The UK is the most unequal high-income country

31:17And so it was announced as the flagship program of Boris's government. That's what Michael Gove said, who was the minister for levelling up. The flagship program of the government. The flagship didn't have any money. And so the ship never left port. There was nothing was done. How much are you talking about in terms of spend? Do you know? So the whole budget for levelling up was about$4 billion. $4 billion sounds a lot of money. The cost of the overrun of the Elizabeth line was$5 billion. And that was quietly slipped by the Treasury, that$5 billion. So, okay. So we start with$4 billion. spread over four years, billion a year.

32:11And then we discover that 90 % of that money which was allocated has never been spent. 90 % of it unspent. Why? Because the proposal, The system was that the local governments around the country could put in bids for how they would spend this four billion. And 90 % of those bids was vetoed by the Treasury because it didn't trust them. And so we ended up with 400 million spread amongst the 50 million people plus. It's not very much money. In fact, the technical word for it is peanuts. And so this was a complete sham is a word. It was the pretense of doing something. I compare it with a really successful program in which a region was financed to catch up.

33:25And this is East Germany after the reunification with West Germany. That happened in 1992. And the head of the German government at the time, called Kohl, he was a conservative, like Boris. but he was absolutely serious about getting the East to catch up with the West. And so first thing he did was to say, well, this will take a generation. It'll take at least 30 years. So I won't be in power, nor my party for 30 years. So we have to make this a cross-party commitment. So from the very start, the commitment to enabling East Germany to catch up was endorsed by all the political parties. So it was cross-party.

34:21He didn't use it for party advantage. Did Boris do that? I don't think so. Then he said, this is going to be big money for a long time. We're going to have to raise taxes. Did Boris say we've got to raise taxes? I don't think so. Is Rishi Sunak, did he promise to raise taxes? I think not. He was all talking about tax cuts. So what did Cole do? He said, we're going to raise taxes. And he raised them a lot. And he said, this has got to be a moral commitment. It's a moral duty of every West German to pay these taxes. It's a moral duty because we're all citizens of the new united Germany. And the successful people, as in the West, we've been lucky to be in the West.

35:19That wasn't a decision by us to be in the West. It was dictated by where the Allied armies, where the Russian armies stopped and the British and American armies started. That was an arbitrary line. We were in the lucky half of Germany. and so we've got a moral duty to support our less fortunate citizens. That was a moral duty. Is anybody saying that now? Is anybody saying to you in London, you've got a moral duty to help the left behind in the north? I don't hear it. Do you? Last time we recorded, Temein, you were having some real dramas with your accountant. So how's that been going, mate? They're sacked.

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38:33What's the incentive to, to do this beyond its morally right? Improve the economy. I can understand why someone would go to me, well, I don't really care about you, Damien. Like, you know, I'm okay down here. Are you happy with Brexit? Not at all. No. Why did Brexit happen? Because every region of England, except London, voted in favour of Brexit. Why did they do that? Because they were angry and despairing. Yeah, and they wanted something better. And they just then got sold a lie. So they protested to do this vote. Yeah, it was a protest vote. And who was the guy spinning the lie that, oh, with Brexit, things will all be wonderful?

39:13It was a guy called Boris. So Boris sold a lie very successfully to all the regions of England other than the southeast. Who lost? The whole nation, including London. Would it have been better if Londoners had... Let's relive history, right? So it's now not 2024. It's, let's say, 2000. It was a long time ago, 24 years. Would it be better if you, alive then in London, had said, actually, we better stop this divergence of the north from the south continuing? 100%. The country would be in a much better place. We'd probably still be in Europe. We would be still in Europe, for sure, because it was shooting everybody in the foot, including most especially the north of England.

40:12The north of England actually exports stuff to Europe. London doesn't export that much stuff to Europe. It's a world centre. And so London was less affected by Brexit than the north of England. So the north of England shot itself in the foot because it was misled. But that's because London didn't care enough to look after the rest of the country. A lot of development in Manchester as well was European funding. So European Union structural funds. Unlike Britain, the European Union took seriously the fact that poorer areas were diverging from richer areas. And so it created a big fund called the Structural Funds, which was allocated exclusively to the regions that were falling behind.

