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.
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.

The political map we grew up with is obsolete.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.
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.

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.
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.

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.
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.

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.
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.