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.

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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

Is Britain’s own debt now as dangerous as any foreign rival? This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell speaks to Daniel Hannan, the writer, peer and former MEP who has just taken over as Director-General of the Institute of Economic Affairs – Britain’s original free-market think tank – at a moment when state spending sits at 46% of GDP.

He makes the case that in an increasingly dangerous world, Britain’s economic weakness is a vulnerability we can no longer afford. With debt at £3 trillion and history suggesting our power abroad has always rested as much on deeper, cheaper capital markets as fighting spirit, he argues our stretched public finances risk emboldening our geopolitical foes.

They also discuss how lockdown broke the public’s understanding of what ‘the economy’ even means, how Hannan plans to bring the free-market case to a new generation and why the electorate’s demand for spending deserves as much blame as any politician.

‘The nations whose standards the world adopts win far more than the nations that merely rent their software by the month.’

The UK used to allow proprietary technology to compete alongside its open alternatives. Damian Green argues that as we enter the age of AI, our Government seems unsure how to deal with open-source models. But investing in open-source projects with the Americans is essential if we want to stay ahead of China. Openness helped put the internet in every pocket. We need to set AI free in the same way.

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

Will the man who paints himself as the antidote to Thatcherism lead us back to the worst of the 1970s? This week on The Capitalist, as Britain’s borrowing costs spiked and Andy Burnham faced MPs as Prime Minister, Marc Sidwell spoke to the economist Julian Jessop about Burnham’s plans – and whether they can really get Britain back to growth.

We discussed whether nationalisation is a recipe for reducing the cost of living, and Burnham’s curious belief that Britain’s current condition – with taxes at record levels and the state bigger than ever – can be labelled a failed experiment in neoliberalism.

‘In Britain, we can force £100 million to be spent on a bat tunnel; imagine what our planning system will do with a gigawatt campus.’

Britain is the home of the first data centre, which helped us win the Second World War. James Price says that nowadays we can barely build them, thanks to Nimby complaints gumming up the planning system. The UAE is building data centres in the desert. Singapore is building them – despite real land and water constraints. We need to catch up.

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

This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell speaks to the writer and CapX columnist Jonn Elledge. His new book ‘31 Inventions That Built Our World’, surveys the technologies – from sewers to lifts – that make urban life possible. They discuss what it takes to keep a modern city running, and whether we are losing our nerve when it comes to building twenty-first century infrastructure.

They also talk about the PT Barnum stunt that convinced the public it was safe to ride in a lift, why nowhere on Earth held more than about a million people until the 1800s, the speed limit that stood in the way of commuting and why market pricing – not more regulation – is the answer to the mess we’ve made of urban space.

Compliance costs British business around £52 billion a year. Damian Pudner asks how much of that is wasted on rules nobody has bothered to think through? Every hour spent on paperwork is an hour not spent selling, investing or training staff. Ministers are held to account when they spend public money. They should face the same scrutiny when they spend everyone else’s time.

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