The Capitalist

From the soaring cost of living to ever-lengthening NHS waiting lists, the Government certainly has its hands full at the moment – even without the rumbling discontent about PartyGate in the background. And on top of the day-to-day issues, Boris Johnson has set himself the daunting task of reconfiguring Britain's political economy with the recently released Levelling Up White Paper. To talk us thr...

Martin Wander Weyer has had a front row seat for some of the biggest economic developments of the last 50 years - both as a banker and as business correspondent for the Spectator- including under the editorship of Boris Johnson. His book the Good the Bad and the Greedy argues that scandals like the misselling of PPI and the fixing of Libor have eroded trust in enterprise, and that only a return to...

As part of our new year revamp of the CapX Podcast we're bringing you another topical, multi-topic episode this week.  To kick off we head east and speak to former Ukrainian MP Alyona Hlivco about the perilous situation on her country's borders. Is this just more brinkmanship from Vladimir Putin, or is there a real risk of conflict? Her answer is an interesting rejoinder to some of the more impass...

Why is a rainy island in north-west Europe trying to join a trade bloc centred on the Pacific?  At first sight, the UK's application to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership seems highly counter-intuitive – but it actually makes a lot of sense, as a report this week from our parent organisation, the Centre for Policy Studies, makes clear. To help us explain why t...

The CapX Podcast returns with a rundown of the big stories of 2022 so far - and the only place to start is Downing Street itself, where stories of lockdown gatherings have caused massive political ructions and left the Prime Minister fending off critics on all sides. So what's next for Boris - and can he hang on in the face of the most sustained criticism of his leadership so far? As well as the r...

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...