The Capitalist

Nigel Farage has just resigned his seat to force a by-election in Clacton. The establishment, his allies say, is trying to destroy him. Perhaps – but have they misjudged their target? Gawain Towler, Reform UK's director of communications from 2019 to 2024 and now a member of the party's governing board, joined CapX editor Marc Sidwell in the immediate aftermath of Farage's dramatic announcement. H...

Andy Burnham wants to escape the Westminster bubble by shipping bits of No.10 to Manchester. Neil Garratt of the London Assembly isn’t buying it – he says the BBC’s own move 15 years ago proves relocating an office doesn’t automatically transform the culture inside. Then there’s the small matter of logistics: cancelled trains, no privacy for the journey and a Prime Minister who might need his own...

Britain is in trouble. Its economy is stagnant, and its politics are in turmoil, with Andy Burnham set to be our seventh prime minister in a decade. Yet former chancellor Jeremy Hunt has a surprisingly upbeat take on Britain’s potential – if our politicians can be bold enough. In this episode of The Capitalist, he sits down to discuss his new book, ‘Can We Be Rich Again?’ Hunt advocates a radical...

From Disraeli's One Nation vision to Thatcher's Right to Buy, aspiration was once the animating principle of British conservatism. Yet after 14 years of Conservative government, the housing crisis has torn up the old promises of reward for hard work. In the 1990s, a first-time buyer couple saving 5% of their wages could afford a deposit in three years. Today it would take 24. How did the Conservat...

Ten years ago, Matthew Elliott ran the campaign that changed Britain forever. As the architect of Vote Leave, he helped deliver a result that almost nobody – including many on his own side – genuinely believed would happen. A decade on, with some senior Labour figures openly discussing a return to the EU, Lord Elliott joins The Capitalist to look back at how Brexit was really won, and to make the...

Britain's national debt is heading for £3 trillion. Servicing it costs roughly the annual wages of four million full-time workers. And a former chief economist of the IMF is now putting the odds of a major debt crisis before 2030 at better than fifty-fifty. Independent economist Damian Pudner argues that the Government is running out of options quicker than many believe. Rachel Reeves can continue...

Keir Starmer is giving tech companies three months to activate on-device content scanning and age verification across all smartphones and tablets sold in Britain – or face fines and potentially criminal liability. Framed as a child safety measure, the proposal has drawn fierce criticism from privacy advocates, civil liberties groups and free speech lawyers who warn it amounts to building a mass su...

Why do so many people instinctively distrust free markets? Erik Lidström's answer is rooted in evolutionary psychology. For nearly two million years, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, in small groups where unpredictable resources were shared equally, regardless of individual effort. Our brains are still wired for that world, and the very different rules of the market economy trigger unjustified su...

With Donald Trump back in the White House, tariffs have become front-page news, and advocates for free trade find themselves on the back foot. Soumaya Keynes and Chad P. Bown argue that with great powers now using trade as a weapon, there can be no simple return to the settled order of rules-based global trade that dominated the late twentieth century. Their new book, 'How to Win a Trade War', pro...

Over £12 billion of taxpayer money flows to large charities every year – and 21 of them get 99% of their funding from government. So at what point does a charity stop being an independent voice for civil society and become, in effect, an arm of the state? In this piece by Benjamin Elks, published on CapX, he explores the blurry line between public service delivery and state-sponsored lobbying, wha...

From the progressive left to the nationalist right – in Washington or Westminster – a new consensus is forming. It argues that government should play a larger role in the economy, and that using industrial policy to achieve the economic outcomes we want is just common sense. As president of the American Institute for Economic Research, Samuel Gregg has spent years making the case for free markets....

Britain is paying more to borrow than any other major Western economy. So why is Labour preoccupied with internal power struggles? In a special live address, Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride delivers his account of Britain's fiscal predicament and the Conservative Party's plan to fix it. Our borrowing costs are the highest in the G7, higher even than Portugal, Spain and Greece – not primarily because...