40:57That's why Manchester and much of the north of England got structural funds. It's crazy the way that, not in the EU, but Europe is doing more for Manchester than the north than the UK is. It is crazy, isn't it? It's like a broken system, but everyone's just happy to keep going on with it. It is a broken system. Do you think it will change with a new government? I don't know. I'm not a fortune teller. But what we can do is set out practical agendas, hopeful agendas, which show how other places have recovered. and many other places around the world have recovered from being left behind, partly using their own initiative and partly using help, appropriate help, which doesn't come saying we know what to do.

41:52It comes with ears. We need more ears and less mouth by the centre, by London. and strategies which say, what would help you? What are your ambitions? What are you trying to do? And how can we help you do that? What will happen? At the moment, we've got city region mayors all around the country, and that's a good system. We can build on that. If the city region mayors were given more monies, more powers, then they would experiment. Some would be more successful than others, but they learn from each other. We could have a network of the mayors of city regions who would meet periodically and say, who's tried stuff that's working?

42:48Who's tried stuff that's not? We can learn from failures. We can learn from successes. So it's not a matter even of teaching Whitehall from the north of England, it's a matter of very often of getting a network group of city region mayors who learn from each other. In the process, Whitehall will learn, but the basic lesson that Whitehall needs to learn is modesty. That might take a while. And we can characterise it as, I think I'm doing this, London versus England, like the rest, but is it actually that or is it just this arrogance amongst elites. It's the arrogance amongst the elites. Was it good for London that we got Brexit?

43:35Of course. There's a lot of poor people in London as well, isn't there? I mean, it's just going, I'm not loaded here. Absolutely. We go back to housing. Are you going to get a house in London? Could we take a look at some of the examples where devolution has worked and what that's done to that economy? Because again, I get what you're saying about it's morally right, but I just think most people are, they're selfish to their nuclear family, rightfully so. That's the way we are. We care about ourselves and we care about the kids we have. We don't really care about some abstract northerner. No, we don't.

44:07We care about our own family first. We are, just let me counter that for a little bit, we have evolved through the fierce furnace of evolution so that nearly all humans died out in that fierce furnace. When we came down from the trees and walked about on two legs, We weren't very well designed for what we encountered. Did we have protective scales? No. Did we have claws? No. Could we run fast? I could. Faster than we can now. Faster than Damien, I think. I'm faster than Damien. Not by cheetah's standards. Faster than a leopard? No. And so nearly all human communities died out in that fierce furnace evolution, the only communities that survived were the ones that learnt how to be pro-social within the community, how to help others within the community.

45:12And so we evolved to be the most pro-social mammal of the whole class of mammals. right we're more pro-social than chimpanzees more pro-social than any other mammal right yes we can be dragged down to be selfish and lazy and just concerned about our little family but we're hardwired by evolutionary process to care for more than that to care for a group to support a group. And so we can be more pro-social than just me, me, me. Cities are examples of that, aren't they? Massive collections of individuals all working together. Absolutely. You can have a community, not only in a place, but in a firm.

46:06Bourneville, Cadbury's firm, was a good example of a big firm that had people who had a sense purpose beyond just making money for themselves. So they had pride and skill, but they also had a sense of being in a community of work. So we shouldn't be too pessimistic about saying we're all just greedy, selfish, lazy people. We can be dragged down to that if we are put on a bonus culture and rewarded for being a shit or if we're completely despairing and just get frantic i have no choice like it's me and my family or or him the guy next door and i've got to take off his place yeah the end of the world kind of stuff that's right so we can be dragged down but our more natural mode is to be raised up not to be saints saints ain't on the menu in human life right but working together working together is yes and that's that makes us feel a lot better about ourselves.

47:09So you asked examples of where have people done that. And one example I like, since we've got Spanish experience in our team, let's go to Spain and let's go to the Basque region of spain now the basque region of spain if we go back 40 years was a dreadful mess it was um an industrial a post-industrial town where the the industries had upped and left so it was like sheffield like pittsburgh yes like the north of england now so it was desolate in that sense but it was worse because it was bitterly divided. It's a very weird language, the language that the Basques speak. It's like no other language in Europe.

