January 2026 roundup
Examining the powerful forces and vested interests shaping our economy, and how fairness can restore social cohesion
At the beginning of 2026, we’ve chosen to explore some of the biggest forces undermining the fairness of our economy, including the capture of economic interests by the wealthy and powerful, and the need for a national shared culture to overcome our economic and social challenges.
A reminder that this is a new feature that we are running once a month, at the end of every month, as one of our regular weekly posts (the rest of which will continue to alternate between opinion articles and report summaries, but will also feature interviews with key experts and thinkers). If you would prefer to hear from us monthly rather than weekly (or to stay on weekly but minus the monthly roundups), you can change this by editing your email preferences, but by default you are still opted in to the regular weekly posts (‘Fair Comment’) as well as these monthly roundups.
Harnessing fairness as the foundation of social cohesion
In a guest post, Fairness Foundation Senior Adviser Emeka Forbes made a compelling case for fairness as one of the civic values that can make collective life possible.
At a time when Britain faces a growing crisis of social cohesion, marked by rising polarisation and weakening trust, this argument feels especially urgent. While governments often seek to strengthen communities through targeted investment, Emeka argued that such interventions tend to address symptoms rather than root causes. Upstream lies a more fundamental challenge - a weakening sense of who belongs to a shared national “we”.
Fairness, he suggests, can provide the civic foundation on which rules, norms and expectations rest. A widely held sense of sense of fairness helps establish common rules of the game, anchors a shared national direction, and offers a unifying narrative that can cut across political and cultural divides.
Importantly, it allows people with differing values to recognise one another as sharing the same social space. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for thicker forms of culture, and for a stronger sense of collective ownership over the country we share and the direction it should take.
“Societies that struggle to live together to act together.”
His analysis echoes a growing body of evidence showing how the perception of unfairness is corroding the social bonds that hold communities together. A widespread sense that the economy is rigged, reinforced by extreme wealth inequality and a lack of asset ownership, is undermining trust and driving pessimism.
These themes emerge strongly in the work of the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion. Its recent report, The State of Us, highlights how interconnected pressures are compounded by a failure to sustain meaningful action on cohesion and community life.
Its findings are bolstered by the report produced by This Place Matters, a project led by UCL Policy Lab, Citizens’ Lab and More in Common. Polling for that work last May found that 44% of Britons said they sometimes feel like they are a stranger to those around them, with lower income Britons more likely to feel less trusting and more disconnected from society.
The challenge of cohesion is profound, and forms one part of the Government’s landmark Pride in Place Strategy. Yet as Emeka suggests, such efforts will only be fully successful if the country shares a sense of a national mission, grounded in common values like fairness.
The capture of economic policy by elite interests
This month, we also examined the alignment between economic elites in the UK and political decision-making in an opinion piece by Will Snell.
Lobbying in the UK has long been criticised as opaque, weakly regulated and dominated by wealthy commercial interests.
In recent years, a number of government proposals have been widely perceived to have been diluted by sustained industry pressure - from abandoned plans to tackle carried interest to the decision to spare the banking sector from tax rises.
The mechanisms through which powerful economic interests shape policy are not always straightforward. Distinguishing between overt lobbying, structural bias, and deeper forms of ideological influence is often difficult.
Our piece builds on earlier research by Spotlight on Corruption, which revealed a stark imbalance in access to policymakers. That research found that business and commercial stakeholders secured meetings with decision-makers at a ratio of 23 to one compared with civil society and consumer groups.
Will unpicks the drivers of this gross disparity, pointing not only to lobbying power but to a range of structural factors, including limited state capacity, skewed media incentives, and chronic short-termism in Whitehall. Beyond this, he argues that ideological capture narrows the range of policies considered legitimate, privileging certain economic interests while marginalising others.
The result is a vicious cycle linking economic inequality with political inequality. It is little surprise, then, that our polling suggests that 63% of people believe the very rich wield too much influence over UK politics. Similarly, ONS data shows that 69 per cent of people feel they have little or no say in what the government does.
These perceptions were only sharpened last week as global economic elites convened in Davos for the World Economic Forum. As the event began, new Oxfam research highlighted that billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and that since 2020 billionaire wealth has increased by 81%. Against this backdrop, the concentration of wealth alongside democratic power feels increasingly stark.
Fortunately, the publication of the forthcoming Elections Bill presents an opportunity for the UK government to begin addressing some of these structural failures. For our part, we have been working alongside Transparency International UK to make the case for caps on political donations - a reform supported by 67% of the public in polling released earlier this month.
These measures would represent a meaningful step towards rebuilding trust and curbing the outsized influence of money in British politics.
Interview with Claire Godfrey about monopoly power
Meanwhile, our Senior Researcher Jack Jeffrey sat down with Claire Godfrey from the Balanced Economy Project, an anti-monopoly, pro-democracy organisation, to discuss some of the biggest forces shaping our unequal economy today. You can read the full interview here.
Drawing on her research, Claire set out a clear argument that when too much power is concentrated in too few hands, the consequences are damaging for society as well as for the economy. She outlined how dominant firms gain an outsized influence over public policy, with structural and strategic advantages that allow them to shape markets and limit competition. The result is an economy that stifles genuine entrepreneurship, innovation and dynamism.
Claire illustrated the real-world consequences of anti-competitive markets across a range of sectors - from farmers operating on razor-thin margins while surplus is captured by agribusiness monopolies, to cartel-like behaviour in pharmaceuticals and the growing market-shaping role of large asset managers.
Claire linked the forces of monopolisation directly to rising inequality and the growing public sense that the deck is stacked against ordinary people.
She also reminded us that far from being a natural outcome, market concentration is the result of deliberate policy choices from government. The good news is that policymakers already have the tools to tackle the extreme monopolisation that fuels political influence and reinforces wealth concentration in a self-perpetuating cycle.
However, challenging this settlement requires greater political imagination. As Claire highlighted, the UK has never truly experienced free and fair competition, with rent-seeking and extraction long embedded in the structure of our economy.
“A vibrant economy built on small businesses, entrepreneurship, and dynamism is good for innovation and good for society. But that is impossible without a level playing field.”
A genuinely productive economy with sustainable and inclusive growth will depend on competitive markets and inclusive economic models. Jack’s interview with Claire built on our previous research exploring the flaws of corporate and financial governance, as well as work by the Co-operative Party exploring what ‘Grassroots Growth’ looks like in practice (research that we were delighted to contribute towards).
Claire’s analysis of the need for inclusive growth also complements the research conducted by the Good Growth Foundation in Mind the Growth Gap, which looked at ordinary people’s perceptions of broad-based growth.
This was the first interview of our new monthly series. If you have suggestions for who we might interview next, we’d love to hear from you.
Looking ahead
This month, we examined inequality, the capture of economic policy by powerful elites and the case for a more balanced economy - all underpinned by a shared commitment to fairness as a core civic value. In the coming months, we’ll continue to focus on these challenges and the ideas needed to address them.
Thank you for following our work and being part of the conversation.
Insightful. How to build lasting cohesion?