The Capitalist

Keir Starmer is fighting for his political life. The bond markets are watching — and they have a long memory.

Kallum Pickering, chief economist at Peel Hunt and columnist for The Telegraph, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for a lucid diagnosis of what is really going wrong with the British economy, why the markets are spooked, and what a change of Labour leadership could mean for the country's already precarious fiscal position.

Pickering's central argument: Britain's borrowing costs are the highest in the G7 not because of its deficit or its debt, but because of its inflation record. And that inflation, he contends, is not bad luck — it is the predictable consequence of two decades of policy choices that have systematically rationed Britain's own factors of production.

Land, labour, energy, commodities: each has been constrained in turn, shrinking the economic pie even as demand has grown. The result is an economy that borrows to fund current consumption while steadily eroding the private sector's productive potential.

Even as the predictable leadership tension rolls on, the underlying problem, Pickering argues, will not change with the occupant of Number Ten. His prescription is neither complicated nor politically fashionable: deregulate land, labour and planning; cut government spending by three to five percentage points of GDP; let taxes follow. But above all, fix energy. Britain has 25 per cent less electricity available to it than in 2005. Until that changes, every other reform is working against the tide.
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From fractured local elections to the rise of Reform and the Greens, British politics increasingly feels unstable, fragmented and unpredictable. Yet in this essay, Lee David Evans of the Mile End Institute argues that while the old political order may be gone, the old parties are proving harder to kill than many assume. Drawing comparisons with Harold Wilson, John Major and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, Evans suggests that beneath the chaos of five-party politics, Labour and the Conservatives still retain deeper institutional resilience than their critics admit.

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When a business raises capital, it buys equipment, expands its operations, and hires people. That’s how investment becomes jobs. But the United Kingdom has ranked in the bottom quartile of advanced economies for private capital investment every year since 1995.

The gap with our peers runs to roughly £100 billion annually. A new report from the Jobs Foundation makes for uncomfortable reading, but it also offers concrete proposals for what to do about it.

Marc Sidwell is joined by Andrew Allum, international strategist and one of the report's authors, to discuss what it will take to close the investment gap – and whether Britain still has the political will to try.
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Britain may have stumbled almost accidentally into one of the best positions in the world to win the AI race. The question is whether it has the wit and will to press on.

Recorded live at the Margaret Thatcher Conference in London, Charlotte Crosswell OBE chairs a conversation with Louis Mosley, Executive Vice Chair and Head of Palantir Technologies UK, and Tom Westgarth, Head of Growth at Fractile, on what it would take for Britain to translate its genuine and underrated AI advantages into lasting national prosperity.

The case for optimism is more concrete than you might think. Palantir employs one in five of its global workforce in Britain. Google DeepMind, builder of one of the world's three serious frontier AI models, is headquartered here. ElevenLabs, now valued at $11 billion, was spun out of Palantir's NHS team by Polish engineers who came to London for university and stayed. UK AI startups raised £7.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

As for jobs: anyone claiming certainty is, as Mosley puts it bluntly, lying. But the collar flip – where the barista outlasts the barrister – may be closer than comfortable.
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As grocery prices rise and political pressure mounts, radical solutions are back on the table – including state-owned food stores. In this essay, Jimmy Nicholls, writer of Poke the Bear and host of The Right Dishonourable podcast, examines New York’s experiment under mayor Zohran Mamdani, arguing that public supermarkets are a costly illusion. With razor-thin margins and global supply chains driving prices, Nicholls suggests that even the most ambitious politicians cannot outmaneuver basic economics – and that taxpayers may end up footing the bill for a policy destined to disappoint.

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