A Programme for Renewal
The 7 Policies
Seven concrete proposals, grounded in Real Resource Economics and drawn from The Money Sham.
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New Economic Institutions
Replace existing UK institutions with new bodies aligned with RRE principles. An Office for Inflation Analysis (OIA) replaces the Office for Budget Responsibility and monitors supply chains, labour shortages, monopoly pricing, and private debt growth. An Office for Responsible Taxation (ORT) simplifies the tax system, closes the tax gap, reduces avoidance, and assesses how taxes affect inflation and inequality. Taxes are not funding mechanisms but tools for sustaining the currency, reducing inequality, altering behaviour and controlling inflation.
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Rebuild Financial Regulation
The deregulated finance sector has produced asset inflation, ever-increasing inequality and economic stagnation. A new Office for Banking Regulation (OBR) will reintroduce credit guidance, restrict speculative lending, and direct bank credit toward productive investment. Banks will face major restrictions on derivatives, off-balance-sheet activity, speculative lending, and foreign currency lending.
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Affordable Housing Through Credit Reform
Excessive mortgage credit has driven house price inflation and transformed housing into a speculative asset. Proposed solutions include limiting buy-to-let borrowing, introducing land value taxes, discouraging land banking, and reducing the permitted ratio of mortgage loans relative to incomes and, of course, building more houses. This restores affordability and thereby raises living standards.
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Stronger Competition Policy
Capitalism is meant to encourage free markets, but what we have now is too much market power in too few hands. The government must strengthen the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to tackle monopoly power, price gouging, and excessive corporate concentration. Mergers and acquisitions are only permitted if they clearly increase productive capacity and serve the public purpose.
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Permanently Low Interest Rates
Higher interest rates cannot control inflation and in the current era drive up prices, worsen inequality and economic fragility while rewarding the wealthy for doing nothing. Permanently low or zero rates combined with the bank regulation will bear down on inflation.
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A Transition Job Guarantee
With fiscal policy promoting full employment, the government provides a job with a living wage for anyone who wants it through a Job Guarantee programme. A buffer stock of employed people increases wealth, stabilises prices, and promotes social cohesion. Examples from Roosevelt’s New Deal, Argentina, and Austria are precedents.
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Abandon Devaluation Phobia
The UK should not tremble at the prospect of currency depreciation and should no longer allow bond markets and speculative financial flows to dictate domestic economic policy. Exchange-rate pass-through into UK inflation is relatively low; devaluation can improve competitiveness and stimulate domestic production. The bulk of foreign exchange trading is speculative rather than trade-related, and sovereign governments can and must stabilise bond markets. The UK should prioritise employment, productive investment, and productive capacity rather than defending financial orthodoxy or appeasing currency markets.
For full analysis of each policy, see The Money Sham.