The Capitalist

Why do so many people – on the Right as well as the Left – look back fondly on a pre-industrial world they would never actually want to live in?
This week on The Capitalist, Chelsea Follett of the Cato Institute speaks with Marc Sidwell about her new book, ‘The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past’. It sets out what life was really like before modern economic growth: famine every few years, streets that doubled as open sewers and a world in which parents put their surviving children to work instead of playing with them.
We discussed why the fantasy of cosy village life is so persistent and how it feeds today’s scepticism about growth and AI. We also covered why the pre-industrial world was no environmental idyll, and what passed for entertainment when an execution was a family day out. Plus, the Dutch mob who killed and ate their prime minister in 1672.


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‘You cannot reform what you cannot measure, and Britain cannot presently measure corporate welfare in any meaningful way.’
From support for wind farms to assorted tax reliefs, corporate welfare receives far less attention than voter welfare, but Alan Hibben argues it should be easier to cut – if we actually knew the true cost to taxpayers. Until Britain stops administering corporate support as a fog of overlapping schemes, exemptions and tax breaks, nothing will change.
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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What does the fight for free markets look like in 2026 – and how can Britain escape its high-debt, high-tax, low-growth doom loop?
Liam Halligan, the new Director of the Centre for Policy Studies – and so now in charge of CapX as well – joins Marc Sidwell on The Capitalist to explain why he decided to get more involved in frontline policymaking.
He argues that our perilous fiscal position today looks alarmingly similar to the mid-Seventies, when the CPS was founded to break a failing consensus and Britain went to the IMF for a bailout two years later. Fifty years after that bailout, he says, the case for free enterprise and limited government must be won all over again.
We discussed why Britain’s debt interest bill is a moral failure, not just a fiscal one; why he thinks the market will not fund upfront tax cuts, however much he wants them; and why he blames his own trade – economics journalism – for leaving the public unequipped to hold politicians to account.


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‘The only thing more power-hungry than AI are, of course, leftist politicians themselves.’
Economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that making a technology more efficient means people will use it a lot more, rather than less — his example was coal and the steam engine. James Price argues the same holds for AI. In the US, AI has created a million jobs to the 200,000 job losses it gets blamed for. Britain is an outlier because Labour made hiring more expensive and firing harder.
Each week we bring you an example of the best writing from CapX, read aloud. For hosted conversations, listen to The Capitalist, every Wednesday.
Get full access to the CapX Briefing at briefing.capx.co


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Is Britain’s own debt now as dangerous as any foreign rival? This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell speaks to Daniel Hannan, the writer, peer and former MEP who has just taken over as Director-General of the Institute of Economic Affairs – Britain’s original free-market think tank – at a moment when state spending sits at 46% of GDP.
He makes the case that in an increasingly dangerous world, Britain’s economic weakness is a vulnerability we can no longer afford. With debt at £3 trillion and history suggesting our power abroad has always rested as much on deeper, cheaper capital markets as fighting spirit, he argues our stretched public finances risk emboldening our geopolitical foes.
They also discuss how lockdown broke the public’s understanding of what ‘the economy’ even means, how Hannan plans to bring the free-market case to a new generation and why the electorate’s demand for spending deserves as much blame as any politician.


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