Devolution of business rate revenue to English local authorities has been cast as a far-reaching act of fiscal devolution, with the explicit aim of enhancing local economic growth by providing financial incentives to local authorities. The system is based on three tacit assumptions: that local authorities can systematically increase their business rate revenue via local policy decisions, that increasing business rate revenue correlates with growth in the local economy, and that the structural effects of the business rate system upon local authority behaviour and revenue outcomes are negligible. This article makes the first known attempt to analyse the outcomes of the Business Rate Retention Scheme since its inception in 2013, using previously unavailable data from the 2010–17 valuation list for England. Findings indicate that all three of the tacit assumptions can be challenged. Links between local policy and revenue growth are subject to macroeconomic confounders, links between rate revenue and economic growth are ambivalent, and the structure of the system has a decisive effect on individual authority outcomes. The system is not a game of chess, with outcomes based on skill; it is more akin to cards, where results are dependent in part on the cards dealt.

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We build on the work by Peled and Bonotti to illuminate the impact of linguistic relativity on democratic debate. Peled and Bonotti’s focus is on multilingual societies, and their worry is that ‘unconscious epistemic effects’ can undermine political reasoning between interlocutors who do not share the same native tongue. Our article makes two contributions. First, we argue that Peled and Bonotti’s concerns about linguistic relativity are just as relevant to monolingual discourse. We use machine learning to provide novel evidence of the linguistic discrepancies between two ideologically distant groups that speak the same language: readers of Breitbart and of The New York Times. We suggest that intralinguistic relativity can be at least as harmful to successful public deliberation and political negotiation as interlinguistic relativity. Second, we endorse the building of metalinguistic awareness to address problematic kinds of linguistic relativity and argue that the method of discourse analysis we use in this article is a good way to build that awareness.