Britain says its carbon emissions are down 54% since 1990.

That sounds extraordinary.

But there’s another number that tells a very different story.

When you count the emissions created around the world to produce the things Britain actually consumes, the reduction discussed in this episode is closer to 20%. The gap comes partly from the difference between territorial emissions — what is produced inside Britain — and consumption emissions — what is produced on our behalf elsewhere.

In Part Two of our Net Zero investigation, we follow the money.

We look at how renewable subsidies such as Contracts for Difference work, why some costs are recovered through the electricity system rather than conventional taxation, and why consumers can sometimes end up paying generators to switch off when the grid cannot take their electricity.

Then we ask a bigger question:

If wind and solar have become so cheap, why is British electricity still so expensive?

The episode explores the difference between the cost of generating electricity and the cost of running an entire reliable electricity system — including transmission, backup generation, storage, grid reinforcement, balancing and constraint payments.

We also look at Germany’s energy experiment, Britain’s industrial electricity costs, the relationship between cheap energy and economic prosperity, and why expensive power matters for industries such as steel, chemicals, glass, cement and manufacturing.

And this isn’t an argument that climate change isn’t happening.

The episode explicitly accepts the scientific case that human activity is responsible for essentially all observed warming since pre-industrial times — and instead questions whether Britain’s current policy mix is the most effective economic response.

Finally, we ask what an alternative could look like.

Not more coal.

Not waiting for fusion to magically arrive.

But a much greater emphasis on nuclear fission, energy density, technological progress and abundant reliable power.

Because the real question isn’t whether energy should be cleaner.

It’s whether Britain can make it cleaner without making itself poorer in the process.

🎧 Listen to Part Two now.

Taxed & Taken — The Podcast They Don’t Want You To Hear.

Net Zero is usually presented as a simple transition from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewable energy.

But there’s a problem with that story.

There is no such thing as clean energy.

The wind may be renewable. The turbine is not.Sunlight may be free. The solar panel is not.

Every energy system requires materials, infrastructure, land, mining, manufacturing and eventually disposal. The real question isn’t whether an energy source has consequences.

It’s what those consequences are — and whether we’ve been honest about them.

In Part One of this two-part series, I strip the politics away and look at the physics behind our energy system.

We explore:

* Why civilisation has spent centuries moving towards higher-density energy

* The extraordinary jump from wood → coal → oil → gas → nuclear

* Why wind and solar require vastly more land and infrastructure to collect diffuse energy

* The difference between installed capacity and electricity actually produced

* Why an electricity grid needs power when we demand it, not simply when the weather allows it

* The steel, concrete, copper, rare-earth metals and other materials behind renewable infrastructure

* What happens to solar panels and turbine blades when they reach the end of their lives

* And why energy storage may be the hardest part of the entire Net Zero equation

The central argument is simple:

Energy density matters.

For centuries, technological progress meant getting more energy from less material, less land and less labour.

With wind, solar and the storage required to support them, we may be attempting something very different.

And that has consequences.

Coming in Part Two

Next episode, we follow the money.

I’ll look at Britain’s carbon accounting, renewable subsidies, the costs hidden inside electricity bills, what Germany’s experience can teach us — and what a realistic alternative energy strategy might actually look like.

Taxed & Taken: The Podcast They Don’t Want You To Hear

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Sometimes the most important conversations are the ones we’re told have already been settled.

In 1997, Gordon Brown abolished the dividend tax credit received by pension funds — a change expected to raise the Treasury around £5 billion a year. His own officials warned that it could knock roughly £50 billion from the value of existing pension funds and force employers to inject billions more to repair the damage.

But this episode is not the simplistic story that one Chancellor single-handedly destroyed British pensions.

We follow what happened next: new accounting rules made pension deficits impossible for companies to ignore, falling interest rates made final-salary promises dramatically more expensive, and pension funds increasingly swapped shares for government bonds. Final-salary schemes closed to new workers and investment risk was gradually transferred from employers to individuals.

The result is extraordinary.

In 1997, British pension funds and insurance companies owned 45.7% of the UK stock market.

By 2022, they owned just 4.2%.

Pension funds alone owned only 1.6%, while overseas investors owned 57.7%.

Britain did not stop producing valuable companies.

Britain stopped owning them.

