uk politics

Nerdy and empathetic, Michael Gove could be the next Tory leader

David Cameron’s blue-blooded cronies are acting up

Anyone who has read an interview with children’s author/grumpy village atheist Philip Pullman will surely have sensed that he was a bit of an a-hole. He proved the hypothesis, with the cataclysmic decisiveness of a Shaq slam-dunk, in a January 20 address concerning austerity-driven public-library closures in the UK. It is the speech of someone who believes every jot and tittle ever put to paper about his infallible genius; since the chief evidence of this genius is the success of his books in a degraded, semiliterate global publishing marketplace, Pullman naturally spends a lot of time blaming his nation’s library crisis on (a) modern publishing and (b) the market economy. Given such confusion, or perversity, it comes as no surprise that the supreme hero of his plea for untrammelled intellectual freedom turns out to be Karl Marx, who foresaw our sorry state oh so long ago.

Marxism is dead; long live Georgism! With Britain in austerity mode, its government pre-emptively decommissioning aircraft carriers that haven’t been built yet and preparing to bounce a half-million public-sector employees, everybody is looking for policy solutions to make the state’s in-flow exceed its out-go with the least possible agony. That has some progressives, including the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary Vince Cable, looking at the notion of Land Value Taxation (LVT)—applying the new tax burdens not to capital and labour income, which would discourage work and investment, but to the unimproved value of land area, where, to a first approximation, it would merely encourage efficient land use and make it more affordable.