John Kay

Financial markets are an effective discipline on profligate individuals and states because markets cannot easily be bullied or lobbied, and their threat to make the cost of funds prohibitive is effective.

From the start, PFI conflated the desirable aim of exploiting private sector management skills in project supervision with the undesirable aim of obscuring public finances with complex funding structures. It created an industry of advisers with a vested interest in its own expansion.

The interpretation of fairness is culturally specific but rarely does it correspond to measures of income inequality. Fairness is a perception, not a Gini coefficient.

Good quangos have specific technical expertise and their purpose is to take issues out of politics. Bad quangos have no distinctive skills and are designed to put issues into politics.

Government spin is especially debilitating because government is a monopoly supplier of much of the information that an informed democracy requires.

There is no simple answer to the question: “How should capital gains be taxed?” So there are as many different regimes as there are national tax systems and they are often, as in Britain, in a state of seemingly endless flux.

Britain cannot aspire to continental European levels of public services with lower tax rates. Any British government has to confront that simple fact.

British governments will need to make tough choices about taxes and public spending in the decade ahead. These choices are inevitably political. But they can only be well made if the information on which these choices are based is not.