As an Anglo-Scot, I had a dog in the fight that was the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I was a visceral opponent of the dismemberment of the United Kingdom, which, I believed, would damage everyone in the British and Irish Isles. As the UK’s ambassador to the UN in 2014 put it, ‘it […]
What explains prosperity? That is the most important question in economics. It was this question that led Adam Smith to write ‘The Wealth of Nations’. Before Smith, the physiocrats like Turgot explored it in works like ‘Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth’. It is this question that makes economics not only interesting, but […]
Just as there is a battle on the Right in Britain, so too is there a battle inside the Conservative Party for what the party should focus on. There are those who are concerned about the threat of political Islam, the damage to the social fabric of the Boriswave and other elements of mass immigration, […]
When William Buckley went on the front page of Time magazine, the title was simple: ‘Conservatism Can Be Fun’. That is what Kemi Badenoch has done at this conference. Conservatism can be fun, can be serious and can learn from its old mistakes. But most importantly, what makes it the world’s oldest party is its […]
Why haven’t we grown in the last decade? We are experiencing the longest spell of workers experiencing no average wage growth in real terms for well over a century – ‘the longest in history since consistent wage records exist, dating back to Victorian times,’ as a paper in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy shows. […]
With the introduction of student fees in 1998, one might have expected that universities would gain independence from the state and its agencies. They would live off the fees paid by those who wanted them, free to act in accordance with whatever academic values they chose to embody. But the opposite happened: all the movement […]
You could almost hear the revolutionary vitriol dripping onto the Labour benches during Monday night’s Lords debate on political donations, following the announcement of Reform’s £72 million bonanza from two crypto billionaires with UK voting rights but recent residence abroad. ‘An undermining of democracy and rampant Americanisation’, one peeress spat out. A case of ‘the […]
Margaret Thatcher is back in the news. But it is not her admirers on the Right who have put her there. It is our new Labour Prime Minister, whose diagnosis of our country’s ills seems to be that Britain was on the right path up until 1979, when the Conservatives got into power and precipitated […]
In 1943, a Post Office engineer called Tommy Flowers built a codebreaking machine out of 1,500 thermionic valves, partly out of his own pocket. Within a year Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, was cracking Nazi High Command ciphers at Bletchley Park. Britain had invented the data centre, in a large shed, and chock-full […]
The elevation of an AI Minister to the Cabinet Office appears like a triumph for the technology. But Kanishka Narayan is, essentially, on his own island, floating between Andy Burnham’s inner circle and the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) – unmoored from AI’s former home, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology […]
Britain and America have spent a decade arguing about Nimbyism as if it were a housing problem. It is much bigger than that: our inability to build, in a broad sense, has grown into a source of geopolitical weakness. The economic argument has been made already. Growth controls add anywhere from 17% to 38% to […]
‘A Waiter in Paris’ is the story of a young Englishman who graduated from a good university in London with a humanities degree, trained and educated for a world that no longer exists. ‘All while I applied for other, more “prestigious” jobs. Jobs that didn’t appear to exist anymore.’ That’s how Edward Chisholm puts it […]
How do you know this wasn’t written by an AI? If you’re reading CapX, you are presumably interested in free speech, critical thinking and originality. So you should care that what you’re reading was written by a person with a mind. But public life is becoming colonised with ‘copy’ generated by AI. It’s become so […]
Last week, the Community Security Trust’s (CST) report covering incidents between January and June 2026 showed alarming results. The unprecedented wave of antisemitism that started on October 7, 2023, when Hamas massacred and kidnapped over 1,200 people in Israel, shows no sign of easing. On the contrary. The 1,926 incidents recorded represent a 21% rise […]
During the 1979 general election campaign, Margaret Thatcher famously said: ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t.’ If you’re a seasoned research professional who shares that sentiment, and who wants to fight for a high-growth, low-tax, small-state Britain built on personal and economic freedom, then I have just the job opening for you. […]
The EU was born to ‘screw’ the US. That’s what Donald Trump told reporters in 2025: ‘That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.’ But that wasn’t always the United States’s view of the EU. As historian Andrew Roberts wrote, the American State Department ‘enthusiastically signed […]
I’m 23. Like many of my friends, I endured the British education system all the way to university: GCSEs, A levels and then an undergraduate degree. Now, with little opportunity to progress in the small town we grew up in, those same friends are now looking to move to a city for work. For some, […]
This week, Nimby Watch is in central London… Okay then, where are we this time? We’re in Belgravia, one of London’s swankiest neighbourhoods. Don’t say I never take you anywhere nice. Okay, fine. But neither one of us can afford anything here, as well you know, and I’m including coffee when I say that. Well… […]
It’s been a wild summer already. Britain’s onto its seventh prime minister in a decade, with Andy Burnham wasting no time rearranging the furniture – and, for part of the week, the postcode – of No 10. Outside Westminster, England gave us their best World Cup run in 60 years, though the trophy itself will […]
The media headlines all tell a consistent story about AI and employment: We’re doomed! ‘Robots may shatter the global economic order within a decade,’ says The Telegraph. ‘A World Without Work’ is coming, The Atlantic predicts. ‘The brave new world of robots and lost jobs’ is upon us, The Washington Post says. Most gloomily, Forbes […]
As Andy Burnham stood outside Downing Street on Monday to launch his new regime, our new Prime Minister did his best to prove to his 349 parliamentary backers that they had made the right decision. Much of his speech was rhetorical filler. ‘I will put the care of people at the heart of everything I […]
‘I’m personally convinced that our civilisation is approaching its end,’ wrote the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge in 1980. ‘I think of St Augustine when, in AD 410, the news was brought to him in Carthage that Rome had been sacked by the Barbarians.’ Jim Callaghan was equally gloomy. In 1974, he remarked: ‘When I am […]
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