For many people, there is a brilliant piece of music or an inspiring novel that changes their life. For a freak like me, it was obviously a documentary. And of course it was a documentary about Margaret Thatcher. Released just after she died, ‘Margaret, Death of A Revolutionary’ set me on the path of believing […]
In what could have been a comment on Scotland’s low-scoring, but nevertheless clean sheet-keeping win against Haiti in the World Cup, Adam Smith once remarked: ‘Defence is of much more importance than opulence’. But for too long now, Britain has had too little of either. The lack of capable military force has prompted (at the […]
In that bonkers novel, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, Hunter S. Thompson has a great line (well, in some ways, he has several) about crime in America: ‘In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.’ But not even […]
I walked the dog recently along the Thames Path, around the source (or one of the sources, so as not to cause a fight) of the River Thames. This time of year, much of it is all dried up, and you can walk along the bed of what in the winter is full-flowing river. Wondering […]
Three C-17 Globemasters. Eight shipping containers. The first nuclear reactor in history to be moved by air. While it feels like the opening of one of those special-forces slop series on Amazon that I count as one of my guiltiest pleasures, this is the very real Operation Windlord. The operation, conducted by the US Air […]
Can a robot write a symphony? Can it turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?” Can you? This exchange from the film ‘I, Robot’ (and later parodied in a million memes) captures human fears and concerns about coexisting with robots, and what it means to be human. Fast forward 20 years, and artificial intelligence is […]
You will all know this experience. Sitting in a job interview, you are asked your biggest weakness. Desperate to impress, you used a humble brag; I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I get so invested in success. Something similar may have happened in the world of artificial intelligence. Anthropic, the company behind the large language […]
We called this column ‘The Price Mechanism’ because of my surname, but also to send a signal that with economic illiteracy on the rise in Westminster, certain economic fundamentals need to be constantly repeated for the hard of thinking. That’s exactly what prices do – they send signals about underlying market fundamentals. They contain huge amounts […]
This week marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s ‘An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’. At the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), we have naturally been busy celebrating the masterwork’s semiquincentennial. Talks have been held, even graphic novels scribbled. Most importantly, pieces have appeared this week in CapX, written by […]
Earlier this year, I left London, for all the reasons you’d imagine an evil right-winger like me would. One of the few (and there are only a few) pangs of regret I had was when I was driving my wife and dog out along the Westway for the final time. Coming the other way was […]
Christmas may now be a distant memory, but I finally got to watch Frank Capra’s classic ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. It really is a wondrous film, and not even my tipsy uncle talking all the way through it could dent it. One lovely line came back to me this week, where James Stewart’s George Bailey […]
So, never-here-Keir is on, by my counting, his 38th overseas trip since entering Downing Street. This time, it is to Communist China, in what must feel like something of a homecoming for Starmer. The Prime Minister has declared that this trip will make Britain richer, which is a surprising goal given he is doing seemingly […]
In the moments before Keir Starmer, our hapless Prime Minister, opened his mouth, mandatory ID cards were a theoretically popular policy. They polled well, despite the best efforts of civil liberties campaigners to highlight the dangers they pose to our freedoms. The most compelling arguments for the scheme were the ways that they could transform […]
For my last column of the year, the editor of this fine publication asked that I try to inject a spot of early Christmas cheer, and offer some reasons to be positive and hopeful as we lurch into 2026. Amid the doom and gloom of Labour’s Britain, I thought initially that the task might be […]
Britain faces a series of truly invidious problems. In order of salience: our debt, our spending addiction (not unrelated), our totally anaemic growth (ditto), our shrinking birth rates and our weakness in the face of international threats in the form of Russia, China and Islamism. Given these, you might think that a Chancellor with an […]
One of the biggest barriers to getting leftists to understand economics is their pathological misunderstanding of how wealth works. The average socialist/communist thinks that billionaires are surrounded by piles of filthy lucre that sit there in a lair, inert. Like Smaug the Dragon or Scrooge McDuck, they imagine Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk lying among […]
Government press releases are squalid, compromised little things. You can see the fingerprints from dozens of grubby little hands who have all fought to insert their buzzword or catchphrase in there. Whether they be political slogans, corporate waffle or worst of all, dog whistles for (forgive me, Lord) ‘key stakeholders’, they obscure announcements as much […]
At the crushing denouement of ‘A Man For All Seasons’, Thomas More issues the devastating line to the scoundrel Richard Rich, who has perjured himself for a Welsh sinecure, ‘Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… But for Wales!’ In a similar vein, I find it extraordinary […]
By the 1970s, a few generations of the brightest minds in Britain had been utterly flummoxed by our national decline, and felt that managing it was the best they could do in a situation that was inevitable. It took heroic thinkers from outside the Civil Service to diagnose the problems, and come up with the […]
As CapX fan favourite Karl Marx once said: ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.’ This may be one of the only correct statements ever uttered by that awful little man, but it really has proven true this week as Labour’s latest attempts to ‘stop the boats’ have run aground. This week, an […]
