Articles

Policy

The £100bn investment gap behind Britain’s jobs crisis

Youth unemployment is one of those issues that politicians across the spectrum agree is a scandal. The debate tends to focus on training programmes, welfare incentives, employer subsidies. These things matter. But a report published today by the Jobs Foundation points to something more fundamental: the businesses that would employ young people are not growing […]

Policy

Savvy the Squirrel will not fix UK investing

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 […]

Policy

Why levelling up could make Britain poorer

Disruption is what venture capitalists seek to do. Good disruption, that is. Investing in early-stage companies, creating jobs, backing innovation and technologies that can move a country, or perhaps a region of a country, forward. But there’s a catch: economic displacement. This happens when policy intervention that boosts economic activity in one location has the […]

Policy

Your pension is not the Chancellor’s piggybank

This is the transcript of a speech delivered by the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions during the Commons debate on the Pension Schemes Bill on April 15, 2026. Who knew that the Pension Schemes Bill would become so controversial? It is a Bill on which there was so much consensus; a Bill […]

Economics

The Bank of England is fighting the last war

Monetary policy errors are rarely obvious in real time. More often, they emerge slowly – the product of frameworks that persist beyond the conditions that once justified them. Britain now risks drifting into precisely such a moment. The Bank of England spent the better part of two years extinguishing the most severe inflation shock in […]

Ideas

Why Britain needs popular capitalism 2.0

During the Thatcher premiership, popular capitalism came to the fore, focused on boosting home ownership and broadening share participation. It was a period when the City was growing and finance was helping drive economic success, and there was a desire for more people to share in this. The Big Bang reforms of 1986 transformed London’s […]

Politics

Cosying up to China won’t save Britain’s economy

So, never-here-Keir is on, by my counting, his 38th overseas trip since entering Downing Street. This time, it is to Communist China, in what must feel like something of a homecoming for Starmer. The Prime Minister has declared that this trip will make Britain richer, which is a surprising goal given he is doing seemingly […]

Policy

Punishing firms won’t fix Britain’s water crisis

As much as I hate to admit it, there is a lot to like in the Government’s water white paper. But there’s a reason for that: the best ideas are lifted straight from the Conservative Party. Stripped of the hollow slogans and performative toughness about tackling sewage that have dominated the debate in recent years, […]

Policy

Let’s make London the home of start-up capital

Britain has a long and proud history of innovation – stretching from the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions right through to modern successes in the fintech and life sciences sectors. Unfortunately, in recent years another trend has emerged, of start-ups incubating ideas in the UK before listing their businesses overseas, primarily in the US. Of the […]

Technology

At the CMA, the process has become the punishment

There has been a blizzard of important announcements for the future of the digital economy from the Competition and Markets authority in recent weeks. New investigations into search engines and mobile ecosystems, provisional findings from its long-running cloud market investigation, investigations into reviews. However, the regulator’s relationship with the Government has also become evidently strained, […]

Economics

Britain’s pension system is bust – it’s time for radical reform

With all the fuss about Labour’s ‘heat or eat’ decision to means-test pensioners for their winter fuel allowance, and the ‘did-she-or-didn’t-she’ media hyperventilation about Kemi Badenoch questioning the future of the pension triple lock, it’s easy to forget that Britain’s state pension is basically broke.  It was set up when most people only lived a […]

Ideas

Despatch: Heathrow airport – an allegory of our decline

Heathrow shows why Britain can’t build… . . Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Ideas

Bitcoin is thriving: is this the future of money?

CapX does not offer investment advice. This article is for information only. You are not guaranteed to make money from buying cryptocurrency and you may lose your entire investment. It is now almost 15 years since Satoshi Nakamoto announced his new invention, bitcoin, to the world. Since then, it has grown and grown. Following the […]

Politics

Why is the Prime Minister picking a fight with Elon Musk?

A newly elected government organises a global summit to encourage inward investment. Hypothetically, it would be sensible to include the world’s richest man on the invitation list, but it seems as if Elon Musk (estimated net worth: $270.5 billion) has been snubbed by the British Government and will be absent from the event in London […]

Policy

Handing yet more power to unaccountable regulators betrays the spirit of Brexit

Brexiteers have long-argued for the need to restore control over Britain’s laws to the British Parliament and British courts. For too long, the Leavers argued, bureaucrats in Brussels had been tightening their grip on the UK statute book without rigorous accountability from the British people. Leaving the EU was supposed to change that. The Digital […]

Economics

Don’t panic – it’s only the Budget

The forthcoming Budget will be a seat-of-the-pants affair. Former Chancellor Sajid Javid handed his successor, the suave Rishi Sunak, an extraordinarily difficult balancing act: somehow, Sunak has to deliver on the implied promises made to those who voted Tory for the first time in the December election, while still paying lip service to the Government’s […]