In this episode, we examine:

* why pension funds once naturally invested in British companies;

* why Brown abolished their dividend tax credits;

* the warnings he received before doing it;

* how accounting rules and falling interest rates accelerated the collapse of final-salary pensions;

* why British pension money moved from owning businesses to lending to government;

* Gordon Brown’s controversial sale of Britain’s gold reserves;

* why UK investors are still charged 0.5% stamp duty for buying many British shares while equivalent US purchases generally escape it; and

* what Britain could do to reconnect the savings of ordinary people with ownership of British businesses.

This is ultimately a story about something bigger than pensions.

It is about what happens when governments look at capital accumulated over generations and see money available to spend today.

Because capital doesn’t protest.

It doesn’t vote.

It just goes somewhere else — and takes the compounding with it.

Listen now to Episode 39 of Taxed & Taken: The Podcast They Don’t Want You To Hear.

For the last 15 years, American shares have dominated global markets. Brilliant companies played a huge part — but there was another force underneath them: the dollar’s extraordinary position at the centre of the global financial system.

But what happens if that advantage slowly begins to fade?

In this episode, I look at why the dollar doesn’t need to collapse for your investments to be affected, how America could remain successful while US shares deliver disappointing real returns, and why a gradual shift in global money could matter enormously to anyone with a pension or global tracker.

We look at:

* Why so much of the world’s savings keeps flowing into America

* How sterling gradually lost its own reserve-currency crown

* The strongest argument for why the dollar could remain dominant

* The “slow puncture” scenario that could produce a lost decade for US investors

* What a faster dollar adjustment could do to inflation, interest rates and asset prices

* Why your pension may already be far more exposed to America than you realise

* Gold, UK and European shares, equal-weighted US funds, cash and the investments potentially most vulnerable to higher rates

The conclusion isn’t “sell America.”

It’s much simpler:

Know what you own. Know what you’re paying. And don’t assume the extraordinary conditions of the last 15 years will automatically repeat for the next 15.

🎧 Listen to Episode 38 of Taxed & Taken — The Podcast They Don’t Want You To Hear.

Most people have no idea that their supposedly “global” pension is heavily invested in America.

And there’s a reason.

Over the last 16 years, American companies genuinely crushed much of the developed world on profit growth. But that wasn’t the whole story.

US investors also benefited from rising valuations, a strengthening dollar and something no other major economy possesses: the privilege of issuing the currency the world depends on.

That creates enormous global demand for dollars and American assets, helps America borrow more cheaply, and allows it to run deficits on a scale that would cause serious problems almost anywhere else.

In this episode, I explain why American shares became so dominant, why your pension became so exposed to them — and how much of America’s extraordinary performance was business success versus a financial system uniquely tilted in its favour.

Because if that advantage ever weakens, the consequences could reach straight into your pension.

Part One: How America won.Part Two: What happens if the advantage starts to disappear.

If your fixed rate is ending, this episode matters.

In Part 3 of the Central Banks series, we move from theory to real life. This is the episode about what happens when interest rates hit households directly — and why that pain is not a policy accident, but part of how the system works.

We look at what rising rates actually do, who gets hit first, who escapes relatively untouched, and why central banks today may be too trapped by debt to deliver the kind of inflation cure Paul Volcker imposed in the early 1980s.

We also examine the 2022 UK gilt crisis, why the Bank of England had to step in after just days of market stress, and what that tells us about the fragility of the modern financial system.

Then we finish with the most important part: what you can actually do with this understanding.

In this episode:

* Why higher interest rates work by squeezing households

* Why recent buyers and younger working families often absorb the loss

* What Volcker’s “full dose” looked like — and why it may be impossible today

* What the 2022 pension and gilt crisis revealed about Britain’s debt-heavy system

* How financial repression quietly transfers wealth from savers to borrowers

* The 4 principles to help you understand where you stand and protect yourself

The 4 principles:

* Work out whether you’re a lender or a borrower

* Look at real returns, not nominal ones

* Remember your income is your best hedge

* Know where you are in the queue

If you’ve followed all three parts of the series, thank you. And if you know someone who has never really asked where money comes from — send them Part 1.

Stay informed, stay independent, and stay free.

Who does the British government owe its debt to?

Most people would say pension funds, insurance companies, foreign investors, or the banks.

And yes — all of those matter.

But the single biggest lender to the British government is the Bank of England. At its peak, it owned around a third of all government debt in existence, and even now it still holds hundreds of billions of pounds of it. The strangest part? It didn’t buy that debt with money that already existed. It created the money first — and then bought the debt.

In this episode of Taxed & Taken, I break down how that system actually works in plain English.

