The Capitalist

John Healey has delivered his first Budget as Chancellor. In this special edition of The Capitalist, Liam Halligan is joined by Daniel Herring, the Centre for Policy Studies’ Head of Economic and Fiscal Policy, to go through what was announced and what it means for taxes, growth and the public finances.


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'The best course would be to grip spending, not least on welfare, and use the savings to cut the deficit and taxes on business, that essential engine of growth.’
As John Healey delivers his first Budget, the markets will be watching closely, says Mel Stride. In all likelihood Healey will leave himself a very slender headroom, the smallest amount that markets will tolerate. Healey would be wise to reassure the markets further by at least signalling that significant welfare cuts are coming. But who would believe him?
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‘Most people believe we’ve been living in some sort of crazy neoliberal lab experiment for the last 40 years… And that’s because nobody has tried to challenge it.’
This week on The Capitalist, Marc Sidwell spoke to Lord Frost, who led the UK’s Brexit negotiations and later served as Brexit minister under Boris Johnson.
They discussed why Andy Burnham’s move towards rejoining the EU didn’t surprise him, why he thinks the stay-out side is at risk of complacency and why the campaign to keep Brexit’s freedoms needs to start now.
But much of the conversation was about what Britain has failed to do since leaving, and the ‘massive, massive liberalisation’ he says is needed. Frost resigned from the Johnson government at the end of 2021 because it wasn’t challenging the big-state, high-spend status quo. He sets out what he thinks has gone wrong: state spending well above early Blair-era levels, markets of every kind gummed up by regulation and the erosion of a shared national project. He also explains why neither the Conservatives nor Reform UK are yet going far enough, and what it would take to make the Civil Service serve ministers again.


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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.
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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