It’s only on the basis of truth that power should be won – or indeed can be worth winning. Margaret Thatcher, 1996 It is a hundred years since Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham. Fifty years since she took over the Conservative Party. Almost 35 years since she was forced from office. Today’s voters are […]
One of the worst things about having a public profile is that you tend to attract stalkers. But rarely are those stalkers credentialled academics with a six-figure following on social media. Back in May, the Centre for Policy Studies – which I run, and which also owns CapX – published a major piece of work […]
‘The Centre for Policy Studies was where our Conservative revolution began.’ That phrase, from which this book takes its title, forms the first line of Margaret Thatcher’s speaking notes for her address to the think tank’s AGM in 1991, less than a year after being forced out of Downing Street. She went on to list […]
There have been many academic theses written about the powers and role of government. But perhaps the neatest summary comes from an anonymous minister, quoted by former civil servant Tim Leunig. They would explain to stakeholders begging for intervention that ultimately, there were five things they could do: ban something, mandate something, tax something, subsidise […]
This piece was originally published on the Centre for Policy Studies’ new monthly newsletter, which you can sign up to here. Housing is a policy area that attracts a disproportionate number of bad takes. And most of them seem to end up being published in The Guardian. Recently, the paper produced yet another article denying that Britain […]
Mervyn King once said that if you look at Britain’s GDP since the Second World War, only two dates really stand out: 1979 and 2008. One where we started to become richer, and one where we suddenly became poorer. That first great inflection point would not, and could not, have happened without the Centre for […]
Sadiq Khan’s new stats on the economic impact of Brexit have received widespread and breathless coverage, including in the international press. But on closer inspection, they appear to be inexcusably shoddy. The Mayor commissioned new analysis from both Cambridge Econometrics and his own team at the Greater London Authority to show how much damage Brexit […]
Aside from a windfall from higher inflation which the Chancellor used to make tax cuts, the underlying picture for the economy is essentially flat. That being said, some welcome pro-growth measures were announced at the Autumn Statement, most notably the decision to make full expensing permanent. But is it too little too late? To analyse […]
In 1919, a letter appeared in the Times. It warned that in the wake of the Great War, Britain faced a second and more subtle crisis: it was living beyond its means. ‘It is so easy to live on borrowed money; so difficult to realise that you are doing so,’ wrote the sender. ‘It is […]
Over the last few weeks, nutrient neutrality has become one of the hottest topics in Westminster. Now, at least, Labour have shown their hand – and it’s fairly depressing stuff. Writing in The Times today, in their first announcement in their new briefs, Angela Rayner and Steve Reed said that Labour will be voting against the Government’s […]
The Government has today announced that it is reforming EU laws designed to protect ‘nutrient neutrality’, in a move that ministers claim will unblock over 100,000 homes. But unless you are something of a housing policy obsessive, you may not know what this dry sounding directive is. So what is nutrient neutrality? How does it […]
Imagine you run a company. There you are, quite literally minding your own business. When suddenly, a man from the Government appears on your doorstep. Your industry is full of bad people, he says, who have done bad things. So pay up, right now. Or he’ll shut down your firm. That doesn’t really sound like […]
Last week, MPs debated the horrifying scale of Britain’s housing crisis. Just kidding! They actually held a debate on “brownfield development and the green belt”, in which various MPs, mostly Conservative, solemnly agreed with each other that they were very much in favour of the former and very much against the latter. This was of […]
It really couldn’t have happened to a nicer lobby group. In their zeal to exaggerate the threat that housebuilding poses to our green and pleasant land, CPRE, the countryside charity, made a massive, avoidable and frankly hugely embarrassing error. In a Westminster Hall debate this week on brownfield and green belt, Margaret Greenwood MP cited […]
This essay was originally published by the Centre for Policy Studies, CapX’s parent organisation. One of the most striking phrases to enter the political lexicon in recent years is ‘degrowth’. This is the idea that capitalism and its obsession with growth are a cancer on the planet. When you talk to environmental activists, they insist […]
Planning is back in the headlines. The row du jour is over the housing amendments put forward by Theresa Villiers, which as I warned in The Sunday Times – and others have highlighted here on CapX – would slash housebuilding by effectively making it voluntary for councils, rather than compulsory. In that Sunday Times piece, […]
There’s plenty in the Government’s inbox, but here’s yet another problem that ministers are going to have to urgently wrestle with – housing. Over the past year, the stock market has been dropping. Since January, the FTSE 100 is down 7%. Even more worryingly, the FTSE 250 – which may be a better metric of […]
Intriguing reports are circulating that the Government is going to cut stamp duty. The Centre for Policy Studies has long been arguing that this makes overwhelming sense – with one big proviso. Here’s why. First, stamp duty – as our report Stamping Down shows – is not just an unpopular tax but a very bad […]
It’s a pattern as predictable as the water cycle itself. Britain has a drought. The newspapers discover that billions of gallons are being wasted through leaks. There is unanimous agreement that the water companies must be punished. The Guardian calls once more for nationalisation. It’s not just the left that get agitated. In the last […]
The opening stages of the Conservative leadership election have been dominated by talk of tax cuts – and business tax cuts in particular. Quite a lot of coverage has presented this as a weird Tory fixation, utterly divorced from the real-world concerns of the British people. In fact, it’s essential to our country’s future. Now, […]
