Rachel Reeves has found another group of taxpayers to squeeze: graduates who still think they have a student loan rather than a second income tax. At the 2025 Budget, she froze the Plan 2 student loan repayment threshold at £29,385 for three years from April 2027, rather than uprating it with earnings. Freezing a threshold […]
The OBR’s latest Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report, published this week, gives a blunt assessment of the UK’s public finances: we can’t go on like this. If nothing changes, government debt will rise to an unsustainable 300% of GDP in 50 years’ time. How did things get so bad? Well, there’s one big demographic challenge […]
In a recent speech, Andy Burnham, Makerfield’s new MP and likely our next PM, said he would end ‘trickle-down’ economics. What on earth was he talking about? The Left often accuses the Right – and particularly the last Conservative government – of practising this voodoo art form. Supposedly, right-wingers give tax breaks to the ‘rich’ […]
When Andy Burnham enters No10 in weeks the pressure to implement new policy will be massive. The advisers who hold his ear will try to act fast, thinking that they have learnt the lesson from Starmer’s processology. Labour MPs have made their desire for ‘big change’ known for months but have failed to articulate it […]
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 […]
Britain’s national debt is on course for £3 trillion this year. Servicing it costs £30 billion a year at 1% interest and £150 billion at 5%, near where long-dated gilts have recently been trading. That’s a number so big it almost becomes meaningless. So, let’s try another way: it’s about the yearly gross pay of […]
The battle of essays between Labour Party grandees has given British politics a distinctly retro feel over the last week, as Tony Blair, Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham behaved like competing 18th-century pamphleteers explaining in earnest detail why things will only get better if they’re in charge. The ideas these once-and-would-be-future Labour prime […]
At its peak, Britain was known as the workshop of the world. Sheffield produced high-quality steel, Manchester still had a strong textiles sector and the West Midlands was world-renowned for its cars. Glasgow, Sunderland and Newcastle were shipbuilding hubs, Stoke-on-Trent produced ceramics. Cities around Britain provided steady employment for skilled tradespeople, keeping communities together and […]
The British investment industry wants everyone to be familiar with a cartoon squirrel. Savvy, the character fronting a 20 million pound advertising campaign, is the latest attempt to boost investment in the UK. The government-backed ‘Invest for the Future’ initiative, launched last Thursday, is supported by some of the biggest financial services firms in the […]
The Community of Madrid offers a 99% reduction in inheritance tax for close family heirs. So a daughter who inherits €600,000 from her father will pay, after the ‘bonificación’ rebate, just over €1,500. This came as a surprise to me and to the delegation of policy experts I led to Madrid to meet and learn […]
After nearly two decades of weak growth, stagnant wages and stubbornly high inequality – alongside one of the worst productivity records in the developed world since the financial crisis – Britain’s central problem is how to get the economy growing again. We don’t build enough homes. We don’t generate enough cheap energy. We don’t invest […]
Britain stands at a rare strategic inflection point, embrace AI or continue on a path of sluggish economic growth for the foreseeable future. The International Monetary Fund recently forecasted that the energy shocks from the Iran war will hit the UK the hardest of the world’s advanced economies, cutting its estimates for UK growth this […]
One way to sell a new tax is to do the hard work of proving that it’s a good idea. ‘There’s some problem that needs to be solved,’ ‘here is the solution’, sort of thing. Say, carbon emissions are bad, we should have a carbon tax. In the absence of any such evidence, it’s necessary […]
The latest GDP figures out today will give Rachel Reeves some cause for relief. The latest estimates from the ONS suggest that the economy expanded at a rate of 0.5% in the three months to February 2026. A welcome change from the doldrums that characterised 2025. But one swallow does not make a summer, and […]
This week the IMF cut its forecast for UK growth by a hefty 0.5 percentage points to 0.8% for 2026, the sharpest downgrade of any G7 economy. The OECD last week went lower still, to 0.7%, leaving the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of 1.1% looking increasingly optimistic. Britain cannot afford to persist with an […]
Businesses across the UK understand the role they play in driving economic growth. It does not happen by accident – it comes from firms investing, creating jobs and backing their local communities. Nowhere is that more true than in construction – a sector built on long-term investment and the confidence to plan ahead, underpinning everything […]
Enjoy April Fool’s Day while you can, because there’s nothing funny about what’s coming next. With the exception of my birthday, there’ll be little for CapX readers to celebrate this month as we begin to feel the impact of the Chancellor’s many and varied tax hikes. As if Britons weren’t squeezed tightly enough already – […]
We are facing one of those delightful clashes between equity and efficiency. Sadly, it looks like equity might win, which would mean a ‘fairer’ society – by the estimation of some people – but also a decidedly poorer one. I refer to this from Zack Polanski – the unthinking man’s Left populist du jour: ‘And […]
Only last week, the Chancellor set out, once again, the Government’s ambition to get the economy moving. The language is familiar: growth, investment, opportunity and, of course, AI. This Government likes talking about growth, while choosing policies that make it harder to achieve. The route to economic growth is not a mystery And it is […]
For more than a decade, Thomas Piketty has shaped the public conversation about wealth. His central warning is stark. When returns on capital exceed the growth rate of the economy, wealth accumulated in the past grows faster than income earned in the present. Over time, inheritance becomes decisive. Societies begin to resemble nineteenth-century Europe, where […]
Nearly three years ago I launched Next Gen Tories (NGT), a pressure group to focus the Conservative Party on winning back voters under the age of 45. For too long, the Conservatives had ignored the growing problem that younger generations weren’t achieving the key milestones that might make someone feel like they have a greater […]
The debate over inheritance tax is not a new one. Some Roman Emperors levied a form of it, and the concept was first implemented in Britain in 1694. David Cameron and George Osborne famously made cutting the tax their big-ticket pledge ahead of ‘the election that never was’ in 2007, and the latest uproar from […]
Watch or listen to CapX’s weekly podcast ‘The Capitalist’ wherever you get your podcasts.
