The Capitalist

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.
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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?

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The Conservative Party has a plan to rebuild. But is it radical enough — and does it have the courage to see it through?

James Cowling, founder of Next Gen Tories, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to make the case that the Conservative Party's problems run deeper than a bad election result — and that the solutions require more than a new leader and a policy or two. Timid politics, he argues, has been the real enemy: governments that knew what needed fixing and chose not to fix it.

Cowling draws a sharp distinction between the Conservatives and Reform — not merely on policy, but on intellectual coherence. Reform, he contends, is a coalition of contradictions, held together by attitude rather than ideas. The Conservatives, by contrast, have a chance to build something more durable: a politics of wealth creation, aspiration and community that speaks to the aspirational thirty- and forty-somethings who feel the system is no longer working in their favour.

There are lessons here from Thatcher — and from Pierre Poilievre, whose Canadian coalition of young, housing-hungry voters came tantalisingly close to power before Donald Trump complicated the arithmetic. There's also an unexpected opportunity in London, where a pro-housing, pro-nightlife conservative candidacy for the 2028 mayoral race might, Cowling suggests, do more to signal the party's renewal than any Westminster speech.

The triple lock, the civil service, urban density, candidate selection — Cowling doesn't duck the hard questions. But his central argument is disarmingly simple: stop polling your way to policy, find the golden thread, and trust the voters with the truth.

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A Labour backbencher posts a forty-second video blaming Thatcher for Britain's economic woes — and the internet applauds. It's a familiar routine. But what if almost every claim in it is demonstrably, provably wrong?

Maxwell Marlow of the Adam Smith Institute takes a scalpel to the mythology of economic nationalism — the idea that privatisation sold off Britain's birthright, that state ownership would have shielded us from the energy crisis, and that what this country needs now is to rebuild its industry behind tariff walls. One by one, the arguments collapse under scrutiny.

Britain's real economic weaknesses — the housing crisis, the collapsing North Sea, the strangled planning system — are not the product of too much market liberalism. They are the product of far too little. The solutions are not romantic, and they are not new. But they work.

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When war in Iran doubled gas prices overnight, Britain's energy vulnerabilities were suddenly impossible to ignore. But what's the real fix — and who's actually right?

Tim Leunig, former economic adviser to Rishi Sunak and chief economist at Nesta, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for a clear-eyed tour through Britain's energy predicament. Leunig makes the case for extracting more from the North Sea — not out of climate scepticism, but precisely because of it. Every barrel left in British waters is one that doesn't have to be bought from Qatar, piped from a capricious Washington or, worst of all, sourced from Moscow. Fracking, by contrast, is simply unscientific in a densely populated country of Victorian terraced houses. The real hedge, he argues, is a combination of more renewables, smarter efficiency and a North Sea used to its full extent — with a contracts-for-difference model keeping both industry and the public on the right side of a price spike.

There's also an uncomfortable truth for British industrialists: in a world where solar energy in Texas and Western Australia is now the cheapest power on earth, energy-intensive manufacturing is going to follow the sun regardless of whether the right or the left is in charge. Britain simply isn't sunny enough to win that race.

The energy trilemma, it turns out, may be less of a trilemma than politicians on both sides would have you believe.

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