Ryan Bridge: Banning and taxing won't solve the problem

Author: Ryan Bridge ,
Publish Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2026, 6:03am

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This week the Tony Blair Institute warned Andy Burnham that you can't tax your way to prosperity.

Some of our politicians could use a similar lecture.

We have parties wanting new taxes to fund what is basically a Universal Basic Income, even though AI hasn't yet stolen the number of jobs they claimed it would.

A Wall Street Journal piece this morning talks about exactly this point, even big tech seems to be u-turning on the job doomsday scenario.

We had the Greens yesterday come out with a policy that was not serious, but potentially destructive to our standard of living.

You can read it on their website. It's four pages long. Two of the pages are pictures and photos.

Fewer cows. Synthetic nitrate fertiliser should be phased out.

But zero detail on when, how and the economic impact of doing so.

Same goes for bottom trawling. 70% of our fishing industry by volume is caught by trawling within a metre of the sea floor.

The industry's worth $5 billion a year. 16,000+ jobs. Dairy's our biggest exporter. $16 billion a year.

To try and take them down is to launch an assault on our standard of living akin to the doomsday AI job wipe-out that was once predicted to happen but hasn't yet eventuated.

On top of this, there's a plan for more taxes, which, remember, even Tony Blair admits is no plan for prosperity.

The thing about the Greens' rivers plan is that they're partly right. Agricultural run-off has made many rivers un-swimmable.

But simply banning and taxing things does not solve problems.

It creates new ones. Like how we're going to feed the kids, create jobs and stay in the OECD.