Andy Burnham is heading for a leadership bid, and he's arrived with a big idea: Manchesterism. Apparently a form of business-friendly socialism, it's built on borrowing, backed by the Manchester skyline, and presented as a credible alternative to both austerity and the hard left. There is just one problem: it doesn't add up. Mani Basharzad of the Institute of Economic Affairs argues that the Manch...

Keir Starmer is fighting for his political life. The bond markets are watching — and they have a long memory. Kallum Pickering, chief economist at Peel Hunt and columnist for The Telegraph, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for a lucid diagnosis of what is really going wrong with the British economy, why the markets are spooked, and what a change of Labour leadership could mean for the country's alre...

From fractured local elections to the rise of Reform and the Greens, British politics increasingly feels unstable, fragmented and unpredictable. Yet in this essay, Lee David Evans of the Mile End Institute argues that while the old political order may be gone, the old parties are proving harder to kill than many assume. Drawing comparisons with Harold Wilson, John Major and Margaret Thatcher’s Con...

When a business raises capital, it buys equipment, expands its operations, and hires people. That’s how investment becomes jobs. But the United Kingdom has ranked in the bottom quartile of advanced economies for private capital investment every year since 1995. The gap with our peers runs to roughly £100 billion annually. A new report from the Jobs Foundation makes for uncomfortable reading, but i...

Britain may have stumbled almost accidentally into one of the best positions in the world to win the AI race. The question is whether it has the wit and will to press on. Recorded live at the Margaret Thatcher Conference in London, Charlotte Crosswell OBE chairs a conversation with Louis Mosley, Executive Vice Chair and Head of Palantir Technologies UK, and Tom Westgarth, Head of Growth at Fractil...

As grocery prices rise and political pressure mounts, radical solutions are back on the table – including state-owned food stores. In this essay, Jimmy Nicholls, writer of Poke the Bear and host of The Right Dishonourable podcast, examines New York’s experiment under mayor Zohran Mamdani, arguing that public supermarkets are a costly illusion. With razor-thin margins and global supply chains drivi...

The feminist case for capitalism is one of the most powerful arguments nobody seems to be making. Zoe Strimpel has decided to make it anyway. A columnist for The Telegraph and author of Good Slut: How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free, Zoe joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to make the conservative case for winning over feminists at the next election. Her argument is simple and unfashionable: throug...

War in Iran. Energy bills set to spike again this summer. Electricity prices that have gone from among the lowest in Europe to among the highest. And a Government that appears to believe the answer is simply to press on. But Dr Gerard Lyons, research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, isn't arguing for abandoning the green transition. Instead, he says the way Britain is pursuing Net Zero is...

Britain's reputation for decline has taken on a life of its own online. But how much of it is real — and what would it actually take to fix? Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at Britain Remade, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for a forensic tour through the structural problems dragging on the British economy — and some surprisingly tractable solutions. The broken Britain narrative, he argues, isn't simp...

Labour's benefits reforms are now law. Ministers say they will cut poverty. Critics say they will simply transfer money from people who work to people who don't. Both sides are missing the point – because Britain's welfare state isn't just poorly calibrated. It is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what poverty actually is. John Penrose, Chair of the Conservative Policy Forum, makes a quie...

Liberalism is under its greatest threat since the 1930s. The question is whether its defenders have the nerve to admit why – and the ideas to fight back. Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg columnist and author of "Centrists of the World Unite!", joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for an unsentimental diagnosis of liberalism's crisis — and an unexpectedly combative case for its recovery. The liberal traditio...

The political map we grew up with is obsolete. What comes next could be far more turbulent than anything we've seen so far. Historian Stephen Davies, author of The Great Realignment, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to make the case that the upheavals of recent years – Brexit, Trump, the rise of Reform – are not aberrations to be waited out, but symptoms of something far more structural: a once-in-a...

In the winter of 1973, Britain ran on three days a week. Candles lit homes, shops shut early, and a Prime Minister insisted everything was under control — right up until it wasn't. Half a century later, the warnings are sounding again. Dr Lawrence Newport, Director of Looking for Growth, draws a stark and unsettling parallel between the energy crisis that brought Edward Heath's government to its k...