The Capitalist

Keir Starmer is giving tech companies three months to activate on-device content scanning and age verification across all smartphones and tablets sold in Britain – or face fines and potentially criminal liability. Framed as a child safety measure, the proposal has drawn fierce criticism from privacy advocates, civil liberties groups and free speech lawyers who warn it amounts to building a mass surveillance infrastructure under the pretext of safety. The messaging app Signal has already said it will not comply – will others follow? CapX Editor Marc Sidwell speaks with Preston Byrne, free speech lawyer and counsel to some of the internet's most controversial platforms, about what this proposal actually represents beneath the child-safety framing – and what it could mean for Britain’s tech sector.


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Why do so many people instinctively distrust free markets? Erik Lidström's answer is rooted in evolutionary psychology. For nearly two million years, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, in small groups where unpredictable resources were shared equally, regardless of individual effort. Our brains are still wired for that world, and the very different rules of the market economy trigger unjustified suspicion.
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With Donald Trump back in the White House, tariffs have become front-page news, and advocates for free trade find themselves on the back foot. Soumaya Keynes and Chad P. Bown argue that with great powers now using trade as a weapon, there can be no simple return to the settled order of rules-based global trade that dominated the late twentieth century. Their new book, 'How to Win a Trade War', provides a tour through the toolkit of the trade warrior.
They join Marc Sidwell to discuss the new world of economic conflict, why tariffs are like a party drug – and how trade wars can still spiral out of control.


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Over £12 billion of taxpayer money flows to large charities every year – and 21 of them get 99% of their funding from government. So at what point does a charity stop being an independent voice for civil society and become, in effect, an arm of the state? In this piece by Benjamin Elks, published on CapX, he explores the blurry line between public service delivery and state-sponsored lobbying, what greater transparency and accountability could look like, and why getting this right matters for trust in British public life.
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From the progressive left to the nationalist right – in Washington or Westminster – a new consensus is forming. It argues that government should play a larger role in the economy, and that using industrial policy to achieve the economic outcomes we want is just common sense.
As president of the American Institute for Economic Research, Samuel Gregg has spent years making the case for free markets. But he knows that dismissing the new consensus is not enough. It has to be understood and engaged with on its own terms.
He joins Marc Sidwell to map how far the turn away from free markets has gone, why it’s proved so seductive across the political divide – and what those who disagree are going to have to do about it.


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