Why you should be nervous about Labour's plans

People seem to have forgotten just how bad things were under Labour in the 1970s, says Merryn Somerset Webb. We may soon to have to relearn an awful lot of painful lessons about incentives.

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Jeremy Corbyn: all-singing, all-dancing
(Image credit: 2018 Getty Images)

If the Labour conference this week didn't make you feel a little nervous, you might want to look back at some of the speeches again. They spelled out, as David Smith put it in the Times, an "all-singing, all-dancing left-wing programme for government". Think the effective confiscation of large parts of listed firms for employee benefit trusts and tax grabs; the replacing of up to a third of corporate boards with workers; an awful lot of nationalisation; and a very sharp rise in the minimum wage.

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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.