The Capitalist

From the Washington riots to European Championship football fever, the Taliban sweeping through Afghanistan and the brutal murder of MP David Amess, it's been mostly a year to forget – and that's before we begin to talk about the concertina-ing nightmare of Covid false dawns. Here on the CapX Podcast, however, we ended 2021 in style with three of Westminster's brightest and best brains to pore ove...

It's not often we get bona fide political royalty on the CapX Podcast, and whatever your political outlook, few people have bestrode British politics over the last few decades like Peter Mandelson.   Mandelson is often credited as being the original 'spin doctor' in the 1980s, but that rather glib epithet undersells his influence on the New Labour project, where he was integral to both Tony Blair'...

For the last two weeks the great and the good have descended on Glasgow to try to thrash out a climate deal at what's been billed everywhere as a make or break 'COP26'.  For those of you who aren't familiar, COP stands for 'Conference of the Parties', which since 1995 has been the UN's annual get-together to discuss all things climate change. The Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement were both si...

Is economics fit for the modern world? That’s the basic question posed in Cogs and Monsters, the new book from Diane Coyle, one of Britain’s most eminent economists and our guest this week. Part critique of her own profession, part manifesto for a better, more up-to-date economics, Diane’s book goes beyond the standard criticisms of economics and gets into the the really big issues - not least, wh...

Rome was the greatest city of the ancient world, commanding an empire that spread from Damascus to York and encompassed a quarter of the world’s population. It’s a civilisation whose splendour and eventual decline has inspired generations of painters and poets for more than a thousand years. But as businessman and historian George Maher argues in his book Pugnare: Economic Success and Failure , th...

It's a very special edition of the podcast this week as we take you inside Tory conference in Manchester for a fascinating, fun-packed conversation with the one and only Jacob Rees-Mogg and our editor-in-chief, Robert Colvile.  It's a bit of a cliche to call these chats 'wide-ranging', but they really did cover a lot of ground, from the Labour politicians he most admires, to the state of the Briti...

Most us know about Henry VIII, Napoleon and Churchill, but what about history's unheralded heroes?    In his new book  Lessons from History , political commentator and self-declared amateur historian  Alex Deane  shines a light on the less-known characters who have helped shape our world, from sharp-shooting barons to self-medicating surgeons, to the Lion of Africa and a bear who nearly caused a n...

There's a new, invisible force at work in the highest ranks of corporate America and it's behind what may be the defining scam of our era. By co-opting social causes and embracing 'wokery' America's biggest companies have pulled the wool over people's eyes, subverting both democracy and the free market capitalism that made the country great. But don't take my word for it. Our guest this week, Vive...

Why is the British economy the way it is today? That's the rather daunting exam question The Economist's Duncan Weldon sets himself in his newly released book 200 Years of Muddling Through - The surprising story of Britain's economy from boom to bust and back again . It's fair to say that Weldon succeeds in answering it with his pacy, vivid canter through the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars,...

Long before the Red Wall became a part of our everyday political lexicon, David Skelton was talking and writing about the disconnection between post-industrial Britain and the country's political class.  Skelton's latest book 'The New Snobbery' is partly a polemic about the disdain and condescension voters in these communities have faced from so-called progressives, particularly since the Brexit r...

Few people know more about the language of politics and how to effectively communicate with the public than Frank Luntz.   As an award winning political and communications consultant, pollster and pundit, Dr. Luntz has served as an election consultant and commentator in national elections across the globe. He has worked for more than 50 Fortune 500 companies and CEOs, and he is the author of three...

From the eruption of Vesuvius to the Chernobyl meltdown, human history has always been punctuated by catastrophes - some natural, others very much man-made.   In his new book  Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe , world-renowned historian  Professor Niall Ferguson  argues that far from being "unprecedented", the response to Covid-19 exhibits the same political and social pathologies that have shaped...

