Capx Presents Free Exchange

Britain's reputation for decline has taken on a life of its own online. But how much of it is real — and what would it actually take to fix?Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at Britain Remade, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for a forensic tour through the structural problems dragging on the British economy — and some surprisingly tractable solutions. The broken Britain narrative, he argues, isn't simply noise: there are genuine, self-inflicted wounds here, and they all tend to lead back to the same place.The planning system runs like a thread through almost every conversation about British decline, and this one is no exception. Energy bills are high in part because building the infrastructure to bring them down has been made absurdly expensive. Housing is unaffordable thanks to layers of regulation.But perhaps the sharpest insight concerns supermarkets. Since 1996, a Town Centre First policy has nudged Britain's retail sector away from large out-of-town stores towards cramped urban formats — smaller, less producti

Labour's benefits reforms are now law. Ministers say they will cut poverty. Critics say they will simply transfer money from people who work to people who don't. Both sides are missing the point – because Britain's welfare state isn't just poorly calibrated. It is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what poverty actually is.John Penrose, Chair of the Conservative Policy Forum, makes a quietly radical argument: that the official definition of poverty is itself the problem. By measuring poverty as anything below 60% of median earnings, the system embeds a permanent wealth-redistribution ratchet into the heart of the welfare state – one that treats the symptom, not the cause, and ensures that reported poverty barely shifts regardless of how many billions are spent.Despatch brings you the best writing from CapX's unrivalled daily newsletter.Stay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster. Go to capx.co to subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informat

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 t

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.

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 prot

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 hum

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 every

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 Poilievr

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.Stay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the h

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 industrialis

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.Sta

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 econo

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.Stay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster. Go to capx.co to subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Britain is in the grip of a housing crisis. And despite the promises of successive governments, we just can’t seem to build enough new homes. But this isn’t a uniquely British problem. In his book, “Build Baby Build”, Bryan Caplan examines the forces shaping housing markets in a way that applies almost everywhere.Bryan’s core argument is disarmingly simple: cut regulation and more homes will follow. But as an economist at George Mason University, he is also acutely aware of the political and economic trade-offs – including the tension between high housing costs and the interests of those already invested in the market.He joins Marc Sidwell to discuss not only what less regulation could achieve, but how such an approach might even become politically popular.Stay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster. Go to capx.co to subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.Stay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster. Go to capx.co to subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

America has long liked to see itself as the world’s dream factory – from the birth of Hollywood to the moon landings, a belief in thinking bigger has been central to the national story. But attitudes towards artificial intelligence reveal a worrying shift. Surveys show that more people are anxious about AI than excited by its spread, with around six in ten saying the technology is moving too fast.James Pethokoukis is the author of The Conservative Futurist and writes the Substack newsletter Faster, Please. He’s also a senior fellow and the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where he analyses US economic policy. He joins Marc Sidwell to discuss the transformative possibilities of AI, how its risks can be managed, and why a more optimistic outlook may be warranted.Stay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster. Go to capx.co to subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As younger voters grow disillusioned with a housing system that denies them real control over their homes, the battle over leasehold has become a test of whether capitalism still delivers on its promises. In this essay, Harry Scoffin, founder of Free Leaseholders, argues that reforming — and ultimately replacing — leasehold with commonhold is not a left-wing cause, but the logical continuation of Thatcher’s popular capitalism. From Randolph Churchill to Margaret Thatcher, Conservatives once championed mass ownership as a bulwark against socialism. Scoffin makes the case that finishing that project could restore faith in markets, revive homeownership and prevent a new generation from turning away from the system altogether.Despatch brings you the best articles from CapX’s unrivalled daily newsletter.Stay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster. Go to capx.co to subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When the Conservative Party last entered government, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the UK was still finding its feet after the global financial crisis. What followed was a succession of events that quickly came to dominate political life: Brexit, the pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Each of these moments demanded large, costly interventions from the state. But Britain now faces a new set of challenges: an ageing population, a fresh industrial revolution driven by AI, growing global security risks, and the pressures of a changing climate.John Penrose is the founder of the Centre for Small Conservatives. A former Conservative MP, he joins Marc Sidwell to discuss why he’s arguing for moving beyond rhetoric and towards serious, practical policy ideas — ones he believes can deliver tangible results in the real world.Guest: John Penrose, former MP and founder of the Centre for Small State ConservativesStay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster. Go to capx

Can a Prime Minister really be on borrowed time less than two years after a landslide election victory? Benjamin Wilson speaks to ConservativeHome's Henry Hill about the mounting speculation around Sir Keir Starmer — and why Labour’s internal unrest may be less surprising than it looks.Henry argues that Starmer’s problems were baked in from the start: a low-turnout election, a deliberately cautious manifesto, and a parliamentary party that never felt bound to deliver painful choices on welfare, spending, or reform. But now the problems run even deeper: Labour’s rebellions, the structural difficulty of governing with a huge and undisciplined majority, the changing expectations placed on leaders in the age of social media, and the stagnant fiscal reality that now threatens any party in power. From Reform’s rise to the fragmentation of the electorate, Henry thinks Britain may be entering a brutal cycle in which voters punish every governing party for problems no leader can easily fix.Stay informed with CapX's un

After decades of chronic undersupply, even modest housing reforms can feel like cause for celebration. But in this essay, John Penrose, Chair of the Conservative Policy Forum and founder and director of the Centre for Small-State Conservatives, argues that the Government’s latest plans don’t go nearly far enough. His solution is simple and radical in equal measure: give homeowners the right to build up, not out. By gently increasing density in towns and cities, Penrose says Britain could unlock millions of new homes, restore urban beauty, and finally make housing affordable for a new generation.Despatch brings you the best articles from CapX’s unrivalled daily newsletter.Stay informed with CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster. Go to capx.co to subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.