For more than a decade, UK fiscal policy has rested on a statistical foundation that has now shifted. With the ONS’s correction to labour input measurement, the Chancellor enters the upcoming Budget with a different baseline: he may have more fiscal room than previously believed, even though borrowing remains high and fiscal rules still constrain policy choices. That change forces a debate about how fiscal decisions have been made, and what should happen now that the underlying data has been revised.

The ONS’s 2026 revision shows that productivity was systematically understated, hours worked were mismeasured, and GDP was smaller on paper than in reality. Those errors fed directly into OBR forecasts, shaping assessments of economic capacity, borrowing, and fiscal risk. They influenced how governments interpreted the strength of the economy and the limits of fiscal space. Now that the statistical foundation has been corrected, the assumptions that guided past fiscal judgements need to be reconsidered.

This creates a clear political economy question: if the economy was mismeasured for more than a decade, what does that imply for the decisions made under that mismeasurement? And how should fiscal policy evolve now that the Chancellor may have more room to act than earlier forecasts suggested?

The debate begins here: what changes when the data that shaped fiscal policy is shown to have been wrong?

On Wednesday 28 October, the Chancellor will walk into the Commons and spell out his Autumn Budget. The media are already circling the same question: how much fiscal room does he really have? Some commentators want cuts to welfare. Others want tax rises. A few insist there is no room at all. But almost nobody is asking the question that actually matters: who should pay?

This is where the debate becomes uncomfortable. When the conversation turns to “fiscal responsibility”, it almost always turns towards the same groups — people on benefits, public sector workers, households already squeezed by living costs. What it rarely turns towards is the banking sector, despite its £39 billion annual tax contribution and the legacy of a crisis that pushed public borrowing from £40 billion to over £150 billion. The Bank Levy was created to make banks contribute to the cost of that crisis. Fifteen years later, the country has quietly forgotten why it exists.

So, the question for this Budget is not simply whether taxes should rise or spending should fall. It is whether the Chancellor — and the public — believe that raising bank specific taxes is a fair and credible part of fiscal repair, or whether the burden should fall elsewhere. Most people have never seen the evidence. Most people have never been shown the trade offs. And most people have never been asked the question plainly: if the Chancellor needs more revenue, should banks pay more — or should you?

This report sets out the evidence so the debate can finally happen in public, not in headlines.

Liability driven investment remains one of the most consequential features of the UK’s pension landscape, and its current form reflects a system that has been tightened since the gilt market crisis of 2022 but not fundamentally rebuilt. LDI is safer, but still fragile. The explosive dynamics seen during the crisis are less likely, yet not impossible, because the underlying architecture that allowed them to occur remains largely intact.

LDI is still structurally dependent on leverage. The accounting rules that force schemes to value liabilities using market interest rates continue to drive demand for synthetic duration, ensuring that leveraged derivatives remain central to the strategy. This dependence means that LDI remains exposed to sudden yield spikes. Liquidity buffers are larger than before, but the feedback loop between collateral calls, forced selling, and rising yields has not been eliminated.

The areas of the system that matter most are still under regulated. Segregated mandates operate with fewer constraints than pooled funds, and the broader non bank financial system remains outside a regulatory perimeter designed for banks rather than the institutions that now carry systemic risk. LDI therefore continues to sit within a wider financial state shaped by years of cheap money, regulatory drift, and structural avoidance — a state that has been stabilised, but not made resilient.

Charitable status in the UK can allow an organisation to present itself as educational while operating in ways that materially support the interests of wealthier groups. The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) illustrates this problem clearly. Although registered as a charity, its funding base, policy agenda, and political networks align consistently with business, finance, and high income donors. The evidence shows that the policies it promotes would increase inequality, weaken protections for lower income households, and fail to improve UK economic growth. Understanding how a charity can function as an actor of upward redistribution is essential to assessing whether current charity regulation adequately protects the public interest.

Over fourteen years, Conservative governments reshaped UK defence through a pattern of cuts, delays, and fiscal compression that hollowed out capability across the armed forces. What began with soldiers returning from Afghanistan and being made redundant — “the Army lost approximately 20,000 regular personnel between 2010 and 2016” — became the first sign of a long austerity driven contraction. Defence spending fell, entire capabilities were retired, procurement plans became structurally unfunded, and training collapsed as budgets tightened. By 2024, the Army had fallen to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era, and the Equipment Plan carried a £16.9 billion deficit.

This report shows how these decisions accumulated into a systemic weakening of UK defence: from man-power loss to procurement failure, to readiness decline, to the abandonment of Afghan allies. It is a forensic account of how austerity hollowed out the country’s first line of national security.

UK politics keeps repeating the claim that welfare is driving the debt. The evidence shows the opposite. Welfare spending has been stable for decades. The real pressure on the public finances comes from the cost of money — rising gilt yields, global tightening, and the Bank of England’s QT programme. A one point rise in yields adds tens of billions to the interest bill, dwarfing any welfare cut. QT raises borrowing costs, the yield driven stress is misdiagnosed as “overspending”, and welfare becomes the political target because it is easy to cut. This report sets out the structural case: welfare is not the problem; the cost of money is.

