YouSaid · the spoken record

Liam Byrne

lines on the record: 35
first: 2024-03-20
most recent: 2024-03-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, the key bit that we debated tackling in the book was around how you fitted the prescriptions of the book within a framework that was going to help us save the planet. So in the chapter on tax, there's a lot, for example, on how you fix carpet bagging and how you tax capital, but there isn't the ideas about how you tax carbon. That bit just didn't make the cup because we needed a particular kind of focus. Bringing this framework into marrying this framework with the kind of ideas that, for example, Kate Rawarth in Donut Economics has set out is something that I...”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not always popular in Westminster working in this cross party way. But, you know, I've been here 20 years now, and I suppose that the longer I've been here, the more I've recognised that particularly in a world of polarizing politics, we actually have to work harder to find the ideas that we have in common because those are the ideas that will last the course.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fell into four categories. There were ideas around agency. So, how do we make sure that individuals have the agency that they might need to move themselves on and up in life? There were ideas in the realm of asset building, and that's obviously what the book talks about a lot. So helping people build assets in a faster way. There were then lots of ideas about how you support people moving up the ladder. So a lot of ideas in the education space, as you'd imagine, and then lots of ideas about how you equalize investment in places, what I guess is called leveling up. So that agenda around agency, assets, people, and places was quite an interesting takeaway from the big inequality conference that we did last year. And we've got some further work now that is underway with some of our think tank partners and academic partners that we're going to present to a conference in July.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is such a key question, and it's important because unless we can find what John Rules used to call that overlapping consensus between left and right, it's really difficult to safeguard policy continuity. How do you make sure that the work of one government is not simply undone by a change of administration or indeed a change of prime minister, as happened over the last few years? You've got to work harder, I think, in Westminster, where I'm talking to you from now, to find the things that are in common between left and right. So the all-party group on inclusive growth, which is co-chaired by myself and John Penrose, is really, really focused on this task. And so we did a big bit of polling last year across about 40 or 50 different policy measures to try and create a kind of a superset of ideas where we thought there was that consensus. And what was quite interesting about that work is that the ideas basically”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All kinds of enforcement problems. So it's just quite interesting that you can actually begin to saw slots of these ideas from around the world. You can see that they've been tried and tested in lots of different places. But as a politician, I struggled to try and bring all those ideas together, which is why I had to try and produce the book to say, look, there are these ideas out there. Let's think about how you knit them together in a system. And that's the kind of debate that we now need, I think.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, universal basic capital sounds like a new idea, but actually it draws on good ideas from around the world. And then on wealth taxes, I would say this is a more novel area. There's obviously been a range of different wealth taxes that have been tried and have failed in OEC countries. The big insight from the Wealth Tax Commission is that you create a small rate of tax on a small number of very wealthy people. So having a 1% tax on fortunes worth over 10 million, that basically bites on about 22,000 households. The reason that that's important is it allows you as a tax authority to really get to grips with where the assets are, what they are, and how much they're worth. Where you've had tax systems that introduced wealth taxes on a much, much wider group of people, they run into”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Second on the growth side, I mean, we've now got a range of industrial policy taking shape around the world now. That is now very much back in vogue. This idea of mission-driven government is something that Keir Starmer has picked up. If you couple it with quite radical economic devolution, then I think you can have a pretty serious impact on the rate of growth in the UK. And crucially, the supply, the creation and supply of knowledge-intensive jobs, that's important because half the knowledge intensive jobs are in London and the southeast today. And these are jobs which on average in the British economy pay a third more in average wages. So that's an important way to kind of get up the ladder. And there are lots of examples around universal savings accounts, for example. Lots of countries, Singapore is a good example and countries that have got individual learning accounts. And I'm interested in how people build both knowledge capital as well as pension capital and property capital.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In general. So, well, a couple really stand out. So, the fact that 80 countries around the world now have sovereign wealth funds is a really important signal from policy land that sovereign wealth funds are a good way to mobilize investment, which then allows you to create returns, which are quite high.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has done some of the best polling work on this. You can see quite surprisingly high levels of political support across both left and right and between the generations on some quite bold measures. So if, for example, you take the idea of a 1% tax on the 22,000 fortunes that are worth over 10 million, for example, you can actually see very high support levels for this across left and right in between the generations. That's perhaps quite a surprising conclusion. John Penrose, who is my conservative co-chair of the All Party People on Inclusive Growth, is somebody who's argued for equalizing tax on capital gains and regular income, for example, as Nigel Lawson did back in the 80s. So it's fascinating to see now how we're beginning to get to both a detailed description of specific measures, and people are now beginning to build both the economic case for this, but also the political case.