The Capitalist

Few political questions are as basic, or as pressing, as how a government raises the money it spends – and the last year in British politics has provided ample examples of the political pitfalls of tax reform. In principle a good tax system should be a winning combination of fairness, efficiency, smooth revenue raising and growth-enhancing incentives. The UK does reasonably well on some of these f...

From sin taxes to plain packaging, smoking bans to warnings about the perils of office cake , the reach of Britain's nanny state has never felt more pervasive or pedantic.   Only this week the public health panjandrums came up with a new wheeze - proposing reducing the calorie content of certain naughty foods by 10% in a bid to shrink the nation's waistlines.   Few know the intricacies of the publ...

Our guest this week. John Longworth, is a real titan of UK PLC. As a scientist, business, entrepreneur and advocate for the interests of British business, there aren't many who have John's breadth or depth of experience - something he's bringing to bear now as chairman of the Independent Business Network, which represents our often ignored small and family businesses.  We sat down for a fascinatin...

CapX regulars know all too well the parlous state of British housing. We don't build enough, what we do build is often shoddy and angrily opposed by local people, and both rents and mortgages are increasingly out of the reach of even those on middling income. There is no single silver bullet, no snapping of the fingers that will suddenly deliver a properly functioning, prosperity-enhancing British...

Trying to boil down this eventful, hectic and often tragic year into a single podcast was always going to be a hell of a challenge - but here on the CapX Podcast we like to shoot for the moon and cram in as much content for our loyal listeners as possible. To that end, our editors John and Alys brought together some of Westminster's sharpest commentators to run the rule over their heroes and villa...

Wherever you look workers are going on strike and our schools are no exception - even though Jeremy Hunt managed to find an extra few billion behind the Treasury couch for education at his recent Autumn Statement. So what's going on here, why are union leaders still balloting, and what's the state of English schools after 12 years of Tory-led governments? To get the lowdown on all things education...

What kind of country is Britain today? That might be a rather broad question, but thanks to the recently published census, we can have a stab at answering it – at least for England and Wales. For this week's topical podcast we kick off with deep dive into those findings, what they say about Britain's demography and, in particular, the rapidly declining status of Christianity. And if it's British i...

Baroness Dambisa Moyo is a seriously impressive woman. She’s worked at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs analysing global economic trends, and sat on the boards of numerous FTSE100 companies including Barclays and Chevron. She’s also the author of five books including best-sellers Dead Aid – a critique of development policy in Africa – and How the West was Lost, about a series of mistakes and failu...

Our guest this week is one of a kind. A truly polymathic personality, there's not much Tyler Cowen doesn't have a well informed view on, from the merits of Bradford curry houses to the future of cryptocurrencies and the fate of Trussonomics.   That breadth of interest is evident from his prolific writing on his Marginal Revolution blog, in the pages of various newspapers and in the 20-odd books he...

We're turning our gaze Stateside this week where the mid-term elections promised a red wave and delivered ,well, something more like a ripple. A bad night for Donald Trump, a pretty good one for Joe Biden and a fascinating tee-up for the presidential race in a couple of years' time.  To chew over the results we welcomed back to the podcast my predecessor as editor, Oliver Wiseman, who since leavin...

Law and order has shot up the political agenda in the last year or so, with the chaos in the Channel, damning reports into the culture of the Met Police and chaos in the prison system. Just this week we've seen the firebombing of a migrant centre in Dover and uproar over the treatment of asylum seekers at an asylum centre in the Kent village of Manston. Few commentators are better equipped to addr...

Typical isn’t it – you wait ages for a new Prime Minister and then three come along in six months. Rishi Sunak has taken command of a party that’s been through a bruising ideological battle and taken a battering in the polls as a result. He inherits an economy that’s in even worse shape than it was when Liz Truss took charge, which, to be clear, was already very bad. So where does he go from here?...

