The Capitalist

Liberalism is under its greatest threat since the 1930s. The question is whether its defenders have the nerve to admit why – and the ideas to fight back.Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg columnist and author of "Centrists of the World Unite!", joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for an unsentimental diagnosis of liberalism's crisis — and an unexpectedly combative case for its recovery. The liberal tradition that defeated totalitarianism and built the modern world is not, he argues, exhausted. It has been betrayed: hollowed out by a self-satisfied establishment on one side and captured by identitarian collectivism on the other, while the intellectual energy of the age flows freely to the post-liberal right.But the book's argument is ultimately one of recovery. Liberalism has reinvented itself before — in the 1890s, a dying Gladstonian creed gave way to a new liberalism that produced Keynes, Beveridge and a generation that rebuilt the post-war world. The genius is latent. The question, as Wooldridge puts it, is whether today's liberals can sound something other than a faltering trumpet.

The political map we grew up with is obsolete. What comes next could be far more turbulent than anything we've seen so far. Historian Stephen Davies, author of The Great Realignment, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to make the case that the upheavals of recent years – Brexit, Trump, the rise of Reform – are not aberrations to be waited out, but symptoms of something far more structural: a once-in-a-century shift in the organising principle of politics itself. For a hundred years, the central divide was economic. Now, he argues, it is existential – a clash between rooted national identity and open cosmopolitanism that is scrambling every alliance, every assumption, and every party's electoral map.The term "populism", Davies contends, is not merely inaccurate but dangerous – a label that allows established institutions to patronise and persistently underestimate the movements they most need to understand. And to those who believe economic recovery will drain the energy from nationalist politics: he is unsparing. The voters driving the realignment are not, at root, angry about stagnation. They are angry about identity. Those are not the same thing, and no growth strategy will make them so.The show looks at where free marketeers fit in a world reorganised around culture rather than capitalism – and Davies' answer is bracing. The nationalist right's actual agenda, he argues, is functionally incompatible with limited government. Mass deportations, reindustrialisation, reshored supply chains: none of it can be delivered without a very large state indeed.And then comes the prediction that may prove most provocative of all: that the Brexit divide in British politics will flip – with the nationalist right eventually embracing a Europeanist identity defined in civilisational terms, and the cosmopolitan left recoiling from what that Europe would actually become.

In the winter of 1973, Britain ran on three days a week. Candles lit homes, shops shut early, and a Prime Minister insisted everything was under control — right up until it wasn't. Half a century later, the warnings are sounding again.Dr Lawrence Newport, Director of Looking for Growth, draws a stark and unsettling parallel between the energy crisis that brought Edward Heath's government to its knees and the fragility of Britain's power supply today. The numbers are not reassuring: North Sea output at historic lows, gas storage a fraction of what it once was, and an import dependency that leaves the country acutely exposed to the kind of international shocks that, history suggests, are a matter of when rather than if.The failure, Newport argues, is not one government's alone. Successive governments chose dependency over resilience — allowing a labyrinth of reviews, consultations, and legal challenges to strangle domestic energy production while quietly decommissioning the reserves that might have offered protection. Hinkley Point C, the most expensive nuclear plant ever built, stands as the monument to decades of political drift.The Government insists Britain has one of the most reliable energy systems in the world. Newport is less sure. And the cost of being wrong, he warns, will not be felt in Westminster.Despatch brings you the best writing from CapX's unrivalled daily newsletter from the heart of Westminster.

We have been telling ourselves the wrong story about recessions for four centuries. And the consequences of that error are bigger than you might think.Dr. Tyler Goodspeed, former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and author of the new book Recession, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to dismantle one of the most seductive myths in economics: that booms cause busts. Drawing on 132 recessions spanning four centuries of British and American history, Goodspeed makes a forensic and devastating case that economic expansions don't die of natural causes — they are murdered by shocks that nobody saw coming and nobody could have hedged against.Yield curve inversions, inventory cycles, towering skylines, the ghost of Kondratiev — none of it actually predicts the next downturn. We are, Goodspeed argues, pattern-seeking mammals in a world that doesn't always offer patterns, and our hunger for moral narratives — the roaring twenties, the reckless bankers, the inevitable correction — tells us more about human psychology than it does about economic reality.Despite our current gloom, recessions are actually getting rarer. But the greatest threat to long-run prosperity may not be the downturns themselves, but the paralysing stories we tell about them.

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.