When you drive a vehicle, you are obliged to hold car insurance. On the off chance you crash and cause injury to others and their property, this ensures no one else has to pay for the resulting damages. So why shouldn’t companies be made to buy insurance in case they – or the capitalist ecosystem in which they operate – also crashes?

In many cases they already do. Like car owners, they are obliged to purchase employer’s liability insurance in case their workers are injured. On top of that, prudent businesses buy insurance to protect themselves against the financial losses…

Why not use competition regulation to protect workers from abusive and exploitative firms?

Sometimes workers don’t have much choice about where they earn their living.

Think of towns where the major employer is a particular factory or warehouse business – perhaps even the main (the only?) pub or restaurant in a village. When workers don’t have options, this gives the employer a lot of power to reduces wages, working hours, conditions and even employment.

There is no upside to this for workers or even for consumers. What firms are doing is pushing wages down and employing fewer workers, and thereby…

This is the launch event of the Fabian Society Economy and Finance Policy Group

The Fabian Society Economy and Finance Policy Group has been set up by a group of finance professionals, academics and economists to look at the future of UK economic policy.

With fellow Fabians Keir Starmer MP, Annalise Dodds MP and Wes Streeting MP leading on Labour Party economic policy, we seek to develop new and innovative policy; as Labour refresh their policy outlook, respond to new challenges and prepare for Government. We are delighted to have Wes Streeting as our policy group sponsor.

We have structured…

The UK pension system is renowned for being the most complex in the world. Decades of tampering and incremental reform have created a bewildering array of regulations, structures and products. This might be acceptable if it led to better outcomes in retirement, but instead we have wildly uneven coverage and, by many measures, one of the higher rates of pensioner poverty in Europe.

To understand why, and what we might do about it, let’s quickly run through the main protagonists. First, there’s Defined Benefit (DB), née Final Salary, schemes. These guarantee an income based on length of service and salary…

We need to talk about meritocracy and what steps we must take to get there.

The Oxford Dictionary of Politics defines ‘meritocracy’ as “an elite selected on the basis of ability rather than social background”.

But how do we define ability and who should get paid more? Is the market mechanism working when ability is defined by demand and supply, and bankers or accountants get paid more than doctors or academics?

We may not be able to fix all these grand issues, but we may able to level the playing field in terms of social mobility.

My proposal looks at…

The Climate Emergency is at last starting to get the kind of media coverage which it requires to keep it at the top of the priority list for people and politicians. This is thanks to high profile protests and actions by groups like XR and Greenpeace alongside more responsible reporting from news agencies. To meet the 2050 net zero target, and much nearer carbon budget targets, we need to transition our economy in so many ways; decarbonising electricity generation, transport and heat is the trinity most often cited. These sectors alone are huge and that’s even before we start discussing…

The new government will inherit an unenviable situation, facing three challenges:

· Unacceptable levels of poverty and inequality for a progressive government

· Limited fiscal space due to a debt-GDP ratio of 85%, and a deficit of 1.1% of GDP

· Wariness amongst foreign investors, upon which economic success depends.

A radical government must achieve radical social change subject to the related threats of either capital flight or a budget crisis, which makes it imperative for the Government to develop impeccably credible policies to achieve its objectives.

Many on the left instinctively reach for high marginal tax rates on personal…