It’s no secret that the strong commitments to free markets that, at least rhetorically, marked many conservative parties from the 1980s until 2015, are no longer so robust. Full-throated support for free trade, for example, is hard to find in Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Other Western centre-right parties have proved more resistant to protectionist sentiment. […]
The fate of the high street, and support for local communities, has just come into even sharper focus following the local election results and their consequences – of which more later. Everyone thinks the high street is important, right? Voters constantly complain that the high street is full of vape shops. Shop owners say the […]
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 […]
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 […]
The following is an edited transcript of Lord Wolfson’s keynote speech at the 2026 Margaret Thatcher Conference on Prosperity, organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he argues that replacing Britain’s failed planning system would be the first step towards a freer, faster-growing economy. My father actually worked for Mrs Thatcher as her […]
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 […]
Not too long ago Keir Starmer was banging on about how growth is his ‘number one mission’. Now, with the economy once again faltering – real GDP grew by an anaemic 0.1% in the last quarter of 2025, following an equally disappointing 0.1% in the previous quarter – we are hearing a bit less on […]
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 […]
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 […]
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, so the saying goes. If that is true, Britain’s political class must be losing its mind. Faced with persistent economic stagnation, the highest youth unemployment in Europe and embarrassingly high levels of debt, they continue to reach for the same interventionist […]
After the non-event that was the Spring Statement, yesterday’s Mais lecture by Rachel Reeves was supposed to give us the granular detail of the Chancellor’s plan to rescue Britain’s economy. I hope no one held their breath. The speech was at times incoherent, and felt like an exercise in buck-passing more than the decisive plan […]
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 […]
Thinking ahead about the City of London should be high up on the policy agenda, given the City’s importance to the UK economy in terms of jobs, tax revenues, trade performance and inward investment. It is easy to take a relaxed and optimistic view of what lies ahead for the UK’s financial sector. London is, […]
Although it is early days, it does now look as if a cyclical recovery is starting in the UK economy. The best evidence is the recovery in retail sales from its six-year post-Covid slump. Since consumer spending is around 60% of GDP, a consumer recovery is critical to getting GDP rising. The recovery is also […]