We go through:

* how government debt really works

* why banks are allowed to create money

* what quantitative easing actually is

* why asset prices soared after 2008

* why wages didn’t keep up

* and why the losses ultimately fall back on the taxpayer

This is the second part of the central banking series, and by the end of it you’ll understand how money is created, who gets it first, who benefits most, and who ends up carrying the cost. The episode also sets up the next question in the series: once inflation is loose, who gets chosen to pay for bringing it back down?

If this episode changes how you see the financial system, share it with one person.

Stay informed, stay independent, and stay free.

Central banks were not originally created to control inflation or protect your savings.

They were created because governments needed a reliable way to borrow enormous sums without defaulting, debasing the currency or provoking revolt.

In 1694, the Bank of England lent £1.2 million to the Crown. Parliament guaranteed the interest using future taxes, while the government’s IOU was transformed into an asset against which new banknotes could be created and lent back to the public.

The same debt now produced two streams of interest: one paid by taxpayers and another paid by borrowers.

In Part 1 of this three-part series, we uncover:

* Why kings needed a new way to finance war

* How government debt became the backing for money

* Why ordinary people became the permanent guarantors

* How a £1.2 million loan became a national debt that has never been repaid

* Why the system has survived for more than three centuries

This is not a story about a hidden conspiracy. It is the documented history of a machine built in public view — but rarely explained in plain English.

Listen now and discover where money really comes from.

Stay informed. Stay independent. Stay free.

Most people are told to follow the same financial formula:

Invest regularly.Buy a diversified portfolio.Hold shares and bonds.Ignore the headlines.Wait.

That advice worked exceptionally well during the economic environment that dominated much of the period from 1980 to 2020.

But what happens when the environment changes?

In this episode, I explain the four economic environments that determine what happens to your savings, pension, property and investments:

1. Good WeatherEconomic growth is strong and prices rise gently. Shares, property and growth companies tend to thrive.

2. The HeatwaveThe economy is still growing, but inflation is accelerating. Energy, commodities and other real assets begin to matter more.

3. The Long StormThe economy weakens while prices continue rising. Shares and bonds can fall together, breaking the traditional 60/40 portfolio.

4. The FreezeGrowth collapses and prices stagnate or fall. Cash and high-quality bonds can provide protection—and create opportunities to buy assets cheaply.

The biggest investment mistake is not necessarily buying a bad asset.

It is owning the right asset in the wrong economic environment.

You do not need to predict every market movement. You do not need to beat hedge funds to the news. You simply need to recognise when the weather has changed—and stop dressing for the world that existed five years ago.

In this episode, you will learn:

* How to identify each economic environment without complicated charts

* Why shares and bonds sometimes collapse together

* Why gold, commodities and infrastructure perform differently from financial assets

* When holding cash becomes a strength rather than a failure

* Why the advice that worked for forty years may not work for the next ten

* How to avoid losing an entire decade by remaining trapped in the wrong portfolio

Most investors are still positioned for an economy that may no longer exist.

Listen now—before the weather changes again.

This episode discusses general economic ideas and is not personal financial advice.

Taxed & Taken: The Podcast They Don’t Want You To Hear

Subscribe, share the episode, and send it to someone who still thinks investing is only about choosing the right share.

This week a man walked into Number 10 having told the TUC that our economic model “doesn’t work well enough for ordinary people.”

I want to be fair to him. He probably means it. That isn’t the danger. The danger is that we’ve heard those exact words before — and I can show you where they led.

In this episode I explain, in plain English, the real difference between capitalism and socialism. Then we go and look at what happened the last time Britain picked the second one.

Inside:

* Why nobody on earth knows how to make a pencil — and why that’s the whole argument

* The 83% tax on earnings and the 98% rate on savings. Not a typo.

* September 1976: the Chancellor turns back at Heathrow as the pound collapses, and Britain borrows more than any nation had ever asked of the IMF

* The winter the rats took Leicester Square and the gravediggers of Liverpool went on strike

* The strongest arguments against my case — made properly, then answered

* What Thatcher actually did, and the real price communities paid, which I don’t dress up

* “But what about the sewage?” — the statistic almost nobody knows

Nobody who built the 1970s wanted coffins stacked in a warehouse. They all meant well. Good intentions are not a policy.

🎧 Listen now — 40 minutes.

🔒 Paying subscribers get The Receipts: every figure sourced, including the Budget speech where a sitting Chancellor calls the 98% rate “an absurdity” that raises almost nothing.

Think for yourself. Keep what’s yours.