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what is now accelerating in policy land is a detailed debate about what are the precise measures. So the Wealth Tax Commission chaired by former Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell laid out a number of really helpful options. There are campaign groups that are looking at the reform of property taxes. And we're now getting into a world where the OECD itself is beginning to look at this kind of option around inheritance tax reform, for example, across OECD countries. So you're now beginning to get a catalogue of specific policy measures. And it's so important to get to the specifics because we know that the way you frame an account of a tax change has a gigantic impact onto the support level. But regardless of those caveats, when you look at the best polling numbers that we've got and Ben Ansel at Nuffield College in Oxford,”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the first point is it's very difficult to do tax policy in opposition. It's quite unwise to do tax policy in opposition because you don't have access to the data that allows you to understand who would be the losers from any particular changes in tax. So these are definitely ideas that are best explored in government. But second, you do need a climate of opinion to take shape. And that's kind of what's happening now around what are broadly called wealth taxes. And the reason for that is because the world has changed. As wealth has multiplied, national household wealth has doubled since the financial crash. But over the course of this century, income from investments has about doubled. So it's about £80 billion at the moment. But broadly speaking, the tax on that investment income is half the rate of tax paid by one in five taxpayers who are now on 40%. So people can see the kind of inequities really clearly.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least let us have a debate about a structured system of ideas that people will actually vote for in a general election.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The question comes well, how do you build a sovereign wealth fund? Well, you can build it an awful lot faster if you restore fairness to the tax system and at a time when a prime minister who earns £2 million a year, Rishi Sunak, is only paying 23% tax, you can see that there's plenty of room to go at there in actually restoring a degree of fairness to the tax system so that you've got a tax system that reflects your moral code. These ideas may be wrong. There may be people with better ideas, but the book, I suppose, is a provocation to the political class and to the think tank class, the academic class. They say, look, here's a set of ideas that you can find somewhere in the world. Each of these ideas have been tested somewhere. They're practical. They're not so radical as to be impossible. If you fitted them together as a system, you could definitely move the dial on inequality. But if people have got better ideas, then let's hear them.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I use that basic checklist to generate the proverbial five-point plan, which is a set of ideas for raising the growth rate, not just in London and the southeast, but across the UK. Something I call civic capitalism, which is about harnessing the power of pension savers to actually channel money to firms that provide good work as opposed to participating in a kind of a race to the bottom on wages and standards. Rather than universal basic income, I suggest something called universal basic capital, which is basically rollout of a universal savings account, which then provides a platform for us introducing a much more progressive regime of tax incentives for savings. Something like a sovereign wealth fund for the UK could be a way in which we can provide a democratic participation in the superior returns that sovereign wealth funds can earn. Sovereign wealth funds earn a return globally of about 8% a year.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, what I sought to do to provide some structure to the solutions was restore the work of James Meade to the center of the policy debate. James Mead was a great disciple of Keynes. He was one of the most important economists.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't get this right, you will get populism continuing to flourish. And I think in a country like ours, the opposite of populism is actually separatism. I think you will get separatist pressures in places like Scotland that become far more pronounced. And you will see separatist pressures across Europe get a lot stronger too as people react to the rise of populists taking over particular capitals. You will have particular regions that just want to go their own way. So the kind of centrifugal pressures on the state will get sharper and sharper unless we come up with a policy mix that actually helps share wealth more fairly.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Martin Wolfe has written very thoughtfully about this, I think, in the relationship between the breakdown of an economy that works for everybody and a political polarization. That will definitely get worse. Martin is right to pin down that trend. It will definitely get worse if inequality does get worse. But what's the solution to that? The solution to that is you've got to build coalitions for change between the bottom 90% and people in the top 10%. And what that means in practice in real life is building coalitions between grandparents, the baby boomers, and grandchildren, millennials and Gen Z because a lot of that asset wealth is concentrated in the hands of the over 65s. And unless we can provide solutions that the over 65s are prepared to vote for, then political progress is likely to be really slow and really difficult.