Lord Heseltine Holds Up the Georgist Lens

“Michael Heseltine was a minister under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and was heavily involved in urban regeneration (i.e. had direct contact with the economics of infrastructure and land).”

“I landed at Dover after a choppy crossing of the Channel in 1962, and for the next 40 years I paid my taxes to Her Majesty’s Treasury. Working in the computer industry…I did not dodge my obligations to the public purse. After all, I was married, raising two children and using the public services; so I was happy to pay my share of the costs of the schools and hospitals that my family needed.

Then, as the millennium was dawning, a miracle happened. The government returned every penny that I had paid in taxes over the previous 40 years.”– Don Riley, in the Foreword to Wheels of Fortune: Self-funding Infrastructure and the Free Market Case for a Land Tax by Fred Harrison, The Institute of Economic Affairs (2006)

In order to understand Don Riley’s good fortune, think about railways. Consider High Speed 2, the long and heavily contested plan for a modern rail connection between London and the north of England, which has just been given final approval. The campaign to cancel the project has featured prominently in the mainstream. But just before the final decision was made, the conservative peer, a terse Lord Heseltine, was given time to dismantle the main objection:

BBC Radio 4: “Lord Heseltine are you worried by the poor benefit-cost ratios that have come out of studies of HS2?”

Lord Heseltine: “But how do you know they are poor? The last statement of the chairman, I’m going to quote: ‘the benefits to the economy for the regeneration around HS2 stations and local growth strategies have been excluded from the benefit-cost ratio.‘ …”