Julian Price

Almost everything in this country is now a taxable event, complete with an ever growing mountain of paperwork and administration. The tax take is on track for its highest level since the Second World War. The OBR forecasts it rising every year out to 2030, into what one of its own committee members has called "uncharted territory." Public spending sits at around 45% of GDP. Almost half the economy is now state, in one form or another. And still, the prevailing message from government is that things are under-taxed. Buying a house: stamp duty. Inheriting one: inheritance tax. Building and subsequently selling a business: capital gains, raised in the October budget. Inheriting a farm or a family firm: APR and BPR capped at £1m from April 2026. Hiring: higher employer NICs on a lower threshold since April 2025. Dividends. Pensions. ISAs above the cap. Trust transfers. All taxed. Mostly taxed more. Then there are the duties. Alcohol duty up with RPI in February 2026, on top of the 3.65% rise in February 2025. Tobacco. Air Passenger Duty. Insurance Premium Tax. Soft drinks levy. Vape duty incoming. Then there is the regulation. The Home Builders Federation puts the cumulative tax and policy changes on housebuilding since 2020 at £76,000 per new home. Building regs. Biodiversity Net Gain. Future Homes Standard. Section 106. Building Safety Levy. Nutrient neutrality. Landfill tax. Affordable housing contributions. Completions in 2024/25: 208,000. Down 16% from the 2020 peak. The same compounding load now sits on every venue with a door and a licence. One pub closes a day. One nightclub closes every two days. A third of UK nightclubs have disappeared since 2020. A quarter of British towns no longer have a single one. 40% of operators expect to close within six months. Average pub rateable value is up 30% in the 2026 revaluation. Business rates for the average pub up 76% over three years. Employer NICs up. Living wage up again from April. The dance floor itself is now effectively taxed out of existence. The result is exactly what you would expect… Houses don't get built. Farms don't change hands. Businesses don't expand. Founders defer or relocate. Hiring stalls. Capital sits. The high street closes, one shuttered venue at a time. And the tax and regulation conversation is not slowing. It is ramping up. In the space of a single week, two senior Labour figures have briefed the next round. Wes Streeting wants capital gains tax aligned with income tax, taking top rates from 24% to 45%, estimated at £12bn a year. Andy Burnham wants a land value tax he claims could raise £35bn, on the basis that British land is "under-taxed." The Treasury is already collecting more, in more places, than at any peacetime point in modern history. The political class is now openly competing on what to tax next. Every new proposal freezes a fresh part of the economy in anticipation. This is more than friction. It's the deliberate, line-by-line pricing of inaction over action. Every shuttered venue, every unbuilt home, every founder on a flight out is a tax receipt the Treasury will never collect. Yet the answer seems to be… more tax and more regulation. What was Einstein’s definition of insanity again?

Do you feel waiting lists are down or have you experienced what I am seeing… @DailyMailUK today

The hard truth is that the UK Government has no choice. It depresses me, but the alternative is meltdown. The lesson is that two decades of green energy and industrial policy have brought us to this moment. We hollowed out our refinery capacity, reducing the number of facilities from ~12 in the 2000s to 4 today, and deliberately vandalised our domestic hydrocarbon sector. Gordon Brown’s 2009 energy security review warned that Britain risked exactly this kind of scenario / exposure if it failed to support these sectors. Unfortunately, successive governments have done the exact opposite. On top of this, some of us have been warning for years about how our actions benefit Russia and China. And by this, I do not just mean financially. This goes well beyond economics. We are systematically handing strategic leverage to countries that do not wish Britain or our allies well. The loosening of sanctions on Russian-linked crude is the clearest sign yet of how this works in practice. It is not only humiliating, with RUSI estimating that these imports could be worth around £1bn to Putin's war machine, but it also undermines deterrence. It tells hostile powers that Britain can be forced into retreat because we no longer have the domestic capacity or resources to withstand pressure. We urgently need to change course. If we do not, my fear is that the 2030s are going to be a nasty reckoning for Britain. They risk being the moment when all the complacency, short-termism and ideological fantasy of the last few decades finally catch up with us.