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now basically providing that kind of choreographed mockery of the super rich, which is how we've dealt with upstartish behavior for millennia. But that culture is a warning signal. And the polling behind this is quite interesting. So we ran a poll last year that asked who is the most powerful in Britain. People in Britain today think the top 1% are the most powerful in Britain. Now we ran the same poll four years ago and people thought government was the most powerful. So people have got a sense of how the top 1% now are becoming more and more powerful. And that will almost inevitably have a political impact.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think the state of the country will basically be this. Gen Z will be the most unequal generation that we've had for at least 50 years. But that phenomenon will unfold amongst the generation that is much more connected with social media and much better able to mobilize when it comes to protest. You will end up with an unequal society that is also a much more febrile society. And again, you can already see our culture beginning to give us the warning signs. So this cultural phenomenon, which some call wealth porn, you know, shows like succession or above deck, below deck, or real housewives. I mean, you've got lots of kind of cultural elements.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back in 1970. So if you haven't got assets, if you're asset less, you are increasingly priced out of the market for assets. And at the same time, you're in a cohort, which is much more unequal.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there are. So there are two risks, and writers on the FT, like John Burns Murdoff, have done a great job at just helping us visualize this new inheritocracy. So on the one hand, As the baby boomers shuffle off this mortal coil and bequeath their fortunes to their children, wealth inequality will increase because some will inherit lots and some will inherit very little. The second effect, though, is on asset prices. So when I was born, net household wealth was about three times national labor income. Today net household wealth is worth about 10 times national labour income. So household wealth is a reflection of asset prices. So asset prices are basically 10 times the national labour income. So if you don't own assets today, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to gather together the wages that you might need and therefore the savings you might need in order to buy the assets because the assets are just much more expensive today relative to wages than they were.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In wealth management that allow those that have already got significant assets to safeguard those assets down the generation. So economists like Brooke Harrington at Dartmouth have written incredibly persuasively about how today's wealth management industry stops the kind of traditional cycle of sandals to the stars and back to the sandals in three generations, which has always been a characteristic of capitalist evolution. So on the one hand, you've got the preservation of wealth with a new kind of integrity for the future, but on the other hand, you've got AI potentially destroying a lot of low skill working class jobs. And so there are two big”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this is one of the great risks of the future and it's one of the reasons that we have really got to begin acting now about economic inequalities. So if you take some of the best data around like, say, from Carl Frey and others at Oxford Martin School and apply that to the British economy, you quite quickly get to an estimate that suggests that automation and AI could destroy more jobs than the shutdown of the coal industry and the steel industry put together. And those that are most vulnerable to AI, there are some white-collar jobs in there, but there's also a lot of transportation jobs, a lot of retail jobs, a lot of low-paid jobs, in other words. So AI basically could act as a great destroyer of economic opportunity for those without skills. Now, that is likely to unfold at the same time as new advances.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“you do get some very big and powerful individual individual individuals who have got not just economic power but political power and so that becomes market distorting for everybody else”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which are getting stronger and stronger, but these oligopolies are different now because they can combine network effects as well as using data to lock consumers in. And of course, we now know that it's pretty difficult to escape boom and bust cycles, but when those boom and bus cycles unfold, generally speaking, it's the richer that recover fastest and the poorest which take longest to recover. Now you put all those three things together, you get some very big system effects that lean towards inequality but within that system, you've got entrepreneurs who are often building great businesses but are then trying to guard their positions in the markets through influence on regulation, through influence on tax to basically safeguard the competitive advantages that they've built. And again, that's not a novel insight. That's something that Joseph Schumpeter predicted many, many years ago. But in a global economy,”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is such a good question. So, exactly right. And part of the book, a core of the book is a reflection on what we got wrong in New Labour. I began my career in Millbank Tower in 1996. I was a minister under Tony Blair. We had a particular view of economics. And we've now learned a lot about what was wrong with that economics. There's not been a kind of a new John Maynard Keynes since the financial crash, but there have been some really big insights from the new institutional economists, the Neo-Shumpetarians, and the behavioral economists. And if you put their analysis together, what it basically describes is a story about privileged technopoly and bubble. So people are basically able to acquire privileges or rents very quickly. They will build from that monopolistic or oligopoly.