Author Archives: Toby Matthews

When the Chancellor raises National Insurance, are the effects the same everywhere? We don’t know.  But we ought to — regional inequality in the UK is so stark that comparisons to reunified Germany bear out. If fiscal policy plays a role in this, we need to know ‘how much’ and ‘where’.

There’s very good reason to ask for answers: long-established economic theory holds that governments will create poverty through taxation on economic activity:

All economic principles must be tried and proved at the margin. On marginal land there is no surplus above non-land costs, hence there is no taxable

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Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere… This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain- Matthew Parris, The Times

Matthew Parris’s dismissal of poor, coastal Essex adorned thousands of UKIP leaflets in Clacton. It served only to justify UKIP’s rout of the Tory party.

Inadvertently, Parris came close to the truth: Britain as a political entity almost ceased to exist in September. Despite the eventual result in Scotland, the strength of the yes vote saw victory in Glasgow, quadrupled the membership of the SNP and caused Scottish Labour to implode. The high turnout alone belied the modern complaint of political apathy.