I particularly enjoy a phrase that appears in Christopher Bullock’s ‘The Cobbler of Preston’: ‘Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes.’ The sentiment was later popularised by Benjamin Franklin in his correspondence. In the world of government budgets, there’s another thing that is, sooner or later, unavoidable: fiscal consolidation. That […]
Just as there is a battle on the Right in Britain, so too is there a battle inside the Conservative Party for what the party should focus on. There are those who are concerned about the threat of political Islam, the damage to the social fabric of the Boriswave and other elements of mass immigration, […]
When William Buckley went on the front page of Time magazine, the title was simple: ‘Conservatism Can Be Fun’. That is what Kemi Badenoch has done at this conference. Conservatism can be fun, can be serious and can learn from its old mistakes. But most importantly, what makes it the world’s oldest party is its […]
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 housing market has ground to a halt in London – in large part because of political decisions […]
It has been reported that the UK looks set to follow the example of the EU in imposing tariffs on electric vehicles from China. This would be a mistake, for five main reasons. First, we have to look at the main reason why the UK is considering doing it. The EU is using its proposed […]
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 […]
Britain is looking for the effects of artificial intelligence in all the obvious places: redundancies, vacancies and unemployment numbers. So far, there is little evidence of dramatic change in overall headcount. The Office for National Statistics reports that most British businesses using AI have not changed the size of their workforce, even as AI adoption […]
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 […]
A year ago I ended the Growth Commission’s annual Growth Budget with the prediction that if the then Chancellor Rachel Reeves continued with her policy of tax and spend, she – or more likely her successor – would be back in a year’s time asking for more. So the Government can’t say that they weren’t […]
Britain is pretty good at spending money on infrastructure. In the most recent OECD data, only China spent more on rail infrastructure as a share of GDP. Yet the problem for Britain is that we’re pretty bad at actually building infrastructure for the money that we do spend. The bulk of the money in the […]
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 […]
