You’ve done it. After 15 years of staring at a screen and someone else’s quarterly KPIs, you have finally resigned. The dream is close. Your own coffee shop. Your other half is on board, if a little nervous. The bank, after a polite interrogation, has approved the business loan. You scout a unit on a […]
This was not the King’s Speech Keir Starmer imagined it would be. The crisis engulfing the Prime Minister has become so terminal that Buckingham Palace even questioned whether it would be appropriate for the King to speak at all. But Starmer hasn’t maneuvered himself to the top job for nothing, and he patently won’t go […]
Britain is in a funk. Economic sclerosis, populist agitation, social fragmentation – now with extra domestic terrorism – and a political class bewildered by it all. What to do? Enter historian A.G. Hopkins. In his book, ‘The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot’, Hopkins’ sweeping analysis explores the last two centuries of […]
One of my favorite Soviet-era jokes is the story of a farmer and a Soviet official. The official asks the farmer: if you had two farms, would you give one to the state? ‘Of course,’ the farmer replies. If you had two tractors, would you give one to the state? ‘Yes,’ he says again. ‘And […]
Americans like their eggs. While for Britons it is but one part of a fry up or mere fodder for toasted soldiers, for Yanks there is a deep romance, whether eaten at an old-school diner or as part of a trendy brunch. It was therefore bemusing for outsiders when the price of eggs caused a […]
The Green Party is proposing that CEO salaries should be capped at ten times the minimum pay within a company. Given the current leadership of the Greens, this is not surprising. But what is surprising is that, according to a YouGov poll 65% of Brits seem to agree – including 77% of Labour, 58% of […]
For years, politicians of all stripes have talked about turning Britain into a ‘science and technology superpower’. It is an appealing slogan. The UK has world-class universities, top researchers and a reputation for remarkable scientific discoveries. On paper, the country should be an innovation leader. But as new research from the Centre for Policy Studies […]
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg asked a dying Fidel Castro in 2010 if Cuba’s economic model was worth exporting to other countries. He replied: ‘The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us any more.’ It has taken a decade and a half for the Cuban regime’s fans to catch up and they are still advocating for […]
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 […]
Jonathan Hinder, Labour’s MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, has taken to X to deliver what he clearly hopes will be received as a bracing call to arms. In a forty-second video (the medium is very much the message) he laments that ‘Trump’s whims, tariff wars, global energy prices’ now ‘dictate living standards in Britain’. The […]
This week marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s ‘An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’. At the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), we have naturally been busy celebrating the masterwork’s semiquincentennial. Talks have been held, even graphic novels scribbled. Most importantly, pieces have appeared this week in CapX, written by […]
You’ve seen a film like ‘Hoppers’ before. A plucky young girl who loves animals campaigns against a corrupt and venal politician who wants to concrete over a local beauty spot. Children are natural small-c conservatives, so it is no wonder that the culture created for them is often derivative and formulaic. But ‘Hoppers’, a new […]
Yesterday marked the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’. The book is an exploration of why some countries grow faster in the long term than others, with a particular focus on what was happening in Britain at the time, i.e. its early industrial development. […]
1776 has a claim to being the single most important year in the history of the English-speaking peoples. America declared her independence, James Watt sold his first steam engine and Adam Smith invented modern economics. Edward Gibbon might also win ‘highly commended’ for publishing the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ in the same year. […]
Before I begin, let me share that I noticed a strange phenomenon when buying a coffee at your local coffee shop. I paid for the hot beverage and said ‘thank you’. But the lady did not say ‘you’re welcome’ back. She said, ‘thank you’. Our mothers taught us it was ‘thank you – you’re welcome’. […]
As it touted the latest recipe change to its flagship beer Punk IPA in December, BrewDog decided to splash the news across many of the country’s billboards. The tagline? ‘Tastes like commercial suicide’. Rarely has a marketing campaign from the brewer proved so honest. This week, the one-time £2 billion company agreed a sale to […]
