July 2026 roundup
From the billionaire wealth machine of private equity to the tax system’s built-in bias against work, we make the case for making fairness the organising idea of a Burnham government
Ordinary wealth in every postcode
This month saw a new Prime Minister take office and a new Government take shape. In response, our Head of Politics & Advocacy Jason Bunting set out why tackling extreme economic inequality should be the defining test of Andy Burnham’s government, and how he might go about meeting it.
We outlined how wealth now plays a bigger role in shaping life chances than at any point in living memory, and how the inability of people across the UK to build ordinary levels of wealth is frustrating growth, cohesion and faith in democracy.
In fact, the new Prime Minister’s own diagnosis, that Britain has concentrated political power in London while privatising and deregulating the economy, matches our research on a widening wealth gap caused by the extraction of value from our economy, and an economic model where too many don’t share in the same proceeds.
Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s. Political power was centralised and economic power was privatised. The country surrendered control of the essentials – housing, water, energy, transport - and left people exposed to higher costs. That in turn led to the concentration of more wealth and power in the hands of fewer people and fewer places.
Andy Burnham, on becoming Labour Party Leader
To address these challenges, we argue that redistribution alone won’t be enough. Instead, the new Prime Minister needs a programme that reshapes how wealth is created, shared and governed, including through more effective fiscal devolution, improvements to the taxation of wealth, and the creation of more guardrails between money and political power - including by capping political donations.
The Billionaire Factory
In the next instalment of our monthly interview series, our Head of Policy & Research Jack Jeffrey spoke with award-winning author Hettie O’Brien, author of The Asset Class, about how private equity became one of the most powerful forces reshaping the UK economy. O’Brien traces the industry’s roots to a reaction against managerial capitalism, explains how Britain became PE’s “experimental laboratory” thanks to its aggressive privatisation agenda. She also unpacks how firms have loaded unsustainable debt onto companies, as in the case of Thames Water, to enrich a small group of financiers rather than to invest in productive capacity. O’Brien is sceptical of the industry’s pitch that channelling pension savings into private markets “democratises” returns, arguing that it looks more like creating powerful coalitions against reform.
She also called attention to the “explosive political potential” for mobilisation posed by the sectors now infiltrated by private equity, including water, housing and care. She highlighted the example of local campaigners like Becky Malby in Yorkshire, who has led a campaign to hold the environmental regulator in the water system accountable. Given the deep dissatisfaction with the cost and quality of public services in Britain, it’s not hard to see how a powerful coalition could be built in opposition to value being siphoned away from them by damaging forms of private equity.
In the context of a new government which is explicitly seeking to challenge the power of vested and private interests in our economy, the role of private equity in our public services will become ever more important over the coming months.
AI will kill off the lingering myth of meritocracy
This month, we released a new piece from our Chief Executive Will Snell, who argues that AI won’t just automate some jobs or create labour market displacement, but could help to finish off the idea that reward tracks merit.
Where the existing critique of meritocracy rests on unequal starting points (talent, family wealth, geography), AI removes something that survived even that critique: the ability to infer effort and skill from what someone produces. When anyone can generate a competent strategy document or piece of code in minutes, the signal that work sends about the worker starts to dissolve, and reward shifts instead toward whoever owns the model, the data and the compute.
His conclusion is that if we can no longer credibly claim people’s place in society reflects their merit, we need a different basis for deciding how resources and status are distributed.
Will’s analysis links to our founder Julian Richer’s comments on why acknowledging our own good fortune would make the world a better place. In that piece, Julian argued that many people under-estimate the role that luck has played in our lives, and that a greater admission on the part of successful people of the role of luck in that success would help policymakers to act on inequality.
The right should not tax work more than wealth with Bright Blue’s Centre Write
While taxing wealth is sometimes seen as the preserve of the left, in this piece for Bright Blue’s Centre Write magazine, Will makes a case aimed squarely at a centre-right audience. In it, he argues that action to rebalance Britain’s 4% average tax rate on wealth versus 33% on work should be as much their cause as anyone else’s.
Will explains how taxing work in this way more than wealth bends incentives away from genuine graft and enterprise and toward rent-seeking, distorting competition by unfairly rewarding incumbents over challengers.
Reforms like equalising Capital Gains Tax with Income Tax (last attempted by Nigel Lawson) would raise an estimated £11.3 billion a year. Yet beyond arguments for revenue raising, the real centre-right case is that rewarding work more than wealth properly rewards opportunity, freedom and market competition, all values at the heart of a centre-right case for a fairer economy.
How to get Britain behind Burnham’s new vision
Finally, we were pleased to be featured on the HopeWorks blog this month, as Will asked what it will take to convert the new Prime Minister’s bold rhetoric on wealth and power into public support for action. His answer is to frame reform around fairness rather than equality: the “fair necessities” of fair essentials, opportunities, rewards, exchange and treatment. That framing can help transform the strong public support for tackling inequality (our polling suggests 85% of Britons are worried about inequality) into a powerful mandate for change, anchored in the shared principle of fairness. It can present a nuanced and concrete way of thinking and talking about fairness, helping the Prime Minister to deliver on his bold political vision in a way that brings the country with him.
Will’s argument previews arguments from his upcoming book The Fair Necessities: Why We Need a Fairer Britain and How to Make It Happen, which is out on 8 September with Policy Press. The launch event is on 8 September at King’s College London (register in person or online).
In the coming months, we’ll continue to explore these issues and more. As ever, if you’d like to support our work or collaborate on upcoming projects, please do get in touch.