The Capitalist

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.


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‘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.
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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.


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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.
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Are Nimbys a threat to national security? Britain’s inability to build houses and infrastructure is rightly at the heart of our domestic political debate. Dalibor Rohac thinks it needs to be seen as a geopolitical failing as well.
This week on The Capitalist, Rohac, incoming director of research at Globsec, discusses his new book ‘Unshackled: How Economic Growth Can Defeat the World’s Dictators’. The conversation also covers how to defend Western institutions while still building fast, what Mancur Olson can tell us about vetocracy, whether letting China into the WTO was a mistake and why chasing foreign students out of American universities is an own goal.
Rohac’s argument is that the accumulated sludge of special interests and regulatory stasis which reduces growth and stops houses and reservoirs being built has serious security implications – such as the shortfall in defence production across the alliance. Free markets can deliver in ways that more centralised systems cannot, but only if the shackles are taken off.
He remains an optimist, on the grounds that free societies have a remarkable power for self-correction. But who will stand up as a new champion of the Western order? A new Reagan or Thatcher may be harder to find.


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