A brief update on the @Indep_Inq_GG “Grooming gang” Inquiry… This week the Inquiry panel for the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs (the official title, not my choice of words) was questioned by the Home Affairs Select Committee. We hadn’t been made aware this was taking place and only found out on the day via a social media post and hence we couldn’t let our survivors know in advance. Much of what was said however has left us with more questions than it answered in all honesty. What was repeated was the importance of placing victims and survivors at the “heart of the panel”!!! This is what that has looked like so far……. We have not heard from the Inquiry team since we took over two dozen survivors and their families to meet with them in February. In that emotionally charged meeting, survivors spoke about their experiences and their anger at how badly they have been failed, most for decades. They shared their expertise and expectations for the Inquiry. Their anger and trauma was palpable, and most of that was actually directed at the “establishment” including police, cps, social services, government rather than towards their abusers tbh! They clearly demanded the agencies that have failed them (and still are in many cases!) are held ACCOUNTABLE, right up to the top of those agencies! In early March, we submitted both our and the survivors’ extensive comments to the draft Terms of Reference. We have received no reply. In April, our legal team @HoweAndCo wrote to the Inquiry on behalf of all our survivor group expressing the importance of victims and survivors being granted proper legal status in the Inquiry and public funding to ensure they can be properly represented by legal experts. This will go some way to addressing the imbalance between survivors and the very agencies, organisations and individuals whose decisions have caused so much of their trauma. Police forces and local authorities around the country will have undoubtedly been working with their legal teams since the inquiry was announced almost a year ago. This is PRECISELY the imbalance I saw 8 years ago when I was involved in the @IICSAVSCP Independent Inquiry Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). Because the “Organised networks” strand became little more than a platform for public institutions to say what a great job they were now going with barely any survivors heard, it became a meaningless paper exercise and that’s imo why we’re here now…. I’ll leave you to read the Home Office’s response attached below and our reply and make up your own mind as to whether we should have confidence that this will be granted. So many survivors have fought hard for this Inquiry. People are sharing traumatic details of the worst times of their lives again in the hope that they will finally see people held accountable for decisions that destroyed their lives. Survivors must have legal status and representation if there is even the slightest chance of this happening. Please share far and wide. We need people pressure to make this happen. Further updates to follow next week….

Labour are trying to reconstruct the ghastly Theresa May / Olly Robbins deal which they themselves voted against in 2019 and which their own manifesto precludes. They've reached the stage of making one terrible offer after another to the EU because they are desperate for any deal, whatever is in it.

This is utter, utter madness. To make SAF (sustainable aviation fuel), you need: (1) unfeasibly large quantities of organic waste (e.g. used cooking oil), or (2) to change the [EU] rules concerning "food vs fuel" and then plant unfeasibly large areas with oilseed rape (to use the HEFA process) or sugar beet (or cane) (to use the AtJ process), or (3) develop "2G" technology to make SAF from woody material (e.g. trees) which doesn't exist at commercial scale. In every case, you put more joules of energy into making SAF than you get out of it. But there's a lot of money at stake for the green grifters. It basically fraud on an colossal scale, and they obviously want to rope the military into dependence on this fraud as well as commercial airlines.

Someone in government needs to get a grip. RAF to spend £1bn switching to sustainable jet fuel telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/…

@hools @DanielJHannan This means that countries wouldn't negotiate FTAs with the UK. They'd negotiate directly with the EU knowing they'd gain backdoor access to the UK market as well without the UK being able to export tariff free into their market.

UK Restricts Intra-Day Power Trading with Europe to Mitigate Blackout Risks The global energy crisis is straining European market dynamics to the point that a pivotal actor—the UK—has capped the volume of electricity traded with continental markets to safeguard its grid. 🧵

Very good example of the lies anti-Western activists love to tell: The claim that Britain only paid off slavery compensation in 2015 is false — and the person who spread it has admitted it. The claim that "British taxpayers were paying off slavery compensation until 2015" went viral in 2018 when the UK National Debt Management Office tweeted it. It was retracted almost immediately because it was wrong. The 1835 government loan used to pay slave owner compensation was fully redeemed in 1938. What continued beyond that were small residual government consolidated bonds — routine Victorian-era debt instruments bundled together with hundreds of other government expenditures from the same period, including the Napoleonic Wars and Irish Famine relief. This lie spread because it was emotionally compelling. It was not true. Yes, slavery compensation was paid to the owners because that was the only way to achieve abolition. And yes, abolition was the result of campaigning and technological changes but it nonetheless represents a unique achievement of the West: everywhere else, including the Far East, the Middle East and Africa slavery continued for decades, if not centuries, and into the present time. Note how, as usual, anti-Western narratives deliberately fail to engage in a fair comparison with OTHER empires and civilisations in the world and their conduct during the same time period. I refuse to hold our civilisation to a fake, utopian standard of perfection while letting everyone else off the hook.

