The Capitalist

The world has just witnessed the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. Yet amid the international condemnation of Hamas terrorists, there has also been equivocation – and even celebration in some quarters. No other conflict stirs emotions like that between Israel and Palestine - so why is it that the world’s only Jewish state appears to be held to completely different standards to oth...

It’s Party Conference season, and while the Lib Dems were kayaking and playing crazy golf in Bournemouth last week, this weekend it’s the Tories’ turn to troop up to Manchester. Attendees are anticipating drama, gossip and exciting policy announcements – the Prime Minister is promising 'long-term decisions for a brighter future'. But while Rishi Sunak will be rolling the pitch for an election mani...

CapX talks about housing a lot – most often to scream 'build more houses!' into a void – yet politicians appear stuck in a doom loop when it comes to this urgent topic. Conservative MPs talk a good game about the need for housing, as long as it's anywhere but in their constituency, while Labour talk up discredited socialist ideas like rent controls. But last week, drama returned to the housing dis...

In a world saturated with information, we have more choices than ever – but how freely do we make them? In their new book Free Your Mind – The new World of Manipulation and how to Avoid it , journalist Laura Dodsworth and behavioural scientist Patrick Fagan argue that there is a war on our minds as the media, advertisers, politicians and big tech vie to influence our decisions. They investigate th...

The NHS recently marked its 75th birthday with the kind of love-in most countries reserve for a passing monarch or truly iconic celebrity. So what is about our health service that has created such a fervent attachment amongst so many Brits, even when it underperforms compared to some of our continental peers?  To find out, we invited the journalist, author and broadcaster Isabel Hardman on to this...

Trash, garbage, litter or rubbish – whatever you call it the world is producing ever more of the stuff. But where does it all go once it's left our colour-coded bins? And what about all those clothes you leave at the charity shop thining you've done a good turn? The fascinating tapestry of grime that is the modern waste industry is documented in painstaking, illuminating detail in the new book Was...

He’s best known for coming up with the terms death tax and climate change, so it’s fair to say Frank Luntz knows a thing or two about political communication – making him an ideal guest for the CapX Podcast.  We sat down to discuss his latest project for the Centre for Policy Studies delving into how the British public really feel about that most American of values: Freedom. Few will be surprised...

How do we really live now? From a Romanian truck driver to an Amazon deliveryman and a factory production line worker, Ben Judah tried to answer that question by speaking to the people whose labour makes the freedom and prosperity the rest of us enjoy possible – for his latest book This is Europe. The author and Atlantic Council fellow crossed the continent conducting hours of painstaking intervie...

As with so much modern political theatre, the debate on artificial intelligence has become polarised to a point that is often profoundly unhelpful, with a false dichotomy between 'doomers' and utopians who see AI as a solution to the world's many problems, both technical and social. Between those positions is a world of nuance and wildly varying predictions on what this expanding new technology co...

There are few political questions as vexed as how to tax hard-pressed motorists. For many years, the Treasury has treated British drivers as a cash cow, levying high taxes while investing relatively little in the road network.  Now, however, things are changing rapidly. The take-up of electric vehicles and the upcoming ban on new petrol and diesel cars presents a big fiscal headache for the Govern...

What is National Conservatism? That's the question we're grappling with this week following the big National Conservatism Conference in London. While it certainly generated lots of media heat, it's still not particularly clear what this US-imported idea actually stands for. Indeed, the answer seemed to vary depending on which of the eclectic cast of speakers was on stage. CapX's deputy editor Alys...

Our guest this week played an instrumental role in the UK's departure from the European Union. As Boris Johnson's Europe adviser and then chief negotiator in the exit talks with the EU, Lord Frost drew on a lifetime of experience as a civil servant and foreign office diplomat to help get the Trade and Cooperation Agreement over the line. Since leaving government at the end of 2021, he has continue...

