What are the best ways of raising more money in tax?

Given that whoever wins next week's election will be going on a massive spending spree, we're going to need to raise at least some of that money through taxation. What's the best way of going about it?

Jeremy Corbyn © Leon Neal/Getty Images

Jeremy Corbyn: hey, big spender
(Image credit: Jeremy Corbyn © Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Right. Here are your choices. Next week you can vote for Labour and £83bn of extra spending. You can vote for the Lib Dems for £63bn of extra spending, or you can vote for the Tories and £2.6bn of extra spending. We'd be over the moon if there was a party you could vote for that was prepared to open a conversation about how to cut the size of the state as a percentage of GDP, rather than keep promising to spend more, more, more. Failing that, we'd fancy a full-on revamp of the system in its entirety. We could start with the introduction of a land-value tax as a replacement for all other taxes on land and property.

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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.