Another week, another mini-reset from the Sunak government. Where the PM’s Mais Lecture last year set out three priorities (‘Capital. People. Ideas’) on Friday Jeremy Hunt went for ‘four pillars’: Enterprise, Education, Employment and Everywhere, which is really just one more way of saying ‘Levelling Up’. Lest this should all seem a bit vague and […]
From sin taxes to plain packaging, smoking bans to warnings about the perils of office cake, the reach of Britain’s nanny state has never felt more pervasive or pedantic. Just this week the public health panjandrums came up with a new wheeze – proposing reducing the calorie content of certain naughty foods by 10% in […]
For fans of cock-eyed statistics, British politics offers a smorgasbord of material – and this week was no exception. Take the big row about the second round of Levelling Up funding. Isn’t it disgraceful that the leafy south-east of England is getting more money than needier parts of the country? Well, you could conclude that […]
This week’s podcast guest. John Longworth, is a real titan of UK PLC. As a scientist, business, entrepreneur and advocate for the interests of British business, there aren’t many who have John’s breadth or depth of experience – something he’s bringing to bear now as chairman of the Independent Business Network, which represents our often […]
One of Labour’s New Year attack lines is that the Government is engaged in ‘sticking plaster politics’, patching up problems with often expensive quick fixes because the fundamental issues haven’t been addressed. It’s an effective slogan, not least because it has the merit of being true – indeed, I’ve written about ‘government by stopgap’ on […]
. CapX regulars know all too well the parlous state of British housing. We don’t build enough, what we do build is often shoddy and angrily opposed by local people, and both rents and mortgages are increasingly out of the reach of even those on middling income. There is no single silver bullet, no snapping […]
Does Rishi Sunak use a private GP? I suspect many will share my instinctive eye-rolling at the genre of question posed by the BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg yesterday. Yes, we all love Our NHS and all that, but why shouldn’t the Prime Minister of one of the world’s wealthiest countries avail himself of private healthcare if […]
Out with the bold, in with the ‘new’ If you’d been missing big political speeches over the Christmas break, the first week of 2023 offered two for the price of one as Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer both set out a sweeping vision for Britain’s future. I say ‘a’ vision because, as our editor-in-chief notes […]
If ever a year needed some literary distractions, it was 2022. Our contributors have served up a feast of recommendations, from dense histories and serious political analyses to more whimsical offerings, there’s something for everyone in CapX’s Books of 2022. Robert Colvile Since he agreed to fly over for our annual conference, it seems rude […]
In the spirit of festive generosity, we ought to give Wes Streeting his due. For a Labour politician to say, as he did this week, that we should not ‘pretend the NHS is the envy of the world’ takes a degree of guts and political self-awareness that has been sorely lacking in the opposition for most of […]
Trying to boil down this eventful, hectic and often tragic year into a single podcast was always going to be a hell of a challenge – but here on the CapX Podcast we like to shoot for the moon and cram in as much content for our loyal listeners as possible. To that end, our […]
In a tech world saturated with hype and bluster, the recent arrival of ChatGPT feels like that rare, precious thing – the real deal. If you have spent any time on the internet in the last 10 days or so, you will have seen people playing around with this remarkable tool, executing often highly complex […]
Wherever you look workers are going on strike and our schools are no exception – even though Jeremy Hunt managed to find an extra few billion behind the Treasury couch for education at his recent Autumn Statement. So what’s going on here, why are union leaders still balloting, and what’s the state of English schools […]
If you’re a hospital patient, a train passenger, a bus passenger, or just someone who likes receiving a timely Christmas card, you’re probably in for a pretty aggravating December. In what looks like the world’s worst advent calendar, the coming weeks could see everyone from fire officers to civil servants, border officers, postal workers, university […]
What kind of country is Britain today? That might be a rather broad question, but thanks to the recently published census, we can have a stab at answering it – at least for England and Wales. For this week’s topical podcast we kick off with deep dive into those findings, what they say about Britain’s […]
This week’s news that net migration passed 500,000 in the year to June will add yet more fuel to a debate that so often produces far more heat than light. Before we get to the bigger picture, there are a couple of important caveats to the latest figures. Firstly, the 21/22 figure includes people who […]
If we’re being generous, Jeremy Hunt made the best of a very bad hand with this week’s Autumn Statement. To quote Tom Clougherty’s piece on Thursday, the overall package was ‘sensible and measured’, without the excessive tightening some had feared. And if you’re going to raise taxes, doing so by freezing thresholds is a slightly […]
Our guest this week is one of a kind. A truly polymathic personality, there’s not much Tyler Cowen doesn’t have a well-informed view on, from the merits of Bradford curry houses to the future of cryptocurrencies and the fate of Trussonomics. That breadth of interest is evident from his prolific writing on his Marginal Revolution […]
When Jeremy Hunt stands up to deliver his Autumn Statement, one figure will be at the forefront of people’s minds – £55bn. That’s the ‘black hole’ in the public finances the Chancellor has been tasked with filling with a mixture of tax rises, ‘fiscal drag’ and spending cuts. To the layman, this scarily large number probably sounds […]
We’re turning our gaze Stateside this week where the mid-term Congressional elections promised a red wave and delivered, well, something more like a ripple. It was a pretty bad night for Donald Trump, a pretty good one for Joe Biden and a fascinating tee-up for the presidential race in a couple of years’ time. To […]
