Episodes
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Parliament is back and so are the Tory factions fighting over the Rwanda scheme. In the first CapX Podcast of 2024, Alys Denby is joined by Research Director at the Centre for Policy Studies Karl Williams to discuss how debates over immigration policy will play out over the next year, and what impact they will have on the upcoming general election.
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CapX Editor Alys Denby runs through the people and policies that made 2023 another peculiar year in politics, with Poppy Coburn, Assistant US Opinion Editor at the Telegraph, William Atkinson, Assistant Editor at Conservative Home and Joseph Dinnage, Deputy Editor of CapX.
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Missing episodes?
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Aside from a windfall from higher inflation which the Chancellor used to make tax cuts, the underlying picture for the economy is essentially flat. That being said, some welcome pro-growth measures were announced, most notably the decision to make full expensing permanent. But is it too little too late? To analyse what this means for the future of the public finances, Robert Colvile was joined by Chair of the OBR Richard Hughes and economist Vicky Pryce.
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The world has just witnessed the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. Yet amid the international condemnation of Hamas terrorists, there has also been equivocation – and even celebration in some quarters. No other conflict stirs emotions like that between Israel and Palestine - so why is it that the world’s only Jewish state appears to be held to completely different standards to other countries?
Jake Wallis Simons, Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, has a word for it:: Israelophobia. His new book explains how the world's oldest hatred has evolved, co-opting identity politics and anti-colonialism to to turn British values against themselves. He joined me at our offices for a conversation that couldn’t have been more timely.
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It’s Party Conference season, and while the Lib Dems were kayaking and playing crazy golf in Bournemouth last week, this weekend it’s the Tories’ turn to troop up to Manchester. Attendees are anticipating drama, gossip and exciting policy announcements – the Prime Minister is promising 'long-term decisions for a brighter future'.
But while Rishi Sunak will be rolling the pitch for an election manifesto, on the fringes other grandees will be fighting for the soul of the Conservative Party.
CapX welcomed our Editor-in-Chief and Director of our parent organisation the Centre for Policy Studies to give is a run-down of what to expect.
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CapX talks about housing a lot – most often to scream 'build more houses!' into a void – yet politicians appear stuck in a doom loop when it comes to this urgent topic.
Conservative MPs talk a good game about the need for housing, as long as it's anywhere but in their constituency, while Labour talk up discredited socialist ideas like rent controls.
But last week, drama returned to the housing discourse, as Secretary of State Michael Gove announced plans for dramatic expansion in Cambridge, Leeds and London. So is the housing shortage, which is the source of so many of this country’s problems, from low productivity to population decline, about to be solved? And how credible is the idea of a brand new neighbourhood on the outskirts of a centuries-old university town, albeit one that's at the cutting edge of the UK's tech sector?
Few people are better placed to answer these questions than Samuel Hughes, Head of Housing at the Centre for Policy Studies, who the CapX Podcast was delighted to welcome this week.
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In a world saturated with information, we have more choices than ever – but how freely do we make them?
In their new book Free Your Mind – The new World of Manipulation and how to Avoid it, journalist Laura Dodsworth and behavioural scientist Patrick Fagan argue that there is a war on our minds as the media, advertisers, politicians and big tech vie to influence our decisions.
They investigate the psychological techniques – from fear to flattery - that are used every day to manipulate us, and offer advice on how to recognise and resist them.
We sat down for a fascinating conversation that ranged from the excesses of Covid lockdowns to the joy of rediscovering your masculinity by getting naked in a forest. Listeners are encouraged to enjoy this episode in the spirit of the book – sceptically…
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The NHS recently marked its 75th birthday with the kind of love-in most countries reserve for a passing monarch or truly iconic celebrity. So what is about our health service that has created such a fervent attachment amongst so many Brits, even when it underperforms compared to some of our continental peers?
To find out, we invited the journalist, author and broadcaster Isabel Hardman on to this week's episode of the CapX Podcast to discuss her brilliant new history of the NHS, Fighting for Life.
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Trash, garbage, litter or rubbish – whatever you call it the world is producing ever more of the stuff. But where does it all go once it's left our colour-coded bins? And what about all those clothes you leave at the charity shop thining you've done a good turn?
The fascinating tapestry of grime that is the modern waste industry is documented in painstaking, illuminating detail in the new book Wasteland, written by our guest this week, Oliver Franklin-Wallis.
He takes us on a journey from hulking mountains of waste on the outskirts of New Delhi to abandoned mining towns in Oklahoma and back-street repair shops in Ghana, where engineers give new life to millions of the West's discarded gadgets.
A truly enlightening, somewhat shocking episode this week – and I'd heartily recommend Oli's book to all our listeners.
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He’s best known for coming up with the terms death tax and climate change, so it’s fair to say Frank Luntz knows a thing or two about political communication – making him an ideal guest for the CapX Podcast.
We sat down to discuss his latest project for the Centre for Policy Studies delving into how the British public really feel about that most American of values: Freedom.
Few will be surprised to learn that it’s not an idea that animates our democracy in the same way it does for our gun-toting cousin across the Atlantic – but for those of us who care about choice and liberty, the detail of his findings are deeply worrying.
Perhaps most concerning, from a CapX perspective, is that almost half of British either can’t tell or see no difference between capitalism and socialism.
So as well getting his characteristically lively takes on all the latest political gossip on both sides of the pond, I asked Frank how those of us who value freedom make the case to a populus who seem to care more about fairness than prosperity?
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How do we really live now? From a Romanian truck driver to an Amazon deliveryman and a factory production line worker, Ben Judah tried to answer that question by speaking to the people whose labour makes the freedom and prosperity the rest of us enjoy possible – for his latest book This is Europe.
The author and Atlantic Council fellow crossed the continent conducting hours of painstaking interviews with people whose vivid stories reveal the powerful forces reshaping our world: migration, technology, war and climate change.
He joined the CapX podcast to discuss a book, by turns harrowing and uplifting, about a promise of unity, peace and the good life that’s realised for some in Europe – but painfully illusive for others. And our conversation was almