This is a highlight from the event programme of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) – CapX’s parent organisation – at this year’s Conservative Party Conference. You can watch all the panels and interviews on the CPS YouTube channel. The £23 billion [in welfare savings] is just the start. The number will be higher by […]
In the mid-90s, you could save up a deposit for a house in a year; now it takes about a decade. That’s a really meaningful change. That’s a whole stage of your life where 30 years ago you might reasonably have expected to become a homeowner and now that is highly unlikely In a room […]
The UK-EU relationship must be viewed through the lens of the battle for the world’s operating system. There are three operating systems in the world. The first is a competition on the merits system where countries are free to engage in regulatory competition but inter-operate on the basis of mutual recognition and equivalence. This historically […]
Even before he became Prime Minister in July, Andy Burnham had talked about the country in institutional, positively mechanical ways. He promised to ‘give Britain the circuit-breaker it needs’, and said that his Number 10 North, part of the Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet based – where else? – in Manchester, would be […]
The Manchester City scandal drags on. Tax Policy Associates now argues, based on the Premier League commission’s findings and leaked documents, that the club may have failed to pay some £12 million in income tax and NICs due on the pay of Roberto Mancini, who managed the club from 2009 to 2013. City, which denies […]
Andy Burnham used the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week to commit the Government to a National Care Service, universal and free at the point of use, while promising to ‘stick to our fiscal rules to get borrowing and debt down’. The service is due in the next Parliament and is supposed to be […]
Picture the scene. A new Labour leader delivering his first speech as Prime Minister to the party conference, two years after a general election victory. The fiscal backdrop is poor, financial markets are not convinced by the credibility of UK economic policy and there is a deep divide between what his MPs want and what […]
The King of the North has spoken. In an emotive speech, Andy Burnham yesterday set out his vision for Britain. The Prime Minister pledged to put Britain ‘on a new path’, and cursed Margaret Thatcher and the 1980s for killing ‘working-class aspiration’. What lies down this new path? A route back to the decade that […]
Among the eye-catching announcements from the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool is a proposal to allow councils to seize privately owned homes. Matthew Pennycook, the Housing Minister, tweets: ‘It’s not a silver bullet, but bringing more empty homes back into use can help solve the housing crisis. Today, we’re announcing strengthened powers for councils to […]
On September 29, 1976, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, announced his intention to apply to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $3.9 billion loan, the largest ever requested. Britain, The Economist announced, was ‘bust’. This was a national humiliation, the crux of a decade of economic turmoil. Britain before 1979 was not […]
Earlier this month, the Government announced it would pause its wide-ranging plans for Local Government Reorganisation (LGR), which would have redrawn local council and parish boundaries and overhauled a system that has been in place for centuries. As focus shifts to Andy Burnham’s less wordy – but no less ambitious – plans for devolution, England’s […]
It’s been reported that officials in the Trump administration have given their UK counterparts a dressing-down over the Online Safety Act and the social-media ban for under-16s. As someone who previously worked on digital trade for the UK government, this does not surprise me. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have seen British laws such […]
It’s not often that a Labour announcement reminds you of music. Reading Andy Burnham’s confirmation of his commitment to Net Zero in the Guardian last week, I couldn’t help but think of The Who’s 1971 epic rocker ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Within it are the lyrics: ‘And the world looks just the same, And history […]
It reads like a horror story. A tiny baby projectile vomiting for four feet. Sinister rashes moving across newborn skin. A shifty nurse hovering over the cot of an infant with blood around his mouth. The looming threat in these sentences: ‘Mother D could see her daughter looked better and so went back to bed. […]
When you drive through the potholes and your suspension gives out, or when you sit fuming at temporary traffic lights because of roadworks, it’s for a reason. It’s because the cost to you in delays and disruption doesn’t figure much in the council’s budgeting or the contractors’ work schedules. The familiar ‘I don’t give a […]
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 […]
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