Bold Package vs Piecemeal Picking
Reform everything at once or don't call it reform at all
Miller's strategic insight is that the political calculus most governments use — make small targeted changes to avoid upsetting too many people — is exactly backwards. A small change on one tax creates a concentrated group of losers with no wider coalition of winners to offset them. A broad, principled package that reforms multiple taxes simultaneously creates more total losers but also far more total winners, and can be defended with a coherent narrative that isolated changes cannot.
The IHT on farms case illustrates the dynamic. Targeting agricultural property relief looked like the government picking on farmers. Farmers mobilised, got public sympathy, and the narrative was dominated by the image of an unfair attack on a sympathetic group. If the same change had been packaged as part of a wholesale IHT redesign that applied the tax consistently to all assets while simultaneously reforming other elements, the narrative would have been: we are fixing a broken system. The farmers would still have been losers, but they would have been explicable losers within a principled redesign.
The framework implies a counterintuitive political strategy: announce more reform, not less. The scope of reform determines whether you can construct a credible narrative. Narrow scope = visible losers + no narrative. Broad scope = more losers but also a defensible story and a larger coalition of beneficiaries.
- Piecemeal changes create visible losers without a coherent narrative — bold packages create more losers but also a defensible story.
- Tax reform requires creating winners alongside losers — isolated changes have only losers, which is why they generate disproportionate political backlash.
- A principled reform agenda is more durable than a series of tactical changes, because it can be explained and defended rather than merely survived.
- Pre-committing not to reform is strategically self-defeating — it removes tools without reducing the underlying problem.
- The bigger the reform package, the harder technically but the easier politically, because the narrative can be about the system not the targets.
- Define the systemic problem, not the individual taxStart from the question 'what does a coherent tax system look like?' not 'which tax can we tweak this budget?' The former produces a reform agenda; the latter produces isolated changes with visible losers and no winners.Pro tipMiller's shortcut: the Mirrlees Review already answered the 'what does a coherent UK tax system look like?' question. Use it as the north star for designing reform packages.
- Identify the package that makes the systemic narrative credibleFor each proposed change, ask: what other changes, if announced simultaneously, would allow this change to be framed as part of principled redesign rather than targeted extraction? Those changes form the minimum viable package.Pro tipAbolishing stamp duty simultaneously with updating council tax valuations is the canonical example — the package is coherent and each element makes the other more defensible.WarningThe package must be internally consistent. Combining unrelated tax changes for political convenience does not create a principled narrative — it just creates a longer list of losers.
- Build the public case before announcing the losersCommunicate the systemic problem first — why the current system is distortionary and unfair — before announcing who will pay more. This changes the political context from 'government targets group X' to 'government fixes broken system, some existing beneficiaries lose their advantage.'Pro tipMiller's framing: 'the system is unfair in ways that people are currently unfair winners of.' This reframes losers from victims to people who had been receiving an undeserved subsidy.WarningThis communication strategy requires genuine structural reform — it will not work if the package is actually a revenue grab with a thin reform veneer.
- Demand the same of politicians as votersCitizens should actively demand bold reform packages rather than accepting tactical changes. When a government announces a small targeted change, ask: what is the systemic problem this solves, and what else needs to change for the solution to be coherent?Pro tipIf a politician cannot answer 'what is the principled case for this change as part of a broader system?' then the change is tactical, not reform.
The government changed agricultural property relief for inheritance tax. Announced in isolation, it looked like the government picking on a sympathetic group. Farmers protested, got public sympathy, and the policy nearly collapsed. Miller's view: it was actually a move in the right direction for tax design, but isolated from a broader package it had no narrative.
Miller explicitly proposes starting with 'actually we're going to reform the entire way we tax income — big bang, all of it.' Her argument is that this is harder technically but easier politically than isolated changes, because you can construct a principled narrative and a broader coalition.
Labour's first budget created concentrated losers — employers (via NI), farmers (via IHT), second-home owners (via stamp duty) — with no connecting narrative about why these specific groups were targeted or what system they were building toward.
Miller arrived at this framework through watching the failure mode repeat across multiple governments. She watched the 2010s produce years of small, targeted tax changes — each announced as reasonable — that collectively produced an incoherent, distortionary system and persistent public frustration. The contrast with the Mirrlees Review process (which did think comprehensively) convinced her that the package approach was not just academically superior but politically more viable than it initially appears.