Can Corbynomics guru Richard Murphy fix Britain?
The Joy of Tax author thinks we should clobber tax avoiders and pump money into social housing rather than the banks. Does this wonkish former accountant have the masterplan to reshape the country?
Richard Murphy, author of Corbynomics and, more pertinently for our purposes, author of The Joy of Tax, steps out of a tax conference to go to a cafe to be interviewed. Murphy is now the key thinker of the opposition to Her Majesty's Government, or, to put it another way, a threat to national security and your family's wellbeing. This charge is even more hilarious attached to Murphy than it is to Jeremy Corbyn - corduroy-ey even when he's not in corduroy, he looks far more like the accountant he started out as than the renegade tax-hunter he became. He is married and lives in Norfolk with his wife, who is a GP, and their two sons of 13 and 14.
Not all of Murphy's ideas have made it on to Corbyn's economic platform; but at the same time, there was nothing on that platform - at least as it was first delivered in the middle of July, at the Royal College of Nursing in Cavendish Square - that didn't come from him. The central planks are to close the tax gap (the money Murphy identifies is lost through tax avoidance and evasion by high-net-worth individuals and corporations), and claw back some of the 93bn currently spent on "corporate welfare"; set up a National Investment bank to invest in infrastructure, such as housing, transport, rural broadband and green energy; and bankroll that investment with "people's QE", money created for a social purpose rather than for banks.
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