Here at CapX we love an unfashionable cause – and in a cost of living crisis, few demographics are less popular than those who seem to be struggling less. But we're also fans of basic economic concepts, and with the tax burden the highest it’s been since the era of state socialism under Attlee, the Laffer Curve inevitably comes to mind. Because while calls to ‘tax the rich’ may be popular, if it m...

Did you know that every time you fill up your car, you are paying for the UK’s biofuels mandate, the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO)? In fact, some 6% of the price Brits pay at the pump goes on biofuel being blended into petrol and diesel. More concerning still at a time of soaring food prices, crops such as wheat and corn are still a central part of the industry. That's why a new repor...

Things can seem a bit gloomy at the moment, and no one is better suited to explaining why than our guest this week, the Tory writer and self-proclaimed doom-monger Ed West.  In an eclectic career that has spanned lad mags, religious publications and a very popular personal Substack, Ed has become one of the most entertaining, thought-provoking writers on the British right, and it was a pleasure to...

Breathless predictions of AI-induced doom are all around, with some experts in the field saying the technology has already advanced beyond the point of no return. The recent open letter signed by the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Andrew Yang was just the latest example of the unease that programmes such as Chat GPT-4 have provoked.  So how well-founded are the fears that a super-intelligen...

After years where prices barely seemed to rise and interest rates remained stubbornly low, the last two years have seen inflation come roaring back - combined with union strife and an energy crisis it has felt like we've been living through the 1970s all over again. What better time then, for an economist to publish a handy explainer on just what inflation is, where it comes from and why central b...

Would we all be better off if only we had better politicians?   It's a comforting illusion, but really the problem isn't those who sweep in and out of power, but you and me, the public - that's the basic argument put forward by political scientist Ben Ansell in his new book Why Politics Fails.    Drawing on examples from Ancient Greece to Brexit and Covid lockdowns, Ben argues compellingly that th...

How did an NHS clinic end up prescribing young people potential dangerous medical treatment with next to no data on the long-term effects? And why did that same clinic fail to respond to the concerns not just of outsiders, but its own staff?   These are just some of the many questions posed by BBC journalist Hannah Barnes in her new book 'Time To Think', which details the rise and fall of the Tavi...

It's that special time of year again when the Chancellor delivers a Budget, before commentators, policy wonks and political opponents rush to tear it apart in the ensuing days. In that noblest of British traditions, we invited our editor-in-chief, Robert Colvile and the Centre for Policy Studies tax and policy guru, Tom Clougherty, for a special Budget edition podcast. Stay informed with CapX's un...

How bad was the British Empire? That's the question Nigel Biggar, Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, has attempted to answer in his book Colonialism a Moral Reckoning . But in doing so, he has confronted those who don’t just want to tell a one-sided story of an imperial project motivated solely by racism and exploitation, but who want to silence a...

The Government's Net Zero target is nothing if not ambitious - to decarbonise the British economy - energy, manufacturing, transport and agriculture included - all in the space of just a few decades. But while there is a glut of potentially exciting new low-carbon technologies, and some encouraging signs that renewables are getting a lot cheaper, there's still a huge question mark over how feasibl...

This week we're talking about moola, lolly, dough or dosh - the thing that makes the world go round...Money.  In his recent book Money in One Lesson the economic journalist Gavin Jackson tries to answer a seemingly basic but very tricky question: what is money and how does it work? It's a grand tour of the monetary world, from pigs in Papua New Guina to sea shells in West Africa, the foundation of...

Nicola Sturgeon's resignation on Wednesday morning was a slightly puzzling political event – 'shocking', in the sense that it heralds the departure of a politician who has occupied the highest perch in Scottish politics for so long, but also not all that surprising, given both the First Minister's recent political travails and the fact she had started to openly discuss how long she'd be in the top...

Britain isn’t working well for many of us right now. The cost of energy, housing, and food are too high, while decent jobs with real prospects are hard to come by.   That is the clarion call of a new campaign group that aims to get Britain building again - Britain Remade starts from the conviction that Britain has been a great hub of industry and science in the past, and there's no reason we shoul...