The Capitalist

The feminist case for capitalism is one of the most powerful arguments nobody seems to be making. Zoe Strimpel has decided to make it anyway.

A columnist for The Telegraph and author of Good Slut: How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free, Zoe joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to make the conservative case for winning over feminists at the next election. Her argument is simple and unfashionable: throughout history, the ability to earn money and keep it has been the most reliable route to female autonomy — more so, in many contexts, than legislation or social movements alone. The reflexive anti-capitalism of contemporary feminism, she contends, is not just intellectually confused but actively harmful to the women it claims to represent.

Zoe traces how feminism, born from the socialist left of the 1970s, was briefly hijacked by the Sheryl Sandbergs of the early 2000s before swinging back hard against so-called neoliberal feminism — leaving young women with a politics that discourages ambition, pathologises wealth and mistakes destruction for progress. The polling bears it out: young women are now among the most enthusiastic supporters of anti-capitalist parties.

Nobody, right or left, is making much of an economic argument at all: cultural questions are more vivid, more emotionally compelling and considerably easier than engaging seriously with how prosperity is actually created. But Zoe thinks that style of politics might be reaching its use by date.
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.

War in Iran. Energy bills set to spike again this summer. Electricity prices that have gone from among the lowest in Europe to among the highest. And a Government that appears to believe the answer is simply to press on.

But Dr Gerard Lyons, research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, isn't arguing for abandoning the green transition. Instead, he says the way Britain is pursuing Net Zero is making the country poorer, less competitive, and more exposed to exactly the kind of international shocks that good energy policy is designed to absorb.

The problem is substitution over addition — replacing fossil fuels before the renewable system is ready to carry the load, and loading the cost of transition directly onto household and business bills. The fix, Lyons argues, requires treating the energy transition as long-term infrastructure, financed through borrowing and repaid over generations. It requires nuclear — urgently, and at scale. It requires a stable tax regime for the North Sea. And it requires fixing a market design that means consumers pay gas prices even when the wind is blowing.

Britain led the world in cutting emissions, and it could yet lead the world in doing so affordably. But Lyons warns that the current path risks making the green transition synonymous with economic pain — and that is a political and economic failure the country cannot afford.

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.

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 productive, and more expensive to run. The result, backed by rigorous comparative evidence from Scotland, is lower productivity, higher prices, and a planning system that lets established supermarkets block cheaper rivals from opening at all.

The overarching diagnosis is uncomfortable: politicians reach for sticking plasters precisely when structural reform is needed most, and the reforms that would work tend to require a political courage that has been conspicuously absent.
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.

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 information.

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.