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 […]
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are. This stirring end to Ulysses fills me with such a sense of mission that Mrs Price and I named our cocker spaniel Tennyson. Much has been taken […]
A solid tactic for how to open opinion pieces is to start with a famous or meaningful quotation. I can think of nothing better than this: ‘I just remember hitting my head, and now I have the cheese’. Wise words, indeed. For this is a piece about what we can learn from one of the […]
What do high-flying LinkedIn profiles and literal air travel have in common? They both want to show a smooth, seamless ascent, with no turbulence and definitely no bumpy landings. It’s true that on LinkedIn, you can often view someone’s career journey taking off and the twists and turns they take. A promotion here, a glossing […]
‘Nothing else in the world… not all the armies… is so powerful as an idea whose time has come’. Clearly, Victor Hugo never envisioned the power of Treasury brain. Despite the manifold reasons as to why inheritance tax should have died long ago, HMT’s apparent allergy to dynamic modelling means that the taxman still inserts […]
By now, we all know that the Prime Minister has the laudable aim of making the UK a science and technology superpower. Well, someone should tell the Home Office – and fast. The much-maligned Online Safety Bill is going through legislative ‘ping pong’ this evening, and yet many elements of it are going to have […]
