A fortnight from today, Rachel Reeves will stand up at the Despatch Box and deliver her first Budget. It will not be the one she wishes she could give. Ever since moving into Number 11, the Chancellor has insisted that, far from there being no money left, there’s a whopping black hole of £22 billion […]
Britain’s rich regional diversity makes our country an immeasurably more interesting and appealing place. But not all of our intra-national differences are a source of pride. One in particular is the widely varying economic fortunes between parts of the UK. Across a range of metrics, businesses in some regions clearly perform better than average, while […]
You needn’t be an expert psephologist to know that immigration was a key reason behind the Conservatives’ capitulation to Labour in July’s general election. So, as the Tory leadership election moves towards its business end, it’s no surprise to see that all of the candidates vying to replace Rishi Sunak have pledged to slash the […]
Politicians are fond of reminding us that people are the ‘lifeblood of the economy’. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for good reason. In advanced economies like ours, the greatest limiting factor on growth tends to be the stock of available talent. You can have all the raw materials and capital equipment in the […]
By far the most important issue facing modern societies is the ability to achieve and sustain economic growth. This doesn’t simply mean the level of Gross Domestic Product – the total value of goods and services exchanged within an economy in a given year – but rather the annual improvement in the living standards we […]
Along with all the benefits international trade brings for consumers in terms of the range and quality of goods they can get hold of, the effect on exporters themselves has perhaps had less attention. Yet it’s something we really ought to all be talking about, especially in the context of Britain’s chronic problems with both […]
Since becoming Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt has trumpeted his ambition to ‘turn Britain into the world’s next Silicon Valley’. Given the recent ‘headaches’ with the bank of the same name – and not wanting to gift sketch writers any easy gags – references to the Californian tech cluster were understandably scrubbed from his Budget speech. But […]
With the Spring Budget just around the corner, it’s no surprise that Westminster’s legion of lobbyists are intensifying their efforts to influence tax and spending decisions one way or another. Given how far it has rocketed up the political agenda, energy policy is an area where campaigning activity has been especially frenzied. The recent establishment […]
Not long ago, I wrote on these pages about heat pumps. the miraculous contraptions with which Britain will decarbonise domestic heating. Yet while it’s true they will help in driving down emissions – being far, far less polluting than your typical gas boiler – it would be wrong to say they are inherently climate-neutral. That’s […]
The UK’s transition to net zero is already well underway, with emissions now around half what they were in 1990. The inconvenient truth, however, is that much of that progress was relatively easy. We got there, in part, by picking the lowest of the low-hanging fruit – cleaning up our electricity grid by replacing coal-fired […]
Even if it hadn’t coincided with the business end of the World Cup, the UN Biodiversity Conference of the Parties (aka COP15) would still have passed all but the most interested observers by. But while the get-together in Montreal didn’t quite capture the headlines like the one in Qatar, we shouldn’t underestimate its importance. COP15 […]
In his first speech as Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak referred to economic growth as a ‘noble aim’ – and indeed it is. But the biggest obstacle to turning that lofty ambition into a reality is Britain’s woeful productivity rates. CapX readers will no strangers to the sorry state of UK productivity – but its familiarity […]
There’s a fun theory that, since at least 1963, British Prime Ministers have alternated between being ‘nerds’ and ‘jocks’. The swift replacement of Liz Truss by Rishi Sunak has, apparently, broken the chain. In the days ahead, tough decisions will need to be taken on a range of policy areas, not least the economy and […]
While tax cuts understandably dominated the weekend’s headlines, there was much more in Kwasi Kwarteng’s Growth Plan that will be crucial if the Government is going to hits its ambitious 2.5% trend growth target. Immigration policy is one such area, with the Government rightfully stating that ‘migration, in particular skilled and high-skilled migration, plays an […]
Cutting emissions from the economy has long been a central aim of Boris Johnson’s Government. But what started as an ambition to decarbonise for the sake of the planet has now morphed – partly, at least – into an even more urgent mission to defend democracy itself. The horrific war which Vladimir Putin is waging […]
With Ofgem about to announce a hike in the energy price cap, politicians, NGOs and commentators are lining up with ways to protect families who can ill afford another increase to their household bills. The trouble is, few of these policy proposals would achieve much at all, while many would be actively bad for consumers. […]
Has COP26 all ended in tears? In a quite literal sense, it very nearly did. When closing the conference on Saturday evening, COP president Alok Sharma struggled to contain his emotions as he spoke of the ‘deep disappointment’ at last minute changes to the wording of the Glasgow Climate Pact. Instead of a commitment to […]
There is never a good time for an energy crunch to hit – but the one we’re currently experiencing comes with particularly inauspicious timing. Just as we move deeper into autumn, families will be worrying about the extra costs of keeping warm. At the same time, workers in energy-intensive industries face an unenviable period of […]
Last week, the Tony Blair Institute became the latest in a long line of think tanks to come out in favour of road pricing. In their excellent paper, authors Tim Lord and Christina Palmou note that changing how we tax motorists – by moving away from blunt instruments like Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty, and […]
Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying. If the authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s mammoth new publication – the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report – wanted readers to take just one message away, that was it. If the evidence of the likely causes and impacts of our planet’s […]
