When coronavirus lockdowns were introduced, the shift to remote working was sudden and sweeping. Now the British government is hoping the return to the office will be just as swift – to help the economy “get back to normal”. But pushing everyone back to the office full time fails to recognise the many benefits that […]
Despite some breathless headlines in recent months, scientists now seem to agree that Covid-19 was not cooked up in a lab. The origins of the virus remain unclear – though a recent study published in Nature, co-authored by the University of Sydney’s Professor Edward Holmes, suggests a number of working theories about how exactly the […]
Since Covid struck, we’ve heard a great deal about “Build Back Better” and the need to “rethink the role of the state”. What these calls tend to have in common is a heavy bias towards ever more public spending and a bigger state. It’s a curious response to a pandemic that has revealed massive state […]
Ok, I admit it – when I first heard the Eat Out to Help Out policy, I scoffed. Turns out I was not alone. For in the first 3 weeks of the scheme, 64 million discounted meals have been demolished by the Great British public – and the Covid rate has not rocketed as many […]
As the pandemic shuttered shops, restaurants and offices earlier this year, the Treasury went into overdrive figuring out how on Earth they would pay to keep people safely at home. We’re all familiar with the results of these brainstorming sessions: a series of subsidies, enhanced welfare programmes, and a rise in NHS funding. And while […]
We are facing the very real possibility that 2020 will be remembered as the year of not one health crisis, but two. The loss and heartache caused by coronavirus itself is well known. But what is still dawning on many is the growing, catastrophic cancer crisis that the virus has precipitated – and may well […]
Scientists in Hong Kong have reported the first confirmed case of reinfection with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, reportedly backed up by genetic sequences of the two episodes of the 33-year-old man’s infections in March and in August 2020. Naturally people are worried what this could mean for our chances of resolving the pandemic. Here’s […]
Viewed from almost any angle, the UK government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme — to give the furlough policy its official title — is a staggering departure in the state’s relationship with the economy. Not since the foundation of the welfare state in 1948 has a British government intervened so emphatically to ameliorate labour market outcomes. […]
After days and nights of negotiations, the hard-won agreement on the EU recovery fund, was hailed as a chance to make the EU more relevant to voters. The mood of sleep-deprived euphoria led some to describe this impressive achievement for diplomacy as a “Hamilton” moment, a staging post on the road to a federal Europe […]
The Government has finally read the writing on the wall for Public Health England (PHE). According to reports, the failing public health body will be abolished and its role preparing for pandemics moved to a new National Institute for Health Protection. PHE’s only unmitigated success has been drawing ire from both the left and the […]
Today universities and Higher Education (HE) in general are in crisis, on both sides of the Atlantic. The immediate crisis is a financial one, triggered by the covid-19 pandemic – although the impact has been seismic because problems have been developing for some time. Beyond the financial problems, HE in the Anglo-Saxon world faces a […]
This week, the Government announced a significant rejigging of the Track and Trace regime, to better integrate the national scheme with local public health teams. The change comes after months of criticism that the contact tracing system was excessively centralised: dependent on outsourced call centre operators who could barely reach more than half the close […]
“All things in moderation” is a cliché. But it’s also quite an important principle if you want to design a fair system for awarding qualifications to around one million young people in the midst of a pandemic. Across the UK, the coronavirus has seen exams replaced by a system built on teacher predictions. They are […]
Given the current gloom, we should take our silver linings where we can find them. One such silver lining from the current pandemic is that we can finally to put to bed most of the spurious arguments about drug development that keep doing the rounds. The usual story goes something like this: nasty private companies […]
We’ve been warned of an impending ‘jobs bloodbath’ and a ‘tsunami of redundancies’ for some time now – and obviously these cautions need to be taken seriously. My own best guess is that a million people could soon have to find new work. However, the latest employment data suggests the chances of some pleasant surprises […]
This is the CapX weekly briefing For the past fortnight I’ve been working from the picturesque market town of Ross-on-Wye, which sits on the cusp of the Anglo-Welsh border. And while friends suggest London has been basking in a semi-sociable ‘new normal’ for some time, in Ross-on-Wye recent days have felt significant. Two weeks ago, […]
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