As the “news” breaks that perhaps nearly one per cent of the enormous green belt surrounding London has been allocated for 200,000 homes, let us ask: who benefits? News of potential green belt encroachment is the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s best recruiting tool. There is no mystery here. The story was seeded by the […]
Power in local government is particularly important to a political party that is in opposition nationally. For a start there is the impact on morale of council election results. Politicians can dismiss (or pretend to dismiss) opinion polls. Real elections cannot be so easily brushed aside. So local elections are taken, quite reasonably, as a […]
This week CapX is republishing some of our favourite articles of the year. This piece first appeared on August 21. Living on our planet is more enjoyable than it used to be in almost all respects. We live longer, we are healthier, we learn more, and we enjoy greater comfort. The one exception is what […]
For the first time, we learnt from the Office for National Statistics today that nearly 600 homeless people died in England and Wales last year. This has increased by a quarter compared with five years ago. These are shocking figures and it’s simply not acceptable in our society that people are being left at such […]
This week Carwyn Jones stands down as First Minister of Wales after nine years in the post. When Jones took over in 2009 the UK still had a Labour Government and Gordon Brown would cling on as Prime Minister for a few more months. Given the turbulence of modern politics, for Jones simply to have […]
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is reported to be considering bringing in rent controls. It is not clear that he has power to do that, or how it would work. Rent control might improve the lot of suffering existing tenants, at least for a while. But the lesson from cities like Berlin, where such […]
A lesser spotted announcement in last week’s Budget was a commitment to ensure that empty lots on high streets — flats above shops and disused malls — could be transferred quickly to housing. It’s a war I’ve been waging for a decade. It’s something I’ve raised with nearly every councillor, MP or housing executive that […]
Part of the drama of Budgets used to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer pulling a rabbit out of the hat. George Osborne, that most political of Chancellors, was keen on them. But it had become a bit of a tradition – like the Chancellor waving the red despatch box in the air when leaving […]
This week on CapX we are publishing the winning entry and the runners-up for the Institute of Economic Affairs Breakthrough Prize. The prize, supported by entrepreneur Richard Koch, sought ideas for a “free market breakthrough” policy to solve the UK housing crisis. Today, Charles Shaw and Daniel Pycock argue that a new system of Simplified […]
This week on CapX we are publishing the winning entry and the runners-up for the Institute of Economic Affairs Breakthrough Prize. The prize, supported by entrepreneur Richard Koch, sought ideas for a “free market breakthrough” policy to solve the UK housing crisis. Today one of the runners-up, Stephen Ashmead, explains why a new self-build framework would […]
This week on CapX we are publishing the winning entry and the runners-up for the Institute of Economic Affairs Breakthrough Prize. The prize, supported by entrepreneur Richard Koch, sought ideas for a “free market breakthrough” policy to solve the UK housing crisis. This year’s winner is Ben Clements, an analyst based in London, who proposed a […]
Why can’t you afford a home? UCL researcher Josh Ryan-Collins says it is due to inevitable landowner profits from land, to a majority of homeowners blocking fair taxation of those profits, and to excessive mortgage credit. His new book is not yet widely available, but he has written a long summary. Causation is complex. Lawyers […]
A disturbing new trend has emerged. Faced with strong evidence from the US of the terrible damage to welfare and GDP from our long-term failure to build enough homes with access to jobs and opportunities, the beginnings of a counter-revolution are stirring. The first signs that the counter-attack had spread to respectable academia emerged at […]
There are few words in the English language which better encompass everything conservatism is meant to be about than “home”. Home is not just the roof over your head. Home is where you are from, where you feel you belong, where you feel safe. We humans are not abstract beings; we exist in particular spaces […]
The Campaign to Protect Rural England has released another in a long line of reports claiming that the green belt is disappearing at an alarming rate. Newspapers lapped this up, as they always do. Readers were told the development is a tragedy for the environment and a national disgrace. The articles were furnished with misleading […]
For all that has changed in politics in recent years, some old truths remain. One of them is the central political importance of economic growth. As Danny Finkelstein reminded a standing-room-only CapX event at Conservative Party Conference this morning, it’s difficult for an incumbent party to win an election when economic conditions on the ground […]
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