The Guardian has put up a fawning interview with Miatta Fahnbulleh, Labour PPC for Peckham and senior economic adviser to Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband. The paper bills her as a “rising intellectual star in Labour’s ranks” who is “juggling campaigning in her own patch, charity work, and school pick-ups for her 10-year-old and her five-year-old twins.” Along with directing policy and research for the left-wing think tank IPPR, Fahnbulleh for the last six years served as CEO of the socialist New Economics Foundation. Her public résumé reveals she has spent her entire life in academia – PPE at Oxford topped up by a Ph.D from LSE – before a stint in Whitehall followed by think-tank wonkery. As clever as Miatta undoubtedly is it is fair to say that all her knowledge of economics is theoretical and she has never so much as run a whelk stall. It’s clear what sort of proposals the “rising star” will be pushing to Rayner and Miliband…

The New Economics Foundation, under Fahnbulleh, recommended, among other things:

• A wealth tax and yet another windfall tax on oil and gas.
• Calls for mass nationalisation e.g. of land, transport, and energy.
• Extending national insurance to investment income.
• A cap on interest rates and charges on every form of consumer credit.
• Hiking capital gains tax to income tax levels.
• Hiking divided tax to income tax levels.
• Abolition of the upper earnings limit for national insurance.
• Huge expansion of the benefits system including a “minimum income guarantee” paid to everyone apart from the rich
• Nationalisation of banks and creation of new “green” banks with taxpayer funds.
• Block on private banks lending to anyone with a “large amount of greenhouse gas emissions” and “penalisation of banks that provide too many carbon-intensive loans.“
• Forced sale of existing businesses to employees.
• A tripling of the stamp duty surcharge to 9% for multiple homeowners and an increase to 6% for non-residents.

Rachel Reeves’ new tax advisory team is filled with high-tax supporters. Now someone who thinks “chasing economic growth” is wrong and that “antiracism means anticapitalism” has the ears of the shadow cabinet’s two leading left-wing members. Who do Labour think they are fooling when they parrot lines on fiscal responsibility?