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The argument

The economy rewards the wrong things. The tax system, accumulated over decades, systematically taxes work while largely exempting idle wealth. The result is stagnation, inequality, generational lockout and a political landscape that has lost the ability to imagine alternatives.

This book is the attempt to work out what that looks like in detail: concretely enough to be criticised, honestly enough to acknowledge the failures, and readable enough to be useful to someone who follows politics but doesn't spend their life in it.

A rigorous alternative: built with AI as a thinking partner, starting from a question rather than an ideology, and honest about what it doesn't yet know.

What makes it different

Most arguments for economic reform start from a political position and work backwards to the evidence. This one started with a question: if you built the UK tax system from scratch, what would it look like?

The answer involved false starts. The numbers didn't add up. Assumptions have needed constant revision and probably need more. It's an iterative back-of-the-envelope exercise. A thought experiment. What emerged from that process is a £649.65bn tax system that:

• Abolishes £315bn in taxes on work: NI, council tax, business rates, fuel duty, inheritance tax
• Replaces them with taxes on wealth, land, pollution, and digital extraction
• Leaves 75–80% of households better off
• Creates 800,000–1.1 million jobs
• Achieves 22% emissions reduction by 2030
• Remains revenue-neutral with a £34bn surplus for green investment

The author's background is in technology and business, not economics, not politics. That positioning is deliberate. The argument earns a different kind of trust when it comes from someone with no axe to grind, no constituency to serve, and no career to protect.

The chapters

1. Another Red Box Empty The 2025 Budget as a moment of collective shrug. What the gap between the scale of the problems and the smallness of the response reveals. The question that began the exploration. Read on Substack
2. What We Got Wrong About Growth GDP as a measure of throughput, not value. Mazzucato on value extraction vs creation. Piketty on why wealth concentrates. The distinction between pro-growth and pro-GDP.
3. Rational Choices, Ugly Results How the current incentive structure produces four interconnected failures. Design failures, not moral failures. The bridge to the reform.
4. Building a Better Budget Starting from first principles, arguing with the AI, hitting a £300bn shortfall, and iterating until the numbers held. How a thought experiment became a complete, revenue-neutral tax system.
5. Somewhere Like Warrington A BBC Breakfast special. Five real people, real impacts, honest accounting of who gains and who doesn't.
6. The Political Compass Is Broken Productive vs extractive as the new axis. The coalition that doesn't yet know it's a coalition. Why this confounds both left and right.
7. Resistance Is Inevitable Taking the objections seriously. The capital flight question. The organised interests. Why resistance is structurally motivated and why it shouldn't prevail.
8. The Economy We Choose Not a call to action. A transfer of perspective. The reader now has a lens they can apply to any policy debate. We don't need to be economists to have a view on what the economy is for.

Who it's for

UK adults who broadly follow the news but don't engage deeply with fiscal policy. People who are interested in "what this means for people like us" rather than political point-scoring. People who are politically homeless, not well served by existing left/right framing. Comparable books on the shelf: Tim Harford, Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics, Mariana Mazzucato's more accessible work, Matthew Syed.