Liam Byrne

I mean, how can that be right?

That can't be right.

It'd be wrong.

So if you begin restoring a bit of fairness to the tax system, actually like that old socialist Nigel Lawson did, equalizing capital gains tax rates and income tax rates, you would begin to raise the money over the course of...

five to six years to build the kind of sovereign wealth fund that could help you finance those kind of tax breaks.

To restore an old idea, actually, once upon a time, we used to talk about the property-owning democracy.

Noel Skelton, who was a Tory, talked about it in the 1920s.

John Rawls, the left-wing philosopher, talked about it in the 70s.

Maybe we would call it the wealth-owning democracy today.

But that's got to be one of the ideas that is in the radical center of politics.

100%.

100%.

And, you know, they're not going to be easy because Iran has just put the cost of everything up.

But if we don't do this, what is going to happen?

We are going to end up with weaker governments in the future, not stronger governments in the future.

And democracy's promise, this idea that if you work hard, play by the rules, you can get on, is not going to be restored.

And that is fatal to the health of a democracy.

I kind of grew up in a Catholic family and my dad was much influenced by the kind of social Catholic theory of the sort of 50s and 60s.

Yeah, but the idea comes from actually Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham, my hometown.

And the insight is that, you know, the time Birmingham was being built, you had kind of thousands and thousands of people leaving the farms and villages, coming into these strange new places called cities.