Why we need to get a grip on our government

Our government is trying to do too much, enacting policies that are destructive to the private sector. It needs to drop the the feel-good nonsense and create policies that lead to long-term wealth, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

Keith Joseph
The government needs to listen to Keith Joseph’s ideas again
(Image credit: © Alamy)

Is there a glut of oil on the way? It doesn’t feel like it at the moment. Years of well meaning lack of investment into fossil fuels have tightened the market (the effect being similar to that of the Opec crisis in the early 1970s) and most analysts are now assuming the supply and demand mismatch will last for some years to come. But is this just to make yet another extrapolation mistake?

In most commodity markets, the cure for high prices is high prices – and there is no reason to think this will be any different, says Max King in this week's magazine. Already, governments and investors are busily backtracking on their opposition to fossil-fuel investment and there is likely be a “significant supply response” from Opec, the US (shale) and Venezuela. This time next year and it may be that the £100 tank of petrol is nothing but a distant nightmare, something that could solve a lot of our problems.

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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.