When I was researching a book on the financial crisis and the collapse of RBS, I became obsessed (again) by Scottish history and the way in which developments north of the border impact on the rest of the UK. I’m British and Scottish. Scotland is a great country, although in celebrating the achievements of Adam […]
This is the weekly newsletter from Iain Martin, editor of CapX. To receive it by email every Friday, along with a short daily email of our top five stories, please subscribe here. The “rock star” Greek finance minister continued his world tour this week, with a visit to Washington. He got twelve minutes with President […]
The last of the UK general election leaders’ televised debates was a strange affair. The Prime Minister David Cameron was not there, and neither was his Liberal Democrat deputy. Instead, Labour leader Ed Miliband did battle with the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, UKIP’s Nigel Farage and the leaders of the Green Party and the Welsh Nationalist. […]
If 400 people had been killed in Rome this week, in a train crash or in a collapsed building, Europe’s airwaves would have been full for days with coverage of the terrible disaster. When those 400 dead people are migrants crossing the Mediterranean, heading for the coast of Italy this week, it gets attention. But […]
My copy of The War Room, the classic fly on the wall documentary about Bill Clinton made during the 1992 presidential election, is on VHS. That’s how long ago the Clintons first became famous. In 1992, the DVD hadn’t been invented, or if it had it was not yet widely available. Netflix didn’t exist and […]
This is the weekly newsletter from Iain Martin, editor of CapX. To receive it by email every Friday, along with a short daily email of our top five stories, please subscribe here. I’ve never bought the Paul Krugman schtick, not since the Nobel Prize winner gave one of the poorest presentations I’ve ever seen. In […]
When is price fixing mad Marxist meddling in the market, and when is it justified as sound common sense? The answer, for Britain’s Conservative party, seems to be that it is the former when Labour leader Ed Miliband is announcing that he wants to freeze energy prices. But it is apparently perfectly sensible when the […]
The UK general election campaign apparently came to life earlier this week, when the Labour leader Ed Miliband announced that he intends to scrap the “non-dom” tax arrangement that enables some UK residents to avoid paying tax on their foreign earnings. The Conservatives responded with a highly personal attack on Miliband which didn’t entirely make […]
Must capitalism and democracy go hand in hand? Does a successful capitalist system need to be a democracy? Since the modern rise of China and the economic success of its authoritarian model, which blends political control with rampant commercial competition, it has become fashionable to say that democracy is over-rated. Look at Singapore, say the […]
One last mention of the UK general election leaders debate. Who won? Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, did rather brilliantly but she had it easy and faced no challenge for her party’s poor record on education and health, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. Miliband was fine too. Cameron played it safe and got what he […]
Apologies if you are not interested in the UK general election, or if you come to CapX to get away from domestic politics. On that score, Beatrice Faleri has written a fascinating piece for CapX on Italy, “a nation on the run” that is exporting many of its best and brightest. And our friends at […]
There is a terrific piece in the Financial Times today on the grave difficulties that the Labour party is having convincing business that it has no plans to turn Britain into Cuba crossed with modern Greece. “Many chief executives,” writes John Gapper, “fear he (Ed Miliband) would lead a left-wing government with far less sympathy […]
The UK election campaign starts this week. What do you mean, it feels as though it has already been going for 18 months? What do you mean you will leave the country if another opinion pollster makes a big deal out of one poll – one poll – showing a sudden shift that is then […]
Former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson’s famous dictum about the UK’s National Health Service is as apposite today as it was when he put it in his memoirs. In the View From Number 11, a deeply valuable and insightful book published in 1993, Lawson said: “The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have […]
I do not propose to repeat here my theories about why excessive consolidation and regulation have caused a deterioration in the quality and durability of basic household appliances. It is all in the piece I wrote for CapX back in December, which was sparked by bumping into Dominic Lawson. His dishwasher had also gone on […]
The modern media is addicted to lists. If thrusting online journalists at new outfits such as Buzzfeed are not compiling lists of the 25 greatest cats that look like American presidents, they are compiling lists of dogs that look most like members of One Direction. They also produce some lists on less serious topics. Lists […]
It might be thought odd that the Labour party could win the general election taking place on May the 7th and that Ed Miliband, the party’s much derided leader, could soon be Prime Minister. Only five years since the end of the financial crisis, the side effects of which put £1 trillion on Britain’s national […]
I love the Guardian. Ok, that’s not entirely true. I was raised reading the Guardian and while my views on politics and economics have “evolved” considerably in the last twenty-five years, I still have a residual respect for the place, despite the way in which it seems to have come to despise the newspaper and […]
Earlier this week, Justine Thornton gave a very good interview on the BBC News at 10. Put to one side that the wife of Labour’s trainee Prime Minister lamented that her husband faces personal attacks on his character from opponents during the election campaign. Let us overlook the reality that her husband, Ed Miliband, has been […]
One of the most unappealing aspects of contemporary British politics is the way in which parties, some more than others, spend their time trying to shame their opponents rather than laying out their own ideas for improving the economy or dealing with an increasingly dangerous international situation. The latest example of this tendency is the […]
