The Case for a UK Sovereign Wealth Fund

Britain extracted hundreds of billions of pounds of North Sea oil from the late 1970s onwards. Norway, with similar geological luck, built a sovereign wealth fund now worth around $1.7 trillion. Britain has no fund. The Thatcher governments used the revenue for tax cuts and unfunded liabilities, and the windfall is gone.

A sovereign wealth fund is collective ownership of productive capital. Norway pays its returns into general government finances. Alaska pays a yearly dividend directly to every resident. Both create a stake for ordinary citizens that no working person can lose by missing a tax bracket or running short on savings.

A UK fund could be capitalised today through a wealth tax, mining royalties on lithium and tidal energy, the QE bond holdings the Bank of England already owns, the privatisation receipts that have not yet been spent, or a managed slice of corporate tax revenue.

The political fight is whether the dividend goes to citizens directly, into general spending, or into individual capitalised accounts. Each model has trade-offs and each is already running somewhere in the world. None of this is fantasy.