Peter Smith

Fred Harrison has identified that the markets rarely name the extraordinary valuations placed on SpaceX, Palantir and ChatGPT reflect not their earnings potential but their structural position as rent-extracting monopolies, the mechanism, he contends, through which future generations may find themselves permanently bound and enslaved. Fred Harrison does not do drama for its own sake. He is a careful man. He works from data, from history, from a body of economic theory that most mainstream commentators have either ignored or never encountered. So when he says something is happening, you should pay attention. This week, I sat down with Fred, and what he told me left me genuinely shaken. We started with the news everyone is now starting to notice. The Halifax, Nationwide and the Land Registry have all been stringing together consecutive months of house price falls. The pundits in the Guardian, the Express and the Telegraph are calling it a blip. A flat-lining. A mild correction before pri...

The UK housing market in mid-2026 is suspended in midair. The fundamental ground vanished months ago. Sellers are simply refusing to look down. In classic cartoons, Wile E. Coyote sprints off a cliff and runs on thin air. Gravity takes hold only when he looks down. We are witnessing a textbook market seizure. Real house prices have been falling almost continuously since early 2022. Nationwide data confirms they are down 17.4 per cent, dragging real values all the way back to 2003 levels. The most recent Nationwide figures, released at the start of June, show a 0.6 per cent monthly fall, the first monthly decline of 2026, with annual growth slowing sharply from 3 per cent to just 1.7 per cent. Yet sellers remain anchored to the peak. Zoopla reports 44 per cent of properties listed in the past three years failed to sell. Rightmove shows live listings at an 11-year high. Buyers are tapped out, affordability is broken, and transaction pipelines are frozen. Residential sales in England just...

The Land That Nobody Wants to Tax: Andy Burnham, LVT, and the War Against Rent-Seekers There is an idea so economically sound, so empirically vindicated, and so politically radioactive that it surfaces reliably only when politicians have nothing left to lose. Andy Burnham, launching his tilt at the Labour leadership from a Makerfield campaign event, has reached for it again: a land value tax. He first proposed it during his failed 2010 leadership bid, calling it “an idea so old Labour it can be traced back to Thomas Paine.” Now, fifteen years on, he is back. The question is not whether Burnham is right about LVT. He almost certainly is. The question is whether he understands the forces that will be mobilised against him, and whether the British political system is structurally capable of implementing the one tax reform that could genuinely transform the country’s economic prospects. The Simplest Idea in Economics A land value tax is, at its core, disarmingly simple. Unlike in...

How Green and Rainbow Capitalism Betrays the Poor, Corrupts Progressive Politics, and Leaves a Dispossessed Generation Angry at the Movement That Was Supposed to Be on Their Side This essay advances a single, uncomfortable proposition: that the progressive social movements of the last century (women’s liberation, gay rights, environmentalism, multiculturalism and biodiversity protection) have been systematically co-opted by those whose primary interest is not human flourishing but the extraction of economic rent. Reforms that would return economic rent to the people who create it are blocked, diluted, or reversed. Reforms that redistribute nothing but the language of progress and the symbols of diverse identity sail through. The result is not a ‘progressivism’ that liberates all, but one that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer, and a population that feels the injustice without yet having a name for its cause. In poor communities, progressivism is no longer associated with wage...