Maxwell Marlow

There is something poignant about Andy Burnham's campaign for water nationalisation. In a previous life, the ‘King of the North’ was Health Secretary in the twilight days of Gordon Brown's government. From his throne on Victoria Street, he saw the NHS groan under chronic underfunding and managerial sprawl. Now, with his eyes set on Downing Street, he is promising that placing sewage pipes under government control will somehow produce a different result to what he saw when running the health service.

England’s student debt is staggering. It comes to £270 billion – that’s larger than the budget for the NHS and two and a half times larger than the education budget. This arsenal of taxpayer-backed cash has seen the creation of 34 new universities just to feed an ever-hungrier mass of undergraduates. It’s forecast that by the late 2040s, this loan balance will reach £500 billion. These loans are not standard financial arrangements. They don’t affect the debtors’ credit ratings, only their mental health when they check their bank balance. Crucially, most loans are also wiped after 30 years from graduation.

Forty-five per cent of 24-year-olds who are not in education, employment, or training – known as 'NEETs' – have never had a job. Not a Saturday shift at a café, not a summer stacking shelves, not an entry-level role that teaches you what an invoice or balance sheet looks like. Alan Milburn, former Labour health secretary and now chair of the government's own young people and work review, delivered this verdict this week with the weary authority of a doctor who knows the patient is deteriorating but cannot persuade them to change the treatment. The latest figures from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) confirm what anyone with a passing familiarity with employing people will know.

Worry not, dear taxpayer, there are more bills for you to pay. Not only must you pay for the lockdown that kept you in your cramped apartment for a disease that didn’t affect you, and don’t forget the deficit payments of over £100 billion a year – really, you should just shrug it off. Even if you have your expensive degree, which creates negligible returns, and levelled with record living costs and taxation, you can of course pay for more benefits for a small minority of retired people who didn’t pay attention to changes in their state pension benefit.

A rare kernel of hopefully good news has been circulating the Treasury. No, we haven’t yet paid off the £2.7 trillion debt, and the state pension is still on path to imploding in a decade’s time. Instead, Britain’s most destructive and ambition-killing tax is for the chop and is to be replaced with a much more sensible system. Property prices have risen by 259 per cent since 1997, with wages only rising by a lowly 68 per cent Stamp Duty Land Tax has its origins in Regency England, and as the name suggests, it originally was levied on stamped documents in order to fund Britain’s war against Napoleon. In 1815, the stamp duty on a newspaper was an extortionate 4d – James Mill, father of John Stuart, wrote that the tax amounted to censorship by taxation.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting says that the changes to the Welfare Bill will 'give people peace of mind'. Perhaps for some, but certainly not economists. Britain’s welfare crisis is staggering – £313 billion a year is spent on disability payments, Universal Credit, winter fuel payments, Motability, child benefit, and, most expensive of them all, the state pension. Currently, the state pension costs  over £150 billion a year, and is engineered to grow at the highest of either inflation, wage growth, or 2.5 per cent. When you factor in our rapidly aging population, the welfare state is quite literally primed to blow. Whitehall is on a collision course of its own making.