The Capitalist

John Healey has delivered his first Budget as Chancellor. In this special edition of The Capitalist , Liam Halligan is joined by Daniel Herring, the Centre for Policy Studies’ Head of Economic and Fiscal Policy, to go through what was announced and what it means for taxes, growth and the public finances. Get full access to The CapX Briefing at briefing.capx.co/subscribe

'The best course would be to grip spending, not least on welfare, and use the savings to cut the deficit and taxes on business, that essential engine of growth.’ As John Healey delivers his first Budget, the markets will be watching closely, says Mel Stride. In all likelihood Healey will leave himself a very slender headroom, the smallest amount that markets will tolerate. Healey would be wise to...

‘Most people believe we’ve been living in some sort of crazy neoliberal lab experiment for the last 40 years… And that’s because nobody has tried to challenge it.’ This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell spoke to Lord Frost, who led the UK’s Brexit negotiations and later served as Brexit minister under Boris Johnson. They discussed why Andy Burnham’s move towards rejoining the EU didn’t surprise...

Why has it become a reflex for Britain to emphasise the worst of our history while neglecting the best? This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell speaks with Robert Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge and author of The English and Their History , about Our Islands’ Story , the new book he has written with Nigel Biggar. It’s out next week. They discussed why the history of empi...

‘She [Badenoch] promised to build a missile and drone defence system called Britannia Shield, telling the hall that if Russia fires a missile at Manchester, Andy Burnham’s £2 bus fares will not save anybody.’ Are the Tories back on track? That’s what Kemi Badenoch was trying to prove in her speech on the final day of the Conservative conference last week. James Price says her approach was a welcom...

At a Centre for Policy Studies fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, the CPS's new Director Liam Halligan put the questions to Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith. Griffith, a former FTSE 100 finance director, begins with why Britain’s growth rate never recovered after 2008. He points to a tax system that discourages risk, a state now spending 45p in every pound, an ageing...

‘The Bakerloo line extension, if it is ever built, will be the most expensive underground line built anywhere in the world outside of New York City.’ Britain is pretty good at spending money on infrastructure. But Ben Hopkinson argues we don’t get much for our money. HS2, at up to £102.7 billion for 140 miles of track, is the most expensive high-speed railway in the world. Ben's new report for the...

What should we do about the nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training? The Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately joined Marc Sidwell on The Capitalist on the day the Conservatives unveiled their answer: a Get to Work plan that would require under-25s claiming benefits to join an intensive programme from day one, or lose their payments. They discuss the cas...

‘American firms dominate the tech industry and so almost any domestic digital regulation a foreign government passes will land disproportionately on US companies.’ The Trump administration has admonished its British counterparts over digital regulations like the Online Safety Act. Ben Ramanauskas, a former trader adviser to the UK government, explains that the US feels hard done by because while t...

Why do so many people – on the Right as well as the Left – look back fondly on a pre-industrial world they would never actually want to live in? This week on The Capitalist, Chelsea Follett of the Cato Institute speaks with Marc Sidwell about her new book, ‘The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past’. It sets out what life was really like before modern economic growth: famine eve...

‘You cannot reform what you cannot measure, and Britain cannot presently measure corporate welfare in any meaningful way.’ From support for wind farms to assorted tax reliefs, corporate welfare receives far less attention than voter welfare, but Alan Hibben argues it should be easier to cut – if we actually knew the true cost to taxpayers. Until Britain stops administering corporate support as a f...

What does the fight for free markets look like in 2026 – and how can Britain escape its high-debt, high-tax, low-growth doom loop? Liam Halligan, the new Director of the Centre for Policy Studies – and so now in charge of CapX as well – joins Marc Sidwell on The Capitalist to explain why he decided to get more involved in frontline policymaking. He argues that our perilous fiscal position today lo...

‘The only thing more power-hungry than AI are, of course, leftist politicians themselves.’ Economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that making a technology more efficient means people will use it a lot more, rather than less — his example was coal and the steam engine. James Price argues the same holds for AI. In the US, AI has created a million jobs to the 200,000 job losses it gets blamed for....

