Let’s get back to capitalism

It's time for the government to let capitalism work as it should, and make us all better off, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

We hoped that last week's election would result in a Conservative majority in the UK. We are pleased that it did. We now know that the new pensions freedoms will stay with us; that the welfare system and in particular the tax credit system will continue to be reformed; that there will be no mansion tax, no rent controls and no rises to the top rate of income tax or to national insurance; and that the margins of private companies are no longer at risk of being determined by the whims of public-sector staff.

We were also pleased to see numbers out this week showing wages and employment rising again. As Roger Bootle notes in my interview with him, the UK looks to be in a perfectly "reasonable position".

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.