Should Sadiq Khan decline to run for a fourth term as London mayor, his contribution to public life will largely have been stoking the culture war. From spaffing European symbols over the New Year’s fireworks to funding bemusing anti-misogyny campaigns, the public messaging has been relentless, if little else has. And yet there’s another cultural […]
Britain has built a tribunal system so sprawling and risk-free that it now consumes the very people who should be running organisations, improving products and services and designing more productive companies. What was meant to be a quick, low-cost alternative to the courts has become a parallel bureaucracy that traps skilled workers in disclosure exercises […]
Viewers of ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ – now back for another season – will be familiar with Jeremy Clarkson’s long-running battle with the bureaucrats of West Oxfordshire District Council. When his Diddly Squat farm shop boomed, the council dragged their feet over planning permission for a car park extension, bizarrely decreed he could only sell goods from […]
Every year, I eagerly await a report that confirms what I see before my eyes. KPMG’s ‘Illicit Trade in Tobacco Report’ is a beast of research, conducting in-person ‘pack-surveys’ (where packets of tobacco, whether to be rolled or already neatly packed into paper, are surveyed to find whether they are legally bought or smuggled, counterfeit […]
In the leafy district of Bassetlaw, council officers want to get tough. Although not in the way you might expect. Last Wednesday night, local politicians weren’t discussing bins, planning or district improvement projects. Instead, they busied themselves going after the humble ‘cake shed’. In recent months, a baked-goods revolution has swept the nation. Stalls have […]
Admired for his reformist approach to the NHS, Wes Streeting is generally seen as the most market-friendly figure on the British Left. Yet his call for social media companies to be treated like tobacco businesses reminds us that even the best of a bad bunch can still be pretty awful. After resigning as Health Secretary, […]
Imagine that a certain Grantham grocer had decided to sell his business. His daughter would have not taken it well had a government official intervened and tried to prevent him, concerned perhaps that there would have been a threat to the employment prospects of a delivery boy or that the purchaser might want to rationalise […]
Here at CapX, we saw the power of ‘X’ long before Elon Musk made it impossible to ignore. X is weird and a bit ugly, but repays a deeper look. X stands for the excitement of the unknown. It hints at vast treasures waiting to be discovered, while promising an encounter with something extraordinary – […]
A confession: I am not a football fan. I have never even been to a game. This does not mean that I am ignorant of the size of football’s fanbase, or the financial scale of the game. On the contrary. Association football is an English creation, emerging from English public schools, and the Football Association, […]
It’s official. Elon Musk, along with biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has been announced by Donald Trump as the head of DOGE – ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ – a body advising the White House and the Office of Management and Budget from outside government, with a plan to ‘dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful […]
President-elect Donald Trump recently announced a commitment to abolishing the federal Department of Education. This announcement, coupled with the news that Elon Musk will be running DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), suggests that Trump is keen to remove what many of his supporters consider to be burdensome, costly and culturally corrupt institutions. Amid the recent […]
Stand back and look at the economic trends across the decades and it’s evident that the UK is stagnating at best and collapsing at worst. Because of this, you are £10,700 a year poorer, Britain faces being a diminishing country in the world and for the first time ever the younger generation(s) are set to be […]
As Los Angeles burns, with ten dead and over 10,000 homes destroyed, a deeper story emerges about how well-intentioned red tape has turned a natural disaster into a regulatory catastrophe. The fires raging through Pacific Palisades and beyond aren’t just revealing the physical vulnerability of California’s hillside communities – they’re exposing the fundamental weakness of […]
The Chancellor’s big growth speech on Wednesday morning was so widely trailed that it contained few surprises. But it was still the clearest and most coherent statement of her economic philosophy and plans so far. Before diving into the detail, it is only fair to welcome the change of tone. It has been refreshing to […]
Yesterday our Prime Minister wrote in the newspaper of record that he will ‘kick down the barriers to building, clear out the regulatory weeds and allow a new era of British growth to bloom’. The Chancellor of the Exchequer later stood in front of a TV camera and promised ‘to grow the supply-side of our […]
Michael Gove was, without a doubt, the most able secretary of state produced by the last 14 years of Conservative government. This sounds like praise, and of course it is. But great ability is a two-edged sword. When an able individual sets themselves to good purposes, they can do great things, as Gove did at […]
2. Ownership and nationhood: the fight for economic belonging 4. The unchecked and the unaccountable: seizing the economic levers 5. A family big bang: putting children at the heart of growth 6. Trust is the precondition for economic growth 7. Out of the shadows: a Conservative tax revolution . The Friendly Giants: Breaking Free from […]
There is a reliable rule in Whitehall that if you do not want people to pay attention to something, you should make it sound as boring as possible. A case in point: today the House of Commons will consider for the first time the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, a compact, 15-clause proposal which originated […]
On departing office in 2010, Labour’s Treasury chief secretary Liam Byrne infamously left a note pointing out that there was no money left. It’s a pity that the incoming coalition government did not have its attention drawn so explicitly to another poisoned inheritance – that of New Labour’s swansong legislation the Equality Act 2010 (EA). […]
Britain is facing a crisis of confidence – a pervasive regulatory culture driven by the belief that whenever something goes wrong, no matter how minor, it must be regulated out of existence. This mindset, which seeks to eliminate risk at all costs, may sound protective, but it is profoundly destructive. Eliminating all risk means suffocating […]
Even though it was introduced by the previous government, the Football Governance Bill – which MPs passed yesterday and will create an Independent Football Regulator (IFR) – attracted strong opposition. Critics say that a regulator will damage the innovation so critical to making English football (especially the Premier League) such a powerful economic generator for […]
Marx was wrong, Burnham was right: capitalism wasn’t replaced by communism, but by managerialism. In ‘The Managerial Revolution’ (1941), James Burnham wrote that the bourgeoisie weren’t sinking into the proletariat – they were being replaced by ‘administrators, technicians, managers’. If, like me, you love Edmund Burke, this might remind you of his mournful line: ‘The […]
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