The Conjuring Trick: Private Equity and the Manufacture of Value

PE's flattering story: buy tired firms, fix them, sell them fitter. It survives by omitting the mechanism — debt loaded onto the target, fees taken upfront, returns geared. Toys "R" Us was still profitable when it went bankrupt. The owners were paid for killing it. Not a bug. The design.

THE TAX TRAP · PART TWO But HMRC Says It Raised £4.2 Billion

The off-payroll headline is real. It is also a count of one channel — and HMRC tells you, in its own report, which channels it left out.

The matching adjustment, Thames Water, and the question the BPA market is not asking

On regulatory architecture, captured rent, and what happens when an infrastructure asset stops behaving like an infrastructure asset.

How Britain Forgot How to Govern a Hospital

Four decades of NHS reform have been designed by people without relevant qualifications. The pattern is structural, not accidental — and the people best placed to fix it are systematically excluded from the rooms where decisions get made.

The IR35 Own Goal

How a tax crackdown enriched consultancies, hollowed out UK skills, and left HMRC empty-handed. Legislation designed to close a tax gap instead offshored specialist work and handed the Big Four a windfall they helped engineer.

State Ownership of Commodities and Infrastructure

Why the shareholder-value consensus has produced less innovation than well-governed state enterprise — and why minimal income tax was a real choice the UK declined to make.