In 1997, I initiated a debate in Parliament to save the British loo. Thomas Crapper invented the cyphonic water cistern which didn’t leak. But #Labour knew better and allowed a leaky valve system in from the EU! With millions of gallons of water being wasted down the loo, they are now thinking of reversing that decision. @Telegraph

The public, rightly, has learned after four decades to take the apocalyptic warnings of climatecrats, so willingly amplified by a credulous media, with a pinch of salt. - In 1972, a Guardian headline told us that ‘space satellites show new ice age coming fast’. - In 1989, a top UN official warned that ‘entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000’. - In 2003, Sir John Houghton, former head of the Met Office, described global warming as ‘a weapon of mass destruction’. In 2004 British climate scientist David Viner said that ‘children aren’t going to know what snow is’. - In 2010 the National Trust told us to expect to replace our lawns with gravel, our oaks with olives and apple orchards with banana plantations. - In 2014, the BBC ran a fictional news report from a typical day in 2020: ‘Health, transport and water supply industries face serious decisions to cope with heatwaves and droughts.’ The film was later removed from the BBC’s website after the summer of 2020 proved wetter than average. - In 2018 Greta Thunberg tweeted: ‘A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.’ In 2023 she deleted her tweet. Climate change is happening - but beware those, such as the powerful climatecrats of the CCC, with a vested interest in exaggerating its future impacts.

@DanielJHannan It would presumably mean negotiating a merger of UK trade agreements, e.g. with Australia, CPTPP, SACUM, Central America, the Balkans, LDCs, etc., the cancellation of autonomous tariff quotas, and no say on any trade agreements going forward. This would not be good for business.

Interesting. The UK offers a single market in goods, which would bring economic benefits to both sides (though slightly more to the EU, given the trade balance). Brussels rejects the offer and instead demands a customs union - which would badly hurt the UK, and would mean that the EU no longer had to worry about a more free-trading state on its doorstep. Eurocrats are not interested in mutual gains. They are still in the business of trying to punish Brexit. theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

The report is full of howlers. It states emphatically that, by 2050, ‘sea levels will be [not “could be” or “may be”] 20–45 cm higher around UK coasts than today.’ That implies sea levels rising over the next 24 years by 8mm to 19mm per year. But over the 35 years we have had satellites measuring it, sea levels have risen on average by just 3.4mm per year. There was a little acceleration in 2015-2020 and there has in fact been a deceleration(ital) since then: 4.5mm increase per year since 2010 and 3.7mm per year since 2015. (In some parts of the country, such as East Anglia, the land is sinking, a different effect.) So to assume that the rate of sea-level rise could more than quadruple within the next quarter-century is completely unscientific. Neither Greenland nor Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate - and they are the only possible sources for such a huge increase. How, then, does @theCCCuk justify this hysteria over sea levels? It bases its sea-level prediction ‘on a high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), using the upper-end estimate (95th percentile)’. RCP8.5 is an economic scenario that was produced in 2011 for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a team of mathematical modellers. Their instruction was to find out what it would take to increase CO2 emissions at a rapid rate to a very high level by the end of the century. First, the modellers said, the world would have to massively increase the use of coal at the expense of oil and gas - using coal to make fuel for cars and planes, burning eight times much coal in 2100 as the world did in 2000, and projecting that fully half of all the world’s energy would be supplied by coal by the end of this century. Yet even this back-to-coal fantasy was not enough to achieve the gargantuan emissions the modellers were tasked with producing. So they assumed both that the world’s population growth would also reverse its current slowdown, surging to 12 billion people by the end of the century, that innovation to make our lives more fuel-efficient would largely end, and also that we wouldn’t even try to cut emissions. None of these are going to happen. Scientists have been saying for more than a decade that the apocalyptic RCP8.5 scenario is extremely unrealistic, and even the alarmist BBC said in 2020 that it was ‘exceedingly unlikely’. The IPCC has recently announced that it is abolishing RCP8.5 altogther, while one of the Climate Change Committee’s own members, Professor Piers Forster, wrote an article just last week ‘on the death of RCP8.5’. Nobody, at all, ever, under any circumstance, should be using RCP8.5 to forecast climate. Yet the CCC is still using it to terrify the government and the British people – and even taking its ‘upper-end estimate’!

