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The UK hasn’t ended up in a state of low investment and stagnant living standards by accident.

This has been decades in the making — a deliberate dismantling of the public assets and institutions that once underpinned a fair and functioning economy, as I wrote earlier today (August 6, 2025).

Now, we’re seeing the consequences play out in real time.

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has warned that Chancellor Rachel Reeves will fail to meet her own self-imposed borrowing rules by more than £41 billion unless she raises taxes this autumn.

It’s being framed as a “trilemma”:

• Reeves promised not to raise taxes on working people

• She also pledged to stick to strict borrowing limits

• And she committed to investing in public services and growth

She can’t do all three.

But here’s the question nobody in government seems to be asking: Why doesn’t she have the money?

The answer, as I pointed out earlier today, is simple: because successive governments sold off the means of generating it.

This isn’t about Reeves – it’s about what her forerunners did to the country

Asset-strippers have been plundering the UK for parts over a period of decades.

Council housing, water, energy, public transport, broadband, Royal Mail, land — all have been sold off.

And what did we get in return? One-off windfalls, falling service quality, rising bills… and a state that now has to rent back the infrastructure it once owned – at top-dollar prices.

It was sold as “efficiency”. In reality, it was a bonanza for the wealthy — and a disaster for long-term investment.

Now Reeves is in charge of the nation’s finances, but the UK doesn’t own the tools of economic recovery anymore.

And that’s the point.

Raising taxes becomes the only lever left when you’ve sold off those that used to generate income.

You can’t invest when the wealth has already been extracted

Economist Simon Wren-Lewis has shown that UK productivity began falling behind other advanced economies from the mid-2000s onward – due to a sharp drop in investment.

Investment drives productivity. Productivity drives wage growth and living standards.

Public investment collapsed — first under austerity, then under the ongoing sell-off of state assets. Meanwhile, private wealth soared. The rich bought what was sold and now extract rent from everyone else.

It’s what I’ve called a zombie economy — one where the people work solely to pay off debts to wealthy parasites.

We’re not underperforming.

We’re being bled dry.

What can Reeves do — and what won’t work?

NIESR suggests Reeves should raise taxes: council tax reform, freezing income tax thresholds, changes to VAT and pensions. All technically feasible. All politically painful.

But none of them fix the underlying problem.

You can’t rebuild public services with a tax base that’s been deliberately narrowed for decades. You can’t invest your way out of stagnation when the profits of that investment flow straight to shareholders, not back into the public realm.

And you can’t pretend Labour’s “pro-growth” strategy will work while the country remains owned by a class of rentiers who profit from public need.

This is what I meant earlier today when I said the UK has a structural ownership problem.

It’s not a ‘trilemma’ – it’s just a trap — built with decades of short-term thinking

Reeves is walking into a Budget that even insiders are calling the “most significant of this Parliament.” But if she wants to get out of this trap, she can’t just tweak tax policy.

She has to name the real problem.

The UK doesn’t just need to spend more — it needs to own more.

That means ending the fire-sale model.

It means rebuilding public ownership.

It means creating new institutions for long-term investment.

And it means taxing unearned wealth and land values, not just squeezing workers to service a system they didn’t break.

The wealth tax is the way out

If the UK is trapped in a cycle where wealth extraction outpaces growth, the answer isn’t just more taxes on income or consumption.

It’s about taxing unearned wealth — the profits that come from ownership itself.

Gary Stevenson has proposed a wealth tax — a step towards addressing inequality by taxing accumulated fortunes.

Critics — often the very wealthy — say wealth taxes won’t work, with valuation challenges and loopholes..

But as I’ve written before, we already have tools that can capture profits from wealth without stifling investment or growth: taxing the returns from assets, cracking down on loopholes, and using the proceeds to fund public investment.

That’s why This Site has proposed a sharper, more practical alternative: a tax on the profits generated by that wealth — the unearned income, rents, and gains that come from owning property, land, shares, and other assets.

By targeting these profits, not just the value of assets, we can:

• Halt the ongoing extraction of wealth from working people

• Reduce incentives for speculative ownership and asset inflation

• Generate sustainable revenue to invest in public services and infrastructure

• Avoid technical problems linked to taxing asset values directly

This is how you rebuild an economy that works for everyone — by making sure those who profit from the country’s wealth contribute their fair share to its future.

Rachel Reeves may be facing a black hole in the public finances today, but the real question is whether Labour will be brave enough to fix the structural problem behind it.

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All I’ve got is my keyboard, these words, and the truth.

The political elite and mainstream media have wealth, influence, and the power to silence voices like mine. I’ve got none of that—just a keyboard, a passion for the truth, and the courage to say what others won’t.

That’s why I need you. If you believe in what I’m saying, don’t just read—share. Tell your friends. Pass it on to your colleagues. Because without that, the truth doesn’t spread. And if you think it will go viral on its own, you don’t understand how the online world works.

Let’s break through the noise. Together.