48:08And so there was a very strong Basque separatist movement that said, we don't want to be in Spain at all. So this was a bitterly divided a place in an industrial wasteland. Do investors come to places which are conflict, violent-ridden industrial wastelands? No. So this was a place, a whole region that was spiralling down. And then it started to spiral up. How did it do it? Not by good political leadership. that came later. It came up from a bottom-up movement, which had been founded by one pretty modest padre, a Catholic priest, who'd gone to a small town when he was young, and that was his job.

49:07He was the padre there. And he felt this sense of, what I need to do in this wreck of a town is create people who are pro-social, but know how to found businesses and grow them. So it's back to SME growth. And he spent years training a small team of people who could do that. Eventually, he said, I've got five of you who are as expert as this now as I am. you five now start you go each of you found a business and they did and and they all got this moral philosophy and all got these skills of what you've got to do is grow the business but then spin it off so that we found we found another business some of us leave and do the same thing and that kept going by now it's one of the biggest companies in the whole of spain it's got 90 000 direct employees it's a cooperative and the cooperative businesses all around the basque region keep coming together to found in common things that they need they need training and skills it's crazy if each business does all the training so they've founded colleges of technology which do the training for all the young Basques in Spain.

50:39So that's a story of coming together. Bilbao is now, the Basque region is now pretty well the most prosperous region in the whole of Spain. It's been lifted up by that bottom-up process of long-term thinking, not the source of short-termism of the treasury coming together, not the divide and rule North versus South, and the modesty of saying, you know, we can't do it all in the Basque region. We're going to have to look out to others and bring something in. And that worked. Yeah, it's like they're a region, so they're not as competitive with each other in the same way that maybe Manchester and Liverpool, there's only 40 minute drive separates them.

51:32They might be able to collaborate. I mean, they did in the past, didn't they? Manchester processed the cotton, dug canals all the way to Liverpool and shipped it out and both cities linked. For heaven's sakes, and rather a long time ago, there was something called the Wars of the Roses where Yorkshiremen fought Lancastrians. It's very long time ago. Maybe it's time that we realised that the whole of the North has been left behind, and only if we've got a common voice, and only if we don't say it's us against the South, but it's all of Britain against this absurd over-centralisation, short-termism that has dragged us from being a major economy to where going down and down and down.

52:29We were, in the past, a place where if you were born in Britain, you said, yes, I'm born in the best place in the world. And now, if you're a youth born in Britain, unless you're in the lucky, gilded minority, you say, I'm really anxious about my future. A lot of disadvantages. Yeah. So it's possible to be very much better than what we've been doing. But you said that you worked with the people that had the power to fix that. They made a load of promises and then they put no money there. So did they just not care? They weren't serious. And you're talking about the previous government. So Boris, Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove was the level up?

53:23Gove was the person I knew best. I had a lot of respect for Gove until very near the end. But by the end, I think the only honest thing for Gove to have done, knowing that he'd got no money, no chance of levelling up, but he was succeeding. The only honest thing for him to have done would have been to be resigned publicly or at least threatened to do that and say, unless this is properly funded and a proper cross-party commitment built to do this, then I'm resigning because it's a deception. It's a farce, yeah. Yeah, and he didn't do that. And so I lost respect for him. I think he connived at a deception.

54:14He was more loyal to his party than he was to the country. You made the brave decision to step away from that, though, and you spoke out, didn't you? I sure did, yes. Yeah, even though, obviously, working with government, you're made to sign all sorts of things. So I just want to commend you for that. I probably breached some... Yeah, I hope you're not going to get sued. You signed NDAs or whatever, and you spoke out because you felt so passionate about it. Yes, because I felt my duty to the people of the country was much greater than my duty to this particular government and its agenda. But what doesn't make sense to me is that if the Treasury, the government invests in the North, it's going to generate more revenue.

55:02And isn't that the whole, the money makes the world go on? Isn't that the aim of the government to generate GDP for the country? You've forgotten the short-termism, right? It's got to pay off this year. In the next four years or something. It's got to pay off this year. Never mind this four years. It's got to pay off right now. Yeah. And it won't. Because this is a thing that will take 30 years. Yeah. Start now. If we never start, do you know how long it'll take? Eternity. Forever, yeah. How long did it take in the Basque region? Was it around 30 years? Yes. It's a long time, of course. but these processes, you can crash a country pretty fast.