Thames Water: Thirty Years of Extraction, Collapse, and a £3bn Public Rescue A forensic Dyslexic Politics investigation into how the UK’s largest water company was hollowed out by financial engineering — and why essential infrastructure must never be treated as a financial asset.

This report explains how the new “default yes” rule for station zone housing reshapes inequality. By automatically directing high density development into the noisiest, most polluted, highest traffic land, the policy hardcodes a spatial hierarchy into planning: quiet, green neighbourhoods remain protected, while households with least income and least power are steered into the harshest environments. Drawing on evidence from transport associated health risks, transit induced gentrification, and justice focused TOD research, the report shows that this rule does not simply build homes — it redistributes environmental burden, accelerates displacement pressures, and weakens procedural voice. In practice, it embeds inequality into the geography of housing.

Austerity in the UK was driven by IMF forecasting errors that underestimated how much cuts would shrink the economy. That mistake helped justify policies that weakened public services. The outcome was the slowest productivity growth since the early 19th century, collapsing investment, and deep reductions across core services. IMF leadership later softened its public criticism for political reasons, allowing Osborne to present austerity as validated even while internal staff remained sceptical.

Scotland taxes workers, not wealth. Westminster keeps every major wealth tax, so high earners pay more in Scotland while high wealth individuals pay the same as in England. Scotland can tax labour. It cannot tax capital.

Greater Manchester’s growth looks impressive, but the numbers tell a different story: investors take the gains, and the poorest are left behind. If we want real change, we need investment that lifts people, not just profits.

Wes Streeting has warned he could quit as Defence Secretary after discovering a £4.7 billion hole in the UK’s defence budget — including £1.8 billion needed next year. With former Defence Secretary John Healey also resigning over unfunded defence commitments, the new Chancellor must now fill the gaps. Our report shows where that money can be found.

The triple lock guarantees that the UK State Pension rises each year by the highest of earnings growth, CPI inflation, or 2.5 per cent. It has lifted many pensioners out of poverty and rebuilt the value of the pension after decades of erosion. It has also created a volatile, increasingly expensive commitment that amplifies shocks in wages and inflation and makes long term fiscal planning unstable. This analysis examines the structural, fiscal, and distributional consequences of the triple lock — and what happens if it is reformed, retained, or removed.

Nigel Farage’s voting record reveals a simple truth: when Clacton needed an MP to back stronger employment rights, fairer fiscal policy, and investment in a deprived coastal town, he voted against the measures that mattered most.

Scrap Inheritance Tax. Sounds simple—not. In reality, it hands billions to the wealthiest estates, widens the inequality gap, and blows a hole in the public finances: eight billion a year, every year. If we care about fairness between generations, this policy takes us in the wrong direction.

Andy Burnham’s halt to the September early release scheme—and the Prime Minister’s swift exclusion of rape, serious child sexual offences and grooming gang offences from the new sentencing framework—captures a moment where political decision making is forced into alignment with the structural limits of the justice system

Britain didn’t fall behind in AI because other countries were faster. We fell behind because we sold the very systems that could have made us a genuine tech power.
While the US, France, Germany, and China built sovereign compute, protected national champions, and invested at industrial scale, the UK relied on slogans and foreign ownership.
The result is structural dependency: our breakthroughs feed other nations’ economies, and our productivity flatlines.
Sovereign compute isn’t a luxury — it’s the foundation of national economic strength. If Britain wants to lead, it has to stop exporting its future.

UK energy bills have blown past what ordinary households can handle. Profit stays protected while people take every hit. Standing charges bite before you even switch anything on. The system was built for stable profit, not stable bills.
“Built for profit, not for people — that’s why UK energy became unaffordable.”

Cannabis hits the lungs, heart, and brain hard: smoked use delivers heavy toxins, spikes heart strain, and raises risks of psychosis with high potency strains. Long term use is linked to cognitive decline and higher emergency care demand. It’s not a harmless substance — the health load is real and measurable. Cannabis isn’t harmless — it hits the lungs, heart, and brain harder than people think.

Burnham says more local tax will stay local. But under England’s Great Land Uplift Giveaway, public money still clears land, builds infrastructure and absorbs the risk — only for private developers to step in once viability is created. The uplift flows out of the community. Taxpayers fund the foundations; developers take the gain.

Andy Burnham: “I said we’d take power out of Westminster and carry it into every postcode in the country. Today, we make good on that promise”.
A choice now sits at the centre of British government: thousands of nurses, doctors, teachers and police — or a second No.10 the country doesn’t need. The fiscal evidence is clear. Spending hundreds of millions on a second No.10 means fewer nurses for the NHS, fewer doctors in hospitals, and fewer police on Britain’s streets. It is money that could hire thousands of frontline staff instead of funding an unnecessary duplicate Prime Ministerial office.
This is the tradeoff. A symbolic second centre of power, or the measurable public value of thousands of essential workers.