Follow the Money: 'Gripping and horrifying... witty and brilliant. Buy it' The Times

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However, this is a step too far for the book. It takes pains to describe what is and to steer clear of what ought to be. I see this as a weakness because it suggests that we live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a view widely touted by the UK Civil Service, but it is far from the mark. After all, politics is all about shifting priorities in spending and income. The book provides some good source information to fuel these discussions, without actually stating the preferences of the author. Government decisions determine the welfare of the poor and the elderly, the state of the health service, the effectiveness of our children's education, and how prepared we are for the future: whether that is a pandemic or global warming. As a society, we are a reflection of what the government spends. The book has some interesting ideas – a call for the long overdue reform of council tax, a flat-rate VAT, the devolution of more power over spending to local authorities – and the chapter on post-school education is excellent. But it doesn’t really break new ground, pushing up to the boundaries of orthodoxy but never beyond them.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Government decisions determine the welfare of the poor and the elderly, the state of the health service, the effectiveness of our children's education, and how prepared we are for the whether that is a pandemic or global warming. As a society, we are a reflection of what the government spends.

Johnson’s big selling point is that being non-aligned means he can speak truth to power. “In all we do, we try to be objective. We are determinedly independent, we have no axe to grind and certainly no political affiliation.” It is true that he has disobliging things to say about almost every chancellor of the past 30 years, Labour and Conservative. But the left-leaning tax expert Richard Murphy says you can’t really be apolitical if you accept – as he says the IFS does – “all the assumptions of neo-classical economics”. Finally, it's great to see a well-deserved shout-out to Steve Webb for revamping the state pension and introducing DC freedom of choice; but there's still work to be done on UK pensions. Let's be more frank that DB members have it really good (and indeed better than was probably originally intended), and think about ways to improve the new DC world we live in for the current workforce generation. Higher default DC contributions? Is CDC the answer? And is there more that we can do with existing DB assets? I could posture on these all day (let me know if you fancy a coffee or beer 😉), but at the very least the status quo is surely not enough.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Equally, the author assumes that the current structure may not change. We might ask, however, how sustainable the structure might be with ever increasing amounts of debt being added to the existing pile? There is little to help that conversation in this book. For example, there are those who might say that inheritance tax only raising 1/34th of income tax is wrong. They might argue that inheritances from rich people to their heirs ought to raise a larger amount of income. The numbers suggest that even if the inheritance tax take was doubled, after allowing for avoidance and mitigation schemes, it would only allow, for example, a 12% increase in the schools budget. Not to be sneezed at, but not a significant amount, either.