55:44The building up is slower. The people who crash a place pretty fast, think of Liz Frost, right? So you can drag a country, you can break a country really fast. Building it back up, there's nothing on the menu that says, oh, this is instant. Of course it will take time. and if you don't start it will take eternity so get started you have to ask the existential question does this matter for our country or not if it doesn't matter then don't do it don't waste money on it does it matter that we've got a divided country that's spiraling down my god that is existentially important, that we've got masses of young people who are very anxious about their future, that we're just leaving people with no chance of a better life.

56:45This really existentially matters. We've got to have a country that works for all our young people. At the moment, it only works for a privileged minority. How, I mean, ask anyone in the North and they would say that investment in the North is important and that it's lacking. And they've tried to vote for that through voting for people for leveling up and the Northern powerhouse and these ideas that were sold to them. And then there was just a lie to get power. So how does an individual really do any more than that? It would be nice if we had a constitution, which of course we don't. It would be nice if we had the German constitution, which we certainly don't, although we helped to design the German constitution after the war.

57:27So Germany has the constitution, which we worked out in Britain, together with, for example, trade unions. British trade unions had a hand in designing the future constitution of Germany, because we'd won the war. So Germany didn't design its constitution, we did. How does the constitution help? Well, there's a law called the Basic Law, which says public spending on infrastructure per person has to be the same in every region of the country. That seems like such a simple, logical rule. Let's just process that. So what you're saying is that school spending isn't the same for kids everywhere. It is.

58:11That kids are treated unequally in the north. Absolutely. And transport expenditure. Yeah. You can see that clearly, the transport. Have you heard of HS2? Yeah. I was about to bring it up. I'm like, yeah. Wouldn't that be quite a quick return on investment? Because people can use, once it's built, obviously, if it ever gets built. But like once it was. It's cancelled. Yeah, it's been cancelled. But it might change their minds. They salted the earth. You could have either said, okay, we're going to build a transport system like that. You could actually have, I mean, it was quite expensive. It was something north of 100 billion.

58:47You could have said to the mayors around the country, if you had your share of this 100 million you meet together would you collectively say what we want is hs2 right if they'd met collectively and said well here we got 100 million between us what's the best use they might have come up with hs2 they might not my guess is probably not probably not idea they've probably got more pressing issues in getting to london and up north quicker. Yeah, yeah. But if you're faced with the choice HS2 or nothing, you'll take HS2. And of course, they say HS2. Is HS2 ever going to be built? Well, first, they decided to build it just the leg from London to Birmingham, and then possibly on to towards Manchester.

59:41Then, when they decided, oh, that's too much money, they decided, we'll just build it London to Birmingham and then they decided oh god when when people in the the home counties started to protest they decided oh it's too expensive to do this so so the train as planned goes from Birmingham to nowhere not an awful lot of people want to go from Birmingham to nowhere or from nowhere to Birmingham. But the trains will be HS2 trains, which are these super high speed ones that don't have many carriages and don't have many seats. But if you run them as far as Birmingham, then they have to continue on, but on the old railway lines up to Manchester or up to Sheffield, but then they're much slower and have many fewer seats than the existing trains.

1:00:44So we've got a... If VHS2 as planned gets built, it will reduce the train services anywhere north of Birmingham. They'll have less trains. They don't have enough trains already. The capacity is already terrible. Yeah. So it'll be worse. It'll be slower. It'll be fewer seats. And it will cost about 50 billion. So this is truly crazy. How on earth did we get that decision? All these intelligent people that are making these decisions, shouldn't they have like, anytime you take on a project, you like do a Gantt chart, you do like risks and rewards and strengths and opportunities. How did they not run all the numbers, figure out all the logistics before they started rather than you've already started building and then you're like, oh, wait a minute, this could be expensive.

1:01:34Oh, wait a minute, this is a problem. So you take one decision one year and then next year you take another decision. And so they've layered these decisions. So at the moment, heaven knows what our new government is going to be doing about HS2. I hope it's going to be rethinking it. And probably the best thing at the moment is just to cancel the whole thing. If we build, if we spend 50 billion, we've already spent quite a lot, I should say. But if we keep on spending and finish with what's planned, it is ridiculous. So that is a spectacular example of very clever people who know nothing about train transport, taking what seems very good decisions year by year and ending up in something that is laughable.