Volodymyr Zelensky became a a global icon almost overnight following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of this year. The force of his leadership and defiance in the face of overwhelming Russian force offered hope in his country's darkest hour. For our guest this week, Zelensky's heroic defiance came as no great surprise. Iuliia Mendel worked as the president's press secretary from his el...

We aren't in the habit of quoting Lenin on CapX, but his observation that there are 'decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen' has felt pretty apposite recently. So there's plenty to discuss in our latest topical podcast: from chaos in the gilt markets to the Government's growing list of u-turns. We also take on the broader question on the UK's miserable growth path and long-term...

When we think of the fight for gender equality, more often than not it's framed in terms of the unequal, often violent, treatment suffered by women and girls.   In many, many places, that is very much still the case - but in the West the 'battle of the sexes' is not as clear cut as it once was. Though there are certainly a host of challenges facing women and girls, it's also the case that – in the...

There's no doubt it's been tough week for proponents of so-called 'Trussonomics', with the Government's Growth Plan taking pelters from all sides and the Bank of England stepping in to calm down the gilt markets. But does that mean the game is up for supply-side reformers? Our guest this week, Julian Jessop, has been in the vanguard of the pro-liberalisation reforms set out by Kwasi Kwarteng and,...

From ancient Mesopatamia to the Monetary Policy Committee, the story of trade, commerce and capitalism is also the story of interest rates.  Few people are as intimately acquainted with that topsy-turvy narrative as our guest this week, the financial journalist and historian Edward Chancellor. In his recent book The Price of Time , Edward offers not only a sprawling, fascinating history of interes...

In a world of relentless, high-velocity news, sometimes it pays to take a step back and look at the big picture. Our guest this week, the US economist Brad DeLong , does that with some aplomb in his new book 'Slouching Towards Utopia', a sweeping survey of economic development from the late 19th century to the present day, and an attempt to work out how we've ended up in this period of roiling eco...

It’s results season, so as well as an opportunity to offer congratulations or commiserations to all our many teenage listeners getting their GCSEs and A Levels this week, it’s a chance to talk about education policy. This is the first year since the pandemic that anyone has sat public examinations, which means an inevitable readjustment and many children disappointed with their grades. But does th...

Water, water everywhere...this week's news has been dominated by rows over the privatised utilities. From polluting water companies to 'greedy' energy bosses, it's open season on anyone who dares turn a (highly regulated) profit while providing an essential public service. Recent water and high energy prices have also turned a spotlight on a chronic failure to build new infrastructure, with the UK...

Are you a booster or a doomster? A recent article by the economist and CapX regular Sam Bowman suggests this is  the  divide in UK economic policy.   For the Boosters, not only is growth paramount, but there's plenty we can do through better domestic policy to improve things, both right now and for future generations. Doomsters, unsurprisingly, take a more pessimistic view, and see a country trapp...

This week we were delighted to welcome one of the stars of the centre-right media landscape, Madeline Grant. After starting out in thinktank world at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Madeline has since forged a path in journalism as a comment editor, columnist and latterly sketch-writer at the Daily Telegraph. There was plenty for us to chew over, from Rishi's green belt proposals to Liz's regio...

In the last few years our guest this week, Tomiwa Owolade, has emerged as one of the most thoughtful, persuasive and eloquent young writers in Britain today, covering everything from Don Henley to Philip Larkin, from football to the wayward attempts to 'decolonise' the school curriculum. As well as writing a slew of articles in various online and print outlets, next year Tom publishes his debut bo...

This week saw the hottest day in recorded history here in the UK – and things were equally fiery down in the Commons corridors as we whittled the Tory field down to a final two of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. So what can we take from the frenetic last two weeks of campaigning, and what can we expect in the month ahead as both candidates make their pitch to the Conservative membership? To chew the fa...

While most of us in the West are pretty unequivocal about Vladimir Putin’s brutal campaign against Ukraine, in Russia itself a sophisticated infrastructure of deceit conditions the public to see and believe in a very different conflict.   Few people are better placed to understand how this war came about than our guest this week, Dr Jade McGlynn. Unlike many of the armchair pundits who have emerge...