Town versus country may seem like a question of personal preference, but it’s really a matter of human progress. Cities are the engines of human liberation and economic growth. Urbanisation is also good for the planet, for people in the cities have a smaller environmental footprint than people in the countryside. And, as such, it […]
There’s so much nonsense in the IPPR’s latest report On Borrowed Time, it’s hard to know where to start. It leads on an eye-catching call for the Bank of England to cap house price increases at 0 per cent for the next five years. Rather than allowing supply to meet demand, say through liberalising the […]
One day several years ago Tony Blair sat on his sofa and decided that the office of Lord Chancellor was an anachronism that needed to be abolished. Immediately people started pointing out it wasn’t quite that simple. The office is so embedded into UK law, statute, legislation and practice that the absence of a named […]
Quick question: if I asked you to lend me £10 and then asked you to pay me for borrowing it from you, you’d think I was mad, right? Well this is currently the deal the world is getting when it lends money to Germany over any duration for the next 5 years. That makes no […]
If the Government ever wants to solve the housing crisis, they need to step up and dispel the Green Belt myth that has become so entrenched within the British psyche. The romanticised notion of a “green and pleasant land” is strangling our cities and preventing the much-needed supply of houses. That’s right. The time has […]
For some Conservatives, home ownership is a precondition for support for capitalism. But is that really the case? After all, you don’t need to own a farm or a factory to enjoy the benefits of their products. You can do very well in a fairly-organised modern economy with nothing more than human capital or a […]
Last Thursday in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury a small party was held to celebrate some of the finest architectural designs of the past year. All were by respected specialists in the field and each had been submitted to the Royal Academy for their Summer Exhibition – and all but one had been rejected out of hand. […]
Shaun Spiers, until recently Chief Executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, has written a fascinating, profoundly significant, and at times deeply frustrating book. Reading How to build houses and save the countryside filled me with excitement and hope. But occasionally I had the urge to hurl it at the wall. It offers compulsive […]
Roll up, roll up. The Conservatives are looking for a candidate to be the Mayor of London. But there’s a catch. A Tory source tells The Sunday Times: “We are likely to lose anyway, so it is better to send a visible message to voters that we are changing.” That is taken to mean either […]
So, you want to heal the generational divide? Thinktankers and policymakers have been out in force over the past few weeks throwing ideas around about how to shift some of the burden from the shoulders of my generation – the student loan generation, generation rent, “those entitled millennials”. The vast majority of those ideas are, […]
Seattle is, by many measures, one of the fastest-growing cities in America, if not the fast-growing city. A few big tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, plus other large, successful businesses such as Boeing and Starbucks, have fueled this explosive rise. But prosperity hasn’t necessarily bred contentment, as the traditionally left-wing city turned on the […]
Conservatives can’t agree on much at the moment. But one view that the vast majority of them would struggle to disagree with is that there are fundamental problems with the party’s pitch to the electorate. The fault lines have been there for some time, but the issue became impossible to ignore after last year’s general […]
The Resolution Foundation published a report this week, “The New Generational Contract”, aimed at redressing the breakdown of a contract between baby boomers and millennials: namely that pensioners’ social care is being paid for by today’s taxpayers (millennials) who cannot afford baby boomer-priced houses. The report is debilitated by two crippling misunderstandings. First, that millennials […]
The Intergenerational Commission has published its final report and, according to the findings, young people have a pretty raw deal. Young workers are forced to “shoulder huge risks” bearing the brunt of “insecure work”: their chances of building up a decent pension are slim, and their prospects of owning their own home one day are […]
Affordable housing is one of the key policy challenges of our time. But as with so many other major policy problems, we face a continued lack of imagination that leads many to think that the housing crisis can be solved with more of what worked last time, commanded from offices in Whitehall. This is not […]
Using the long arm of the law to force-fill empty homes is getting very vogueish. From the far left to the Tory back benches everyone seems to be getting on board with the idea. The Government is legislating to permit greater tax surcharges on empty homes. The Resolution Foundation is arguing for more active steps […]
Watch or listen to CapX’s weekly podcast ‘The Capitalist’ wherever you get your podcasts.