1:02:32So the decision structure that achieved HS2, it's the same sort of decision structure that has achieved a lot of other things. like you've heard of the post office scandal. Scandal after scandal after scandal of these crazy short-term decisions where no team across disciplines and across ministries and across places actually comes to review the decision, to forge a decision together. You mentioned Labour, and I know Tamayn already asked, but do you think Labour will be better at facilitating national conversation, discourse and decisions? Well, there certainly won't be worse. One hopeful sign is that one of the cans that has been kicked down the road is a lot of local governments are financially underwater.

1:03:39They've been given a whole load of liabilities and no money to achieve them. technically that is the prerogative of the sucker right you're going to carry the can for failure and so the mayors of these local governments are at the moment designed to carry the can for failure but nearly all of them are labour and so my hope is that the labour team in Whitehall will talk closely with the Labour teams in all the city region authorities and they'll learn an awful lot by listening to their regional mayors and the first thing those regional mayors are going to tell them is we need more powers and more money not more obligations so yeah i'm a little bit hopeful do you see the bankruptcy of birmingham as part of this then where you're saying they're carrying of course they're carrying the can yes they're carrying the can now to be fair the city the mayor of the city region of birmingham and his street was really very good um and uh he'd won a lot of respect he he he lost by only a thousand votes which given the disgrace of the Conservative Party, which was his label, is not surprising.

1:05:11But we need people like Andy Street. There's got to be a fight for the soul of the Conservative Party over the next four years. And I very much hope it's won by people like Andy Street and not by people we won't name. Could you put a number? I mean, if the IFS put a number on how much money that needs to be spent in the North, you had a budget of 4 billion, you only got 400 million. So 4 billion was peanuts. I mean, the budget for Germany to enable East Germany to catch up was 70 billion euro per year. Inflation per year. 70 billion a year. 70 billion a year for 30 years. This is big money. they had a big institution called kfw which had 7 000 people working in it all devolved to the cities in east germany so there was devolved and they were hugely well financed and the they were spending money in the regions that were in the cities that mattered learning how to do it with the regions.

1:06:22So a city like Dresden, which was a train wreck, recovered over the 30 years. Some other cities that had their money spent the money less well and so took longer to recover. That's inevitable in the devolved system. Not everybody's going to do the same thing, but you do learn rapidly. And that process of learning rapidly through doing things differently in different places is a very important principle that is anathema to Whitehall. Whitehall wants to come up with, we know the solution and we're going to impose it everywhere at once. And that's a recipe for getting things wrong and never learning.

1:07:08do you think we have the ability or the potential in the uk to do a long-term project with which goes across different parties or different governments for like 30 years how would they work together like labor and conservatives working together on a long-term for that why can't because they always it's like we had it in the past if we go back to the 1950s That was an era which is colloquially known as butsculism, because Butler was the conservative, Gates School was the Labour leader, and they worked together with a very similar philosophy. Butsculism was a cross-party set of ideas. And so we once did it in the 1950s.

1:07:53We can get back to those habits of doing things together. We don't have to stand at the dispatch box in parliament and rubbish the other party. It's like we're following America, and it's just like put all the dirt and smear on the other party. And so then you can't imagine the Democrats and the Republicans working together because they hate each other so much. So it kind of feels like we're going in that direction, but not as intense. But you know, in the past, America, there was a lot of cross-party support, A lot. So America was the classic example for years, decades, of the parties working together to fix problems.

1:08:32We've got the cities that we could test it in just up north. You could name five, six big cities. You could have different approaches. And it sounds great, but 70 billion. I mean, net zero is meant to cost 50 billion a year for 20, 30 years, isn't it? So where is that money going to come from? Okay. So if we can, believe it or not, it will come from something called taxes. And remember, that's what Chancellor Kohl explained to Germans. This is going to cost real money, and so we're going to have to raise taxes. He called it the solidarity tax. And it was a good name for a good cause. We have to show solidarity with the people who've been left behind.

1:09:16And by God, the people of East Germany had been left behind. At the time of unification, East German productivity was only 20 % of West German. Now it's 85%. I work with Germans a lot. They think it's a failure because it's still only 85%. I say, you stopped just a few years too soon. You should have kept going because getting from 20 % to 85 % is a big success. East Germany, when it unified with West Germany, productivity was much lower than South Yorkshire. Now, it's much higher. So whatever was being done in East Germany really, really worked. And whatever's been done in South Yorkshire, to South Yorkshire, I should say, whatever's been done to South Yorkshire.