Meritocracy is the creed of our age. An idea that has great success in crossing traditional boundaries: not just Thatcher, Reagan and Boris Johnson, but Clinton, Blair and Xi Jinping have sung the praises of a society where anyone can rise based on their own talent and effort.  But just as meritocracy has risen to be the dominant idea of our age, it's faced an onslaught of criticism, from the trad...

Is Britain a racist society? After a year where prejudice, privilege and protest have never been far from the headlines, it's a question that continues to provoke the fiercest debates – not least after the recent publication of the Government's recent Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. For the latest instalment of The CapX Podcast, editor John Ashmore spoke to Dr Rakib Ehsan, an independen...

Deep rifts are tearing societies apart and shredding old political allegiances: across the Western world, regions are rebelling against cities, the working class against the elites and the young against the old. For far too many, contemporary capitalism simply isn't delivering the goods.   For Sir Paul Collier, one of the world's leading development economists, the response to this profound crisis...

Right now All the Government’s efforts are focussed on coronavirus, but what about the fundamental mandate it was elected on? As the vaccine roll-out continues apace, backbench MPs could be forgiven for raising their eyes to the horizon and starting to think about their prospects for re-election in 2024. By far the biggest Conservative cohort in parliament is the so-called 109 group of MPs newly e...

For our final CapX Pocast of the year, it’s time to take a look back at this absolute car-crash of a year. Rather than the usual tête-à-tête, we decided to make this a bit more of a panel show format, with each of our guests choosing their hero, villain, moment, policy and idea of the year, before rounding off with some reflections on what’s ahead in 2021. Stay informed with CapX's unmissable dail...

Not many economists have trekked through lawless jungles, visited shops and restaurants world’s most entrepreneurial refugee camp or hung out with inmates in a Louisiana mega jail. For his book, Extreme Economies, Richard Davies went to some of the most desperate places on the planet, but found incredible stories of human resilience. People with nothing had created businesses and currencies from s...

Few have opposed the Government’s handling of the pandemic with as much eloquence and authority as Lord Sumption. The former supreme court judge, medieval historian and Reith lecturer doesn’t just dispute the scientific evidence, he questions the legal and constitutional justification for these restrictions on our liberty. He’s claimed that the Government has a habit of deliberately avoiding parli...

Our guest this week is Matt Forde - one of Britain's foremost stand-ups, satirists and impressionists. He's a highly successful stage comedian, the voice of Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer and Donald Trump on the revamped version of Spitting Image and, as of a few weeks ago the author of a new memoir, Politically Homeless ,. It covers his youth in a working class area of Nottingham, teen years of hard...

Not many podcast guests start by telling you they are in pain. Even fewer that the source of their discomfort is the scars inflicted by North Korean prison camp guards. Then again, not many podcast guests have seen what Timothy has. This remarkable man has escaped the Kim regime, not once but twice and lived o tell his extraordinary tale. His is a story of tireless courage, resilience and, in his...

Stats! What we need is stats! If Dickens' hard-nosed utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind was around today he'd probably be knee-deep in SAGE briefings and ONS data bulletins, trying to work out what the heck is going on with this virus.  In the absence of a fictional Victorian schoolmaster, who better to lead us through the numerical mire than Tim Harford - the economist, author, broadcaster and TED-talk...

What do Ancient Rome, Muslim Spain and Song era China have in common? Military might, sophisticated legal systems or, perhaps, intellectual brilliance? All of these things played their part in creating the great empire of the past, but the answer is something a little more abstract. In his latest book the Swedish historian Johan Norberg argues that that every truly successful civilisation is defin...

Not many organisations can claim to have had Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Karl Marx as members. Then again, not many organisations are anything like the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce – better known today as the RSA. For over 260 years Its mission has been nothing short of improving an entire nation – funding inventions, encouraging trade, planting millions...

For the final instalment of our Illiberalism in Europe series we’re going to the furthest boundary of the continent, beyond the Black Sea to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Our guest is Jamila Mammadova, a native of Baku and now a researcher at the foreign policy thinktank the Henry Jackson Society. She sat down with CapX editor John Ashmore to discuss Caucasian foreign policy, Putin's territoria...