government while coloring inside the new lines. They could, for example, submit every single form the government offers, in triplicate. They could apply for every available benefit. They could automatically appeal every traffic ticket, jaywalking fine, or minor BBC rate increase.
Jam it up.
They could pay their fines and taxes in person, in pennies, or pence, or farthings, or whatever coins the British still use. But be smart about it. First, try politely paying with a hundred dollar (pound) bill. When the bureaucrat says sorry, lads, they can’t make change, only then regretfully pull out the sack of coins.
If they won’t take cash, respectfully ask for the manager, and waste an hour of their time.
Brits, culturally skilled at passive-aggressive courtesies, could scrupulously follow every minor regulation, safety rule, and trivial mandate in ways that disrupt smooth government operation. They could use the many snitch hotlines to mass-report government accounts and public officials’ posts for spreading hate or disinformation. They could file millions of small claims cases for any minor (but non-frivolous!) transgression.
They need to learn to wield the rules against the rule-makers. For instance, disabled conservatives could haltingly cross busy London intersections by degrees, stopping a few times to rest, fouling traffic. It wouldn’t take much planning to create total gridlock.
They could organize “buy nothing” days that briefly shut down the economy. They could organize mass opt-out campaigns and boycott government-friendly corporations. They could relentlessly phone their ministers and local agencies with stupid, time-consuming requests. Sorry, I forgot what you told me last time, be a good bloke and tell me again.
They could visit their local zoning offices in person, and when it’s their turn, they could hog the window, feigning confusion and asking dozens of exhausting questions until the bureaucrat goes insane and orders them out. Then the next citizen in line could step up and repeat the same laborious inquiry. They could all come back the next day and start over.
The ideas are potentially limitless. The idea is legal protests. Protesting without protesting. Quiet riots.
To help our beleaguered British cousins, add your own creative suggestions in the comments.
Shut. It. Down. This strategy exploits the great weakness still available to citizens suffering in allegedly open societies. Politely and compliantly use the government against itself. Force the government to go Full Orwell. But for Heaven’s sake, stop actual protesting. Don’t become a target. Mindless protesting only works for leftists. We are much smarter than they are. Hit them where it hurts. Nicely. Legally.
Every government, even authoritarian governments, operates solely with the consent of the citizens it governs. Just stop consenting. I hope this helps. Get the word out.
Why not just organise peaceful protests? The problem is there is no one and no organisations or money to do that so there is also no one or organisation to organise what marebobowl tells us here that attorney Jeff Childers is advising.
Why is no one asking Starmführer’s Left and Hard Left [some Socialist Worker nutters being evidently present amongst them] why none of them are protesting about our homeless ex-servicemen and women and our 80,000 homeless young people who need homes but instead protest that ordinary UK citizens who do are fascists and Far Right?
Or why none of them are protesting about the decades long corrupt Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman service which is pretty blatant about finding all kinds of excuse to not uphold sound complaints and so protects the NHS and Parliamentarians and the like from valid complaints?
Or why are none of them protesting about the decades long corrupt Department of Work and Pensions industrial injuries scheme which is also pretty blatant about finding all sorts of invalid reasons for denying compensation to victims of industrial injuries and vaccine adverse reactions?
Or why are none of them protesting about why in 14 years the Opposition [ie. Starmführer’s Labour Party MPs] did not question the Tories borrowing an annual average of £128 billion nor demand to know what the Tories thereby maxed out the national credit card on? WTF did the Tories spend it on? I would like that explained in Technicolour.
There are lots of problems in the UK to campaign about for the greater good.
So why is no one asking Starmführer why his Left and Far Left Labour Party instead concentrate on issues which are about creating divisions in UK communities, about the destruction of our values and beliefs and communities and the indoctrination in our schools of our children with woke and gender identity issues and thereby setting the children against their parents.
And why is no one asking Starmführer why he is supporting the Left and Hard Left factions which were supposed to have been cracked down on but clearly have not been. They are a fifth column undermining and destroying the UK’s political system and communities and cohesion and which seem to be funded by money from external interests like billionaire George Soros.
I read an article by a reasonable scientist today which said the Mpox has a very similar “gain of function part” to the fake C thing. Oh dear! More MRNA anyone?
Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) is literally pronounced….”FAKE”. Need I say more?