1:10:12Nothing's been done in it. It really, really hasn't worked. So could we please learn from other places that managed to achieve this catch-up? But what about things, you know, the cost of living? The tax rate is probably the highest it's been since World War II. And the current tax rises that are implied in terms of fiscal drag, freezing of tax bans for the next three years, are just enough to balance the books. There's no extra money there. So it's going to be a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. Let's have a look at some of these tax rates. Yeah. Yeah.

1:10:45In the 1950s, 60s, 70s, the top tax rate on income was, I think, 83%. Top tax rate on income now is 45%. But actually, there are a lot of loopholes so that, you know, If you're running a private equity firm, your top tax rate is much lower than the 45%. If you're running a venture capital firm, you have what's called carried interest. And carried interest is gains which are, again, taxed much lower than 45%. So the British tax system is full of loopholes that means some very rich people end up paying very little. If you're rich enough and you can pay good enough lawyers, you can pass on your money to your children pretty well tax-free.

1:11:55Yeah, a bit of farmland and some other things. Yeah, exactly. The likes of us, it's unaffordable. So when you're saying tax, you talk about taxing the rich or taxing, closing loopholes. Because I think the middle earners find that a hard message to swallow of, you need to pay more tax. Absolutely, because the middle earners, I get paid well by academic standards. You're not rich though. But I'm not rich. But my marginal tax rate on my salary from the black school in Oxford, my marginal tax rate is 60%. Yeah. So I'm a middle earner that's paying 60%. One of the tax traps. Yes, I'm in one of the, that's right.

1:12:41And then I'm, I was the last academic to buy in my street. My street is a fancy street now. It's full of Maseratis and things like that. those guys are probably on a couple of million a year and their marginal tax rate is probably pretty low and they've already designed it so that their children will inherit it all tax-free. So that's the bitter reality. But this is what people want to hear. You're basically saying the solution to the problem is to tax people who are avoiding tax-free loopholes and you think that there's enough money within that sphere to fund. Yes. You know, it's not... Certainly to get going.

1:13:22It doesn't need to be VAT, income tax or national insurance. No, no. There's plenty of places where we can close loopholes. Council tax would be nice. I guess, you know, all those big houses in Mayfair that pay the same as a three-bed semi. Absolutely. It's preposterous. We last valued houses in 1992, which is preposterous. I mean, you see the movement now in terms of taxing the rich. We had Gary Stevenson on, and he's generated a massive following from that message. So when I heard you say we need to raise tax, I was thinking, oh, people are not going to like to hear income tax. But the fact that you think there's enough money there, that you've done the research and within the richer cohorts, you know, to get started, like you said.

1:14:09Let's get started for the next five years, do that. Yeah. And then see. Then see. It may be that we need to raise some of the major taxes. But in that case, if you've got enough to show for the first five years, then people will be more willing to accept it. Can be honest and say, you know, yes. Here's some results. Yeah. The productivity's gone up, GDP growth. And again, Left Behind is full of examples where people in other places managed to make an agenda of we're going to pay more tax popular. was a vote winner because they tied that extra tax to real things that real people wanted yeah it feels like everyone knows what the right thing to do is it's the politicians who don't um i've got my eye on the time because i know you've got some important places to be after this but i could listen to you talk about this all day honestly the politicians are too scared of the voters but you get voters that you in a sense you get the voters you deserve and so our politicians really do need to learn how to communicate well and then speak truth.

1:15:19Yeah, that's a great place to end it. Hey guys, did you know that we summarized all of our episodes in the newsletter? You can find a link in the description. And please remember, this is not financial advice. Like we say a lot on the podcast, investments can fall and rise. In fact, it's pretty much a guarantee. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. So your money is at risk with investing and other fees may apply. As with everything financial, please do your own research. We really encourage that because no one cares more about your money than you. I'm Damo. Antti. This was an episode of Making Money from Our Company Most.

1:15:52It was filmed and edited by the team at Flowspire, Jack and Ben. It was produced by Ruth Edwards and brought together by Will Stollerman. What about Ruth and Toothless a Dog? Yeah, shout out them too.