The Capitalist

Why has it become a reflex for Britain to emphasise the worst of our history while neglecting the best?
This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell speaks with Robert Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge and author of The English and Their History, about Our Islands’ Story, the new book he has written with Nigel Biggar. It’s out next week.
They discussed why the history of empire and slavery has come to crowd out everything else, why Britain’s part in abolition gets so little attention and what the empire did for global trade. They also covered why he thinks the institutions are now too captured for the free market of ideas to fix things on its own, and why he fears Britain’s precious inheritance of free speech and thought is under threat.


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‘She [Badenoch] promised to build a missile and drone defence system called Britannia Shield, telling the hall that if Russia fires a missile at Manchester, Andy Burnham’s £2 bus fares will not save anybody.’
Are the Tories back on track? That’s what Kemi Badenoch was trying to prove in her speech on the final day of the Conservative conference last week. James Price says her approach was a welcome return to the principles of Adam Smith. Whether this will be enough to win round disaffected voters remains to be seen.
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At a Centre for Policy Studies fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, the CPS's new Director Liam Halligan put the questions to Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith.
Griffith, a former FTSE 100 finance director, begins with why Britain’s growth rate never recovered after 2008. He points to a tax system that discourages risk, a state now spending 45p in every pound, an ageing population that governments tried to offset with high immigration and years of quantitative easing that rewarded owning assets over building businesses. He accepts that Conservative governments share the blame. In his view the party’s biggest failure was that it stopped making the case for markets, and by the end it was telling people how to heat their homes and regulating how fruit yogurt is advertised.
On the public finances, he compares Britain to Wile E. Coyote, clinging to the cliff edge while paying more for 30-year borrowing than Greece, Portugal, Morocco and Bulgaria. He insists the problem is political rather than economic: the Chancellor, John Healey, could find the savings ‘this afternoon’ if Labour were willing to reform welfare. He also explains why high energy costs are only one layer of ‘the whole stack’ holding British business back, and why he thinks handing power to arm’s-length regulators has been a disaster.


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‘The Bakerloo line extension, if it is ever built, will be the most expensive underground line built anywhere in the world outside of New York City.’
Britain is pretty good at spending money on infrastructure. But Ben Hopkinson argues we don’t get much for our money. HS2, at up to £102.7 billion for 140 miles of track, is the most expensive high-speed railway in the world. Ben's new report for the Centre for Policy Studies lays out eight policy challenges – and how to fix them.
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 should we do about the nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training?
The Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately joined Marc Sidwell on The Capitalist on the day the Conservatives unveiled their answer: a Get to Work plan that would require under-25s claiming benefits to join an intensive programme from day one, or lose their payments.
They discuss the case for taking family finances into account when young people claim, as well as the party’s separate proposal for a prepaid benefits card for the long-term unemployed that would block spending on alcohol, tobacco and gambling. She also explained why she still sees Margaret Thatcher, not the 1970s Andy Burnham looks back to, as the model for a Conservative government.


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