Acclaimed Hungarian Jewish director László Nemes just dropped a truth bomb at Cannes: “There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the West.” His 2015 masterpiece Son of Saul — a harrowing film about a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz — won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Cannes Grand Prix. Today? He says it “wouldn’t even make the Oscar shortlist.” Because “of the politicization of cinemas, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered . . .nobody would touch it with a 10-foot pole.” This is where we are. Jews are being erased from the stories of their own genocide while Hollywood and the cultural elite cheer. The entertainment industry’s antisemitic purge is real — and it’s accelerating. We must call it out. Every single time. Thanks László Nemes for doing so at the risk of your own career. #JewHatred #Antisemitism

Good article. It doesn’t matter which Labour Prime Minister is in Downing Street. “The state of play is even bleaker than it was during the 1970s, when a class-war obsessed Labour Party dedicated itself to taxing the rich until the pips squeaked (as the then socialist Chancellor Denis Healey didn’t quite put it), levied confiscatory rates on high incomes, targeted “speculators” and sent the country into the arms of the IMF as a result.  This time around, it’s not just the very wealthy that are in Labour’s sights, but almost anybody with assets or who wants to improve their prospects in life. When it comes to taxation, it matters little which Labour apparatchik becomes our next PM: all will be even worse than the already terrible status quo.  Rachel Reeves is our worst Chancellor in 45 years, but her successor will be even more damaging.  Every bad idea in tax policy is now mainstream on the Left, especially as candidates to replace Sir Keir Starmer emphasise their supposed fiscal probity and commit to raising more money through taxation, not merely borrowing more of it, to placate the gilt markets.  Investors may at first like this newfound embrace of low budget deficits, but they need to remember that the alternative – effectively confiscating assets from their rightful owners – is something no capitalist society can survive unscathed.  Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, somebody else: they will all increase capital gains tax and probably also inheritance tax.  All candidates will double down on the looming scandal that is the mansion tax, an idea that Miliband helped pioneer.  They all believe that the problem is that the stock of wealth – housing, equities, savings – is insufficiently taxed, and that income from capital (what Marxists call unearned income) is under-taxed compared with income from “work” (or rather, labour, as managing capital also requires work).  Many Labour MPs, in their hearts, believe that the ISA shield against CGT is too generous.  At some point, they will also turn against pension tax relief for the middle classes (high earners have already lost almost all of their tax relief), though we are not there yet.  Burnham repeated his call for a land value tax on Friday, a disastrous idea that – in practice, if not under the unrealistic theoretical construct pushed by economists – would turn into a proto-communist tool to expropriate housing wealth en masse. The Left, wrongly, now almost all believe that the rate at which capital gains tax should be levied must be equaled with that of income tax. This is wrong, for several reasons.  It is possible to construct scenarios under which the state grabs 90 per cent of the value of an income stream.  When will the tax madness end?  There was respite during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, as the Tories (starting in 1979) slashed marginal tax rates and New Labour (as it then was) famously explained that it was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they paid their taxes” (as Peter Mandelson put it in 1998).  In reality, Labour soon succumbed to the politics of spite, taxing pensions and house purchases much more harshly, though it also cut nominal CGT rates. Fast-forward to 2026, and Gordon Brown’s stealth taxes now feel almost benign compared to the horrors that lie ahead of us.  A PM Burnham would be a disaster for taxpayers – but then again, so would any other Labour prime minister” Alistair Heath.

It has been reported that Thames Valley Police want to charge the Oxford Union up to £80,000 for Tommy Robinson’s security at his forthcoming debate. This looks like a blatant abuse of power designed to price the Union out, prevent Tommy Robinson from speaking, and stifle free speech.

Heidi, why do you keep telling porkie pies about the roll out of the 701 trains on South Western? Every time it’s the same old nonsense. The new 701s have got bugger all to do with state control of the railways, they were ordered in 2017 and have been being rolled out for years.