The worst run city in Britain

Think your town is badly run? Edinburgh's farcical plans to build a tram system have to take the biscuit for the most money wasted by a council anywhere in the UK.

A new competition. This one is for the most incompetent town council in the UK. After careful consideration, I'm going for Edinburgh. You might think this is just because I live in Scotland and almost everyone thinks it impossible for any town to be as badly managed as their own let's not forget that up to £10bn a year is wasted by the nation's useless councillors. But I do think there is a good case to be made here.

Why? The trams.

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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.