Is Britain’s own debt now as dangerous as any foreign rival? This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell speaks to Daniel Hannan, the writer, peer and former MEP who has just taken over as Director-General of the Institute of Economic Affairs – Britain’s original free-market think tank – at a moment when state spending sits at 46% of GDP. He makes the case that in an increasingly dangerous world, Br...

‘The nations whose standards the world adopts win far more than the nations that merely rent their software by the month.’ The UK used to allow proprietary technology to compete alongside its open alternatives. Damian Green argues that as we enter the age of AI, our Government seems unsure how to deal with open-source models. But investing in open-source projects with the Americans is essential if...

Will the man who paints himself as the antidote to Thatcherism lead us back to the worst of the 1970s? This week on The Capitalist, as Britain’s borrowing costs spiked and Andy Burnham faced MPs as Prime Minister, Marc Sidwell spoke to the economist Julian Jessop about Burnham’s plans – and whether they can really get Britain back to growth. We discussed whether nationalisation is a recipe for red...

‘In Britain, we can force £100 million to be spent on a bat tunnel; imagine what our planning system will do with a gigawatt campus.’ Britain is the home of the first data centre, which helped us win the Second World War. James Price says that nowadays we can barely build them, thanks to Nimby complaints gumming up the planning system. The UAE is building data centres in the desert. Singapore is b...

This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell speaks to the writer and CapX columnist Jonn Elledge. His new book ‘31 Inventions That Built Our World’ , surveys the technologies – from sewers to lifts – that make urban life possible. They discuss what it takes to keep a modern city running, and whether we are losing our nerve when it comes to building twenty-first century infrastructure. They also talk...

Compliance costs British business around £52 billion a year. Damian Pudner asks how much of that is wasted on rules nobody has bothered to think through? Every hour spent on paperwork is an hour not spent selling, investing or training staff. Ministers are held to account when they spend public money. They should face the same scrutiny when they spend everyone else’s time. Each week we bring you a...

Are Nimbys a threat to national security? Britain’s inability to build houses and infrastructure is rightly at the heart of our domestic political debate. Dalibor Rohac thinks it needs to be seen as a geopolitical failing as well. This week on The Capitalist, Rohac, incoming director of research at Globsec, discusses his new book ‘Unshackled: How Economic Growth Can Defeat the World’s Dictators’ ....

Britain's national debt has just passed £3 trillion for the first time – and John Penrose says it's time to get it under control. But while Andy Burnham ruled out breaking Rachel Reeves's fiscal rules to borrow more, he's asked his Chancellor to find 'wriggle room' within them. Penrose argues that what we need instead is full transparency about the state's liabilities. Any honest reckoning would i...

Richard Hanania had a ringside seat for the rise of MAGA, as his Substack essays on anti-woke issues gained traction at the highest level of the new American Right. He had high hopes for Donald Trump’s second term, and coined the term ‘Tech Right’, hoping for an administration that worked productively alongside some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley. In practice, he says the second Trump pr...

The recent Spanish border crisis – in which some 72,000 illegal migrants crossed into Ceuta from Morocco – should be a wake-up call for Europe, argues Mani Basharzad . Most of those who crossed the border soon returned home, but thousands remained and dozens died in the chaos. Even the most fervent Remainer ought to view these events with relief that Britain is no longer bound by the EU’s right to...

Britain’s ‘equal value’ pay rules go well beyond upholding equal pay for the same work, and mean that tribunals have the power to ignore the market and decide that bin men and teaching assistants should, in fact, be paid the same. These rules bankrupted Birmingham City Council, and the big supermarkets are already facing claims worth up to £8 billion for back pay. Now the Government wants to expan...

Give Andy Burnham his due. He has been arguing for devolution for the best part of a decade. But Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen says that’s what makes the Prime Minister’s recent announcements so dispiriting. Burnham says he wants Whitehall to give power away, but he seems determined to grip tighter than ever. Houchen argues that handing over a share of business rates and income tax counts for litt...