After five years at CapX, and four as editor, I’m very sorry to say I’ll be stepping down at the end of next week. So for my last Weekly Briefing I’d like to reflect on my time in this wonderful job. (I hope you will forgive some mild self-indulgence on this occasion, safe in the […]
When Greenpeace climbed on the Prime Minister’s roof this week, the natural response was to rage about the group’s intrusive, not to mention illegal, tactics. Why, many asked, would an apparently serious organisation think it’s OK to invade a politician’s family property? It’s a perfectly reasonable question: whatever the excuses about the Sunak family being […]
You have to squint very hard indeed to make out a hint of Tory recovery in this week’s by-election results. Rishi Sunak had certainly paid a visit to the political optometrist after his party’s ULEZ-inspired victory in Uxbridge & South Ruislip. ‘The Labour Party has been acting like it’s a done deal. The people of […]
At first blush, Rishi Sunak’s pledge to cut NHS waiting lists looks not just sensible, but absolutely imperative. The backlog since Covid alone numbers in the millions and horror stories of monstrous delays abound. Even a seemingly obvious policy has its pitfalls though. According to Matthew Taylor of the NHS Confederation, focusing too heavily on waiting […]
The NHS recently marked its 75th birthday with the kind of love-in most countries reserve for a passing monarch or truly iconic celebrity. So what is about our health service that has created such a fervent attachment amongst so many Brits, even when it underperforms compared to some of our continental peers? To find out, we […]
With the independent Bank of England acting to control inflation and government keeping close control of the public finances, supporting households, and easing the supply side, we are doing everything we can to make sure expectations for higher inflation don’t become embedded…The country should feel confident that we can, and we will, get inflation back […]
There are few things more emphatically British than our collective cognitive dissonance when it comes to Our NHS. As its 75th anniversary approaches, we continue to treat the health service with quasi-religious awe, as if universal healthcare were a uniquely British achievement. You’ll struggle to find a purer demonstration of this cloying piety than a […]
. Trash, garbage, litter or rubbish – whatever you call it the world is producing ever more of the stuff. But where does it all go once it’s left our colour-coded bins? And what about all those clothes you leave at the charity shop thining you’ve done a good turn? The fascinating tapestry of grime […]
Seven years on from the EU referendum, what began with a political earthquake has, over time, turned into more of a sustained whimper. Of course, the usual suspects are having their say: Alastair Campbell’s been on a special edition Question Time telling voters they were lied to (which apparently he hates now), Tony Blair’s commissioned some polling out […]
Is Britain an opportunity society? It’s a broad question that encompasses education, social mobility, skills, entrepreneurship and, crucially, risk-taking. On the latter theme, I was particularly struck by a panel at our annual Margaret Thatcher Conference this week, on the theme of the ‘opportunity economy’ (you can watch the discussion here). According to Tracy Blackwell […]
As with so much modern political theatre, the debate on artificial intelligence has become polarised to a point that is often profoundly unhelpful, with a false dichotomy between ‘doomers’ and utopians who see AI as a solution to the world’s many problems, both technical and social. Between those positions is a world of nuance and wildly […]
Few items of public policy raise the public’s hackles quite like Inheritance Tax (IHT). For many Brits it seems to be more a moral question than a financial one: that the state should intercede in what is normally a family matter sticks in the collective craw like little else. George Osborne tapped into that well […]
There are few political questions as vexed as how to tax hard-pressed motorists. For many years, the Treasury has treated British drivers as a cash cow, levying high taxes while investing relatively little in the road network. Now, however, things are changing rapidly. The take-up of electric vehicles and the upcoming ban on new petrol […]
We have plenty of external economic problems – wars, plague, failed harvests abroad and so on – but never underestimate the British capacity for shooting ourselves in the foot with well-intentioned but damaging rules. Natural England’s nutrient and water neutrality rules fall firmly into this category. The aim is noble enough: to ensure the vitality […]
This week’s National Conservatism Conference in London was a strange beast: part book fair, part lecture series, part political rally for a group whose principal belief seems to be that, to paraphrase D:Ream, things can only get worse. From the evils of Net Zero, to the collapse of the nuclear family, the march of ‘cultural […]
Just what is National Conservatism? That’s the question we’re grappling with this week, following the big National Conservatism Conference in London. While the three-day event certainly generated lots of media heat, it’s still not particularly clear what this US-imported idea actually stands for. Indeed, the answer seemed to vary depending on which of the eclectic […]
For those who fear the UK is turning into Italy with worse weather and inferior food, this week’s ONS stats on household formation offered yet more evidence for the prosecution. For Britain has been steadily adding to its own stock of bamboccioni – young adults unwilling or, more likely, unable to flee the nest. Between the censuses […]
Our guest this week played an instrumental role in the UK’s departure from the European Union. As Boris Johnson’s Europe adviser and then chief negotiator in the exit talks with the EU, Lord Frost drew on a lifetime of experience as a civil servant and foreign office diplomat to help get the Trade and Cooperation […]
Did you know that every time you fill up your car, you are paying for the UK’s biofuels mandate, the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO)? In fact, some 6% of the price Brits pay at the pump goes on biofuel being blended into petrol and diesel. More concerning still at a time of soaring food […]
Things can seem a bit gloomy at the moment, and no one is better suited to explaining why than our guest this week, the Tory writer and self-proclaimed doom-monger Ed West. In an eclectic career that has spanned lad mags, religious publications and a very popular personal Substack, Ed has become one of the most […]
