The Capitalist

Rachel Reeves delivers her Mais lecture. Zack Polanski addresses the New Economics Foundation. Both correctly identify the wounds – and then reach for policies that will make them worse.Britain's productivity slowdown is the worst in 250 years. GDP per head is nearly £11,000 lower than it would have been had pre-2008 trends continued. Youth unemployment is the highest in Europe. And yet we keep returning to the same remedies: more state, more intervention, more taxation – more of exactly what hasn't worked.Reem Ibrahim of Reason Magazine offers a clear-eyed audit of where Britain's economic debate currently stands, and finds it wanting. Reeves's housing reforms are modest at best – the OBR estimates Labour's planning changes will account for just 13% of homes built this decade. Polanski's rent controls would, as the near-universal consensus among economists confirms, devastate the very renters they claim to protect. His wealth taxes have been tried across the developed world and quietly abandoned almost everywhere. The question remains: who will stand up for British prosperity?Despatch brings you the best writing from CapX's unrivalled daily newsletter from the heart of Westminster.

The Conservative Party has a plan to rebuild. But is it radical enough — and does it have the courage to see it through?James Cowling, founder of Next Gen Tories, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to make the case that the Conservative Party's problems run deeper than a bad election result — and that the solutions require more than a new leader and a policy or two. Timid politics, he argues, has been the real enemy: governments that knew what needed fixing and chose not to fix it.Cowling draws a sharp distinction between the Conservatives and Reform — not merely on policy, but on intellectual coherence. Reform, he contends, is a coalition of contradictions, held together by attitude rather than ideas. The Conservatives, by contrast, have a chance to build something more durable: a politics of wealth creation, aspiration and community that speaks to the aspirational thirty- and forty-somethings who feel the system is no longer working in their favour.There are lessons here from Thatcher — and from Pierre Poilievre, whose Canadian coalition of young, housing-hungry voters came tantalisingly close to power before Donald Trump complicated the arithmetic. There's also an unexpected opportunity in London, where a pro-housing, pro-nightlife conservative candidacy for the 2028 mayoral race might, Cowling suggests, do more to signal the party's renewal than any Westminster speech.The triple lock, the civil service, urban density, candidate selection — Cowling doesn't duck the hard questions. But his central argument is disarmingly simple: stop polling your way to policy, find the golden thread, and trust the voters with the truth.Subscribe to CapX's unrivalled daily newsletter from the heart of Westminster.

A Labour backbencher posts a forty-second video blaming Thatcher for Britain's economic woes — and the internet applauds. It's a familiar routine. But what if almost every claim in it is demonstrably, provably wrong?Maxwell Marlow of the Adam Smith Institute takes a scalpel to the mythology of economic nationalism — the idea that privatisation sold off Britain's birthright, that state ownership would have shielded us from the energy crisis, and that what this country needs now is to rebuild its industry behind tariff walls. One by one, the arguments collapse under scrutiny.Britain's real economic weaknesses — the housing crisis, the collapsing North Sea, the strangled planning system — are not the product of too much market liberalism. They are the product of far too little. The solutions are not romantic, and they are not new. But they work.Despatch brings you the best writing from CapX's unrivalled daily newsletter from the heart of Westminster.

When war in Iran doubled gas prices overnight, Britain's energy vulnerabilities were suddenly impossible to ignore. But what's the real fix — and who's actually right?Tim Leunig, former economic adviser to Rishi Sunak and chief economist at Nesta, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for a clear-eyed tour through Britain's energy predicament. Leunig makes the case for extracting more from the North Sea — not out of climate scepticism, but precisely because of it. Every barrel left in British waters is one that doesn't have to be bought from Qatar, piped from a capricious Washington or, worst of all, sourced from Moscow. Fracking, by contrast, is simply unscientific in a densely populated country of Victorian terraced houses. The real hedge, he argues, is a combination of more renewables, smarter efficiency and a North Sea used to its full extent — with a contracts-for-difference model keeping both industry and the public on the right side of a price spike.There's also an uncomfortable truth for British industrialists: in a world where solar energy in Texas and Western Australia is now the cheapest power on earth, energy-intensive manufacturing is going to follow the sun regardless of whether the right or the left is in charge. Britain simply isn't sunny enough to win that race.The energy trilemma, it turns out, may be less of a trilemma than politicians on both sides would have you believe.Subscribe to CapX's unrivalled daily newsletter from the heart of Westminster.

Under Zack Polanski, the Greens have quietly abandoned environmentalism in favour of something far more combustible: a coalition of economic grievance, communal tension, and calculated identity politics. And it's working.Young Britons — priced out of homes, squeezed by taxes, shut out of stable careers — are turning to a party whose solutions would make every one of their problems dramatically worse. Wealth taxes that don't raise money. Rent controls that push up rents. A Gaza foreign policy built on sentiment rather than sense.But there is a counter-example. Across the Atlantic, a conservative politician managed the seemingly impossible: he made the Right cool to young voters again. His name is Pierre Poilievre, and Britain's political class would do well to pay attention.Joseph Dinnage, Deputy Editor of CapX, makes the case for why — and how — the British Right must go Canadian before it's too late.Despatch brings you the best writing from CapX's unrivalled daily newsletter from the heart of Westminster.

Why does it feel harder than ever for young people to buy a home? According to Pierre Poilievre, the answer lies not just in planning laws or slow construction — but in the silent erosion of money itself.In this special episode of The Capitalist, recorded at the Margaret Thatcher Lecture hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies, Canada's Opposition Leader argues that decades of money printing across the Western world have inflated asset prices and widened the gap between rich and poor. If measured in gold, he suggests, housing is actually cheaper than it was half a century ago — but measured in pounds and dollars, it has skyrocketed as currencies lose purchasing power. The result is a generation locked out of ownership while asset holders benefit from inflation.Drawing on the ideas of Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher, Poilievre lays out a broader conservative argument for the modern age: restore sound money, dismantle barriers to home building, expand free trade between allied democracies, and rebuild an economy that rewards work and enterprise rather than political connections.It’s a sweeping defence of free markets — and a call for a new alliance of free nations determined to restore opportunity for the next generation.

A Green by-election victory in Greater Manchester may once have seemed unthinkable. Now it looks like a warning shot. In this essay, William Atkinson, Assistant Content Editor at The Spectator, argues that the result signals something far deeper than a protest vote: the fragmentation of Britain’s traditional party system and the rise of sectarian, identity-driven politics. With Labour rattled, the Conservatives in retreat and insurgent forces circling, Gorton and Denton could prove a harbinger of a far more volatile political era.Despatch brings you the best articles from CapX’s unrivalled daily newsletter.

As unemployment climbs and youth joblessness surges past 16%, ministers insist the labour market is merely adjusting. But in this essay, Andrew Griffith, Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade, argues the truth is far starker: Labour’s higher payroll taxes, expanded union powers and sweeping employment regulations have made hiring more expensive, riskier and less attractive. The result, he says, is a steady erosion of Britain’s once-flexible jobs market — with young people paying the highest price.Despatch brings you the best articles from CapX’s unrivalled daily newsletter.