The Streetwise Guide to the British Economy

This independent, non-technical guide is crucial to understanding the major choices before us all in a fast-changing British economy. It provides something rare-a streetwise guide to how economics and politics really work and how to navigate your way through them. And it explains how we can clean up our economic and political neighbourhood and create a thriving, open, dynamic UK.The book highlights the big social and economic choices we face today: the current, failed political and economic managerialism; the growing threat of hard-left socialism; or the wealth-creating dynamism of a liberal market economy.With the experience of four decades at the forefront of public policy, Eamonn Butler shows how genuine free-market capitalism boosts wealth, particularly for the poor. He demonstrates how it is bringing the world both prosperity and equality-in sharp contrast to our current stifling managerialism and the historical disasters of socialism. This Streetwise Guide exposes the cosy political cartels of left and right that run things today. The enfeebled, debt-funded, autocratic right and the delusional, Marxian, centralising left. The political class of politicians, commentators and academics who reinforce each others' prejudices and claim to know what is best for us-despite having no understanding at all of the lives and concerns of ordinary people.The book navigates the reader through a political and economic neighbourhood that has become increasingly threatening and dangerous. It explains how the cartels that run in threaten our livelihood: our prosperity, employment, welfare, pensions, defence and private lives. It reveals who pays, and who benefits. It explains the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, of Donald Trump, of Brexit, and of nationalism in Europe and many other places. And it shows the folly of returning to a world of nationalisation, debt, high taxes and controls.