In the final stages of the Labour Party leadership campaign, it is encouraging to hear that one of the candidates, Andy Burnham, has called for ‘a radical tax reform’ with Land-Value Taxation (LVT) at its heart – ‘an idea so old-Labour it can be traced back to Thomas Paine’. This is the first time since the Labour Government of 1929-31 (see also Standing for Justice, Shepheard-Walwyn 2001) that a leading member of the Labour Party has openly acknowledged the many benefits that would flow from this shift of taxation, away from work and enterprise and onto the annual rental value of land, benefits explained in greater detail in the various books in our Ethical Economics list.

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