Duncan Robinson

While writing The Economist’s Bagehot column, Duncan Robinson has focused on the changing shape of Britain’s public finances and how it affects Britons’ personal ones. In the autumn of 2022, Robinson warned readers that Britain was sleep-walking towards a state that cost a lot but delivered a little. Well before other commentators caught on, he pointed out that fiscal drag would have all sorts of perverse consequences, with teachers paying taxes designed for well-paid solicitors. A column in January 2023 focused on the plight of geriatric millennials, shut out from cheap housing, burdened with the highest taxes in years and who will receive far less from the welfare state than their parents. Finally, in the summer of 2023, Robinson unpicked the dirty secret of the cost-of-living crisis: that most people were surviving it perfectly well.