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you have got extreme wealth, it inevitably affects power because, of course, down the generations, if you look at all the great successful entrepreneurs in British history, and my previous book was about the history of British capitalism told through the lives of some of those entrepreneurs, those entrepreneurs are very different, but they have one thing in common. They all end up as quite hungry for power and they all acquire quite serious political influence over the course of their careers. And you can see that same thing happening now.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, they buy or invest in news channels like GB News, for example, GB News brings a political perspective that is predominantly to the right of the right. Many of the people involved in that are journalists who are also writing for center-right newspapers. Many of the ideas that they're writing about are ideas that have been funded on the right in think tanks based in Tufton Street. And so you can begin now to see the way in which a kind of climate of opinion can be influenced by strategic investments in the media, into think tanks, into academia, and of course directly into leadership campaigns, for example.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get to jump to the front of the queue when it comes to the opportunities in life. And you can see traits of all of those three things. Now beginning to bedevil Britain. And it will get worse unless we take a conscious decision as a country to change course.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rolls-Royce cars with a paint job that matches the colour of their jets. And the absurdity of affluence will offend many. Others will say, well, look, people should spend their money how they choose. The thing that really concerns me, though, is less the conspicuous consumption and more the inconspicuous consumption, not of things but of power. And what I see in Westminster now is the way in which extreme wealth turns into Investment in political ecosystems, ownership of news channels, ownership of newspapers, donations into a think tank, direct political donations to a political party, you quickly begin to see inequalities of wealth translate into inequalities of power. And of course,”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was born in 1970 in the holy town of Warrington, and over the course of my life, the wealth of our country has multiplied a hundredfold. So net household wealth in the UK is about 12.2 trillion pounds. That's a big number to get your head around. It's enough to basically pave a path of bullion bars five and a half bars wide from Jai Groves to Land's End. That's kind of how much 12 trillion pounds is. But for most of my life since I was born, the way that we shared that wealth was getting fairer. It was getting more equal. But then things changed in around 2010. So from about 2010, the wealth of the top 1% has multiplied by about 31 times more than everybody else in Britain. And that's part of a global story. And that's why you do now have not one person, but three people racing into space. That's why you do have this extraordinary absurdity of affluence, which is Bernie Sanders' phrase in the book of people buying super yachts.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“but what are the solutions? And we desperately now need 10 years on from that book to identify solutions that people will not only like on social media, but will actually vote for at an election and this election this year could well be the chance to really make that change. So those are the kind of two big reasons, I suppose.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quality is today, it could be about to get an awful lot worse. So as a politician, we worry about the economics of that, but we also worry about the politics of that. And I think there's now more and more political science that shows that those places where wealth is left behind are the places that are much, much more likely to vote for populists like Trump or Le Pen or the far right in Scandinavia, and indeed those were the places that voted for Brexit in the UK. So inequality of wealth has quite big political effects as well as moral effects. And of course, I suppose this is the second reason, really, is that this is the 10th anniversary of Thomas Piketti's great book on capital. And for those familiar with that debate, you'll know that the great challenge that was given to Piquetti by his mentor Tony Atkinson was, okay, look, you've done a great analysis of the problem here.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are now literally running out of food. I have a member of staff who's part of their job is to try and make sure that we have food banks that are well stocked. So we've got levels of poverty now in my city that I've just not seen before and certainly have not seen before in my time in public life. But of course, this is alongside an extraordinary period of wealth. You've got super yacht sales at all time high. Rolls-Royce has just had their best year ever. home prices on Philimar Gardens in London have just now hit 26 million. I mean, you could buy a whole street in my constituency like that. So this is a moment of moral emergency where the gap between rich and poor is just extreme. But of course, what I can see is how it's going to get worse because as the baby boomers die £5.5 trillion is going to cascade down the generations. Some will inherit riches, but some will inherit care bills. And so however bad inequality.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose there's two big motivations. I mean, the first is just the reality of the moral emergency that confronts you as a constituency MP in constituencies like mine in East Birmingham. As some people know, I lost my dad to what was a lifelong struggle with alcohol about eight years ago. That sparked a lot of work in the homeless community in Birmingham. The kind of stories and the people that I was meeting on the streets of Birmingham were just incredibly distressing. I mean, there was at one point on Sunday morning we found somebody lying on the ground in an underpass by a new street station, double amputee, lying by his wheelchair. And he'd been there for two days and he was still dressed in his hospital gown from discharge from hospital. We had food banks in my constituency.”
2024-03-20 · Intelligence Squared · How to Fix the Inequality of Wealth, with Liam Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT