The Capitalist

Why has it become a reflex for Britain to emphasise the worst of our history while neglecting the best?

This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell speaks with Robert Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge and author of The English and Their History, about Our Islands’ Story, the new book he has written with Nigel Biggar. It’s out next week.

They discussed why the history of empire and slavery has come to crowd out everything else, why Britain’s part in abolition gets so little attention and what the empire did for global trade. They also covered why he thinks the institutions are now too captured for the free market of ideas to fix things on its own, and why he fears Britain’s precious inheritance of free speech and thought is under threat.

‘She [Badenoch] promised to build a missile and drone defence system called Britannia Shield, telling the hall that if Russia fires a missile at Manchester, Andy Burnham’s £2 bus fares will not save anybody.’

Are the Tories back on track? That’s what Kemi Badenoch was trying to prove in her speech on the final day of the Conservative conference last week. James Price says her approach was a welcome return to the principles of Adam Smith. Whether this will be enough to win round disaffected voters remains to be seen.

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At a Centre for Policy Studies fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, the CPS's new Director Liam Halligan put the questions to Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith.

Griffith, a former FTSE 100 finance director, begins with why Britain’s growth rate never recovered after 2008. He points to a tax system that discourages risk, a state now spending 45p in every pound, an ageing population that governments tried to offset with high immigration and years of quantitative easing that rewarded owning assets over building businesses. He accepts that Conservative governments share the blame. In his view the party’s biggest failure was that it stopped making the case for markets, and by the end it was telling people how to heat their homes and regulating how fruit yogurt is advertised.

On the public finances, he compares Britain to Wile E. Coyote, clinging to the cliff edge while paying more for 30-year borrowing than Greece, Portugal, Morocco and Bulgaria. He insists the problem is political rather than economic: the Chancellor, John Healey, could find the savings ‘this afternoon’ if Labour were willing to reform welfare. He also explains why high energy costs are only one layer of ‘the whole stack’ holding British business back, and why he thinks handing power to arm’s-length regulators has been a disaster.

‘The Bakerloo line extension, if it is ever built, will be the most expensive underground line built anywhere in the world outside of New York City.’

Britain is pretty good at spending money on infrastructure. But Ben Hopkinson argues we don’t get much for our money. HS2, at up to £102.7 billion for 140 miles of track, is the most expensive high-speed railway in the world. Ben's new report for the Centre for Policy Studies lays out eight policy challenges – and how to fix them.

Each week we bring you an example of the best writing from CapX, read aloud. For hosted conversations, listen to The Capitalist, every Wednesday.

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What should we do about the nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training?

The Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately joined Marc Sidwell on The Capitalist on the day the Conservatives unveiled their answer: a Get to Work plan that would require under-25s claiming benefits to join an intensive programme from day one, or lose their payments.

They discuss the case for taking family finances into account when young people claim, as well as the party’s separate proposal for a prepaid benefits card for the long-term unemployed that would block spending on alcohol, tobacco and gambling. She also explained why she still sees Margaret Thatcher, not the 1970s Andy Burnham looks back to, as the model for a Conservative government.

‘American firms dominate the tech industry and so almost any domestic digital regulation a foreign government passes will land disproportionately on US companies.’

The Trump administration has admonished its British counterparts over digital regulations like the Online Safety Act. Ben Ramanauskas, a former trader adviser to the UK government, explains that the US feels hard done by because while the UK says these policies are neutral, they tend to affect American firms the most because of their size and revenue. For once, Trump is in the right on trade. These laws are non-tariff trade barriers and Andy Burnham should repeal them.

Each week we bring you an example of the best writing from CapX, read aloud. For hosted conversations, listen to The Capitalist, every Wednesday.

Get full access to the CapX Briefing at briefing.capx.co

Why do so many people – on the Right as well as the Left – look back fondly on a pre-industrial world they would never actually want to live in?

This week on The Capitalist, Chelsea Follett of the Cato Institute speaks with Marc Sidwell about her new book, ‘The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past’. It sets out what life was really like before modern economic growth: famine every few years, streets that doubled as open sewers and a world in which parents put their surviving children to work instead of playing with them.

We discussed why the fantasy of cosy village life is so persistent and how it feeds today’s scepticism about growth and AI. We also covered why the pre-industrial world was no environmental idyll, and what passed for entertainment when an execution was a family day out. Plus, the Dutch mob who killed and ate their prime minister in 1672.

‘You cannot reform what you cannot measure, and Britain cannot presently measure corporate welfare in any meaningful way.’

From support for wind farms to assorted tax reliefs, corporate welfare receives far less attention than voter welfare, but Alan Hibben argues it should be easier to cut – if we actually knew the true cost to taxpayers. Until Britain stops administering corporate support as a fog of overlapping schemes, exemptions and tax breaks, nothing will change.

Each week we bring you an example of the best writing from CapX, read aloud. For hosted conversations, listen to The Capitalist, every Wednesday.

Get full access to the CapX Briefing at briefing.capx.co

What does the fight for free markets look like in 2026 – and how can Britain escape its high-debt, high-tax, low-growth doom loop?

Liam Halligan, the new Director of the Centre for Policy Studies – and so now in charge of CapX as well – joins Marc Sidwell on The Capitalist to explain why he decided to get more involved in frontline policymaking.

He argues that our perilous fiscal position today looks alarmingly similar to the mid-Seventies, when the CPS was founded to break a failing consensus and Britain went to the IMF for a bailout two years later. Fifty years after that bailout, he says, the case for free enterprise and limited government must be won all over again.

We discussed why Britain’s debt interest bill is a moral failure, not just a fiscal one; why he thinks the market will not fund upfront tax cuts, however much he wants them; and why he blames his own trade – economics journalism – for leaving the public unequipped to hold politicians to account.

‘The only thing more power-hungry than AI are, of course, leftist politicians themselves.’

Economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that making a technology more efficient means people will use it a lot more, rather than less — his example was coal and the steam engine. James Price argues the same holds for AI. In the US, AI has created a million jobs to the 200,000 job losses it gets blamed for. Britain is an outlier because Labour made hiring more expensive and firing harder.

Each week we bring you an example of the best writing from CapX, read aloud. For hosted conversations, listen to The Capitalist, every Wednesday.

Get full access to the CapX Briefing at briefing.capx.co