I had plenty to be getting on with today, but Simon Jenkins’ latest Guardian column is so utterly, nonsensically wrong on housing and planning that I couldn’t resist fisking it. Housing is such an important area of policy and it’s crucial we base our arguments on facts, rather than spurious assertions. In the first two […]
There is much to welcome in the Government’s newly published ‘Benefits of Brexit’ white paper, particularly when it comes to regulation. The direction of travel is certainly the right one – regulating only when necessary, involving business in ‘co-creating’ rules that affect them, aiming to become the ‘best regulated advanced economy in the world’, and […]
The Beveridge report is now synonymous with the creation of the NHS and the modern welfare state. Yet if you return to its pages, you find a very different vision of the future. Beveridge certainly wanted to fight against the ‘five giants’ – idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want. And he certainly wanted to extend […]
‘Hydrogen boilers could cause four times as many explosions as gas.’ That was the alarming-sounding headline on the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph (with similar write-ups elsewhere). A grievous blow for the Government’s plans to get us to Net Zero, you’d think. But something about the headline struck an odd note. A few weeks ago, […]
From the eruption of Vesuvius to the Chernobyl meltdown, human history has always been punctuated by catastrophes – some natural, others very much man-made. . https://media.acast.com/capx/niallfergusononthepoliticsofcatastrophe/media.mp3 . In his new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, world-renowned historian Professor Niall Ferguson argues that far from being “unprecedented”, the response to Covid-19 exhibits the same political and social pathologies that have […]
In my Sunday Times column this week, I wrote about the difficulties Boris Johnson is having in paying for education catch-up – having commissioned Sir Kevan Collins to produce a money-no-object plan to fill the learning gap, before realising that actually money was something of an object after all. The Government has pointed out, in its […]
Database management, like productivity, is one of those topics that automatically hits the mental snooze button. It may be hugely important, but it’s also almost guaranteed to make the eyes glaze over. Which is why I want to get your attention by saying something provocative: the central lesson of the pandemic is that database management […]
Well, that escalated quickly. On Friday, I was the proud publisher of a policy – long-term, fixed-rate, low-deposit mortgages – that Boris Johnson had decided to put at the heart of his attempts to help “Generation Buy”. By Saturday, the same policy was being condemned in some quarters as putting Britain on a path to […]
What’s the solution to the great pandemic debt pile-up? Tax Britain’s housing wealth. According to James Kirkup, head of the Social Market Foundation think tank, writing in the Times, higher property taxes are both sensible and inevitable – and if the Tories don’t bring them in, then Labour definitely will. Now James is a friend and […]
A decade ago, Rupert Murdoch gave the first Margaret Thatcher Lecture for the Centre for Policy Studies. In his speech – delivered as Britain was struggling to cope with the aftermath of recession – he outlined how tempting it can be in tough times to retreat under the state’s security blanket: “In an anxious time, people […]
In recent months, those in Government have been besieged by pleas for help. Industry after industry is queueing up for assistance, or outright rescue. On the face of it, the housebuilding industry would seem to be one of the lucky ones. The Government made sure to single out construction as an area that should keep […]
For the past week I have been thinking about and speaking to people in and around government about the shape of the eventual recovery from the coronavirus crisis. There is, sadly, no sugar-coating the fact that the future looks pretty grim. The most obvious point is that any return to normality is going to be […]
Spare a thought for the residents of Workington, the Cumbrian seaside town that now faces an invasion of features journalists trying to find out what makes ‘Workington Man’ tick. The phrase was coined in a report by thinktank Onward, and describes a “new voter archetype” that will be crucial to the upcoming election – a […]
The Confederation of British Industry has produced a really important piece of research today on the extra borrowing involved in Labour’s renationalisation plans. Strikingly, it completely vindicates the similar exercise we did at the Centre for Policy Studies – although their baseline figure for upfront cost of £196bn is even higher than ours.* (Their figures […]
Labour’s announcement today on offshore wind is a fascinating case study in how the party isn’t even pretending to care about prudent economics any more. Last January, the Centre for Policy Studies totted up independent estimates of Labour’s renationalisation plans. Suffice to say they turned out to be expensive. Very expensive. We came up with […]
This week is a special episode of Free Exchange, recorded live at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. The director of the Centre for Policy Studies, Robert Colvile, was joined by some of the leading lights on the right to discuss what conservatism actually means, in principal and in practise, and why it’s the best route […]
At the Centre for Policy Studies, CapX’s parent organisation, our mission is to develop policies for post-Brexit Britain – and in doing so to promote and expand enterprise, ownership and prosperity. Part of that is about the ideas we produce in-house. But another part is about providing a platform for others. Ever since the CPS […]
How will we cope with the costs of an ageing population? Yesterday, in an article for The Daily Telegraph, David Willetts made the case that this will soon become the issue in British politics. His piece was prompted by a new report from Damian Green MP on the future of social care, published by the […]
When everyone in politics agrees on something, it is usually a sign that the idea is either very good or very bad. Today something was published which was both. An array of housing charities and think tanks have published an open letter to James Brokenshire, the Housing Secretary, calling for reform to the planning system. […]
Last night, I appeared on Newsnight to discuss the renationalisation of the water industry. It was a depressing experience, because my debating partner – from the trade union think tank CLASS – seemed utterly impervious to anything resembling the facts. In particular, there is a weird tendency on the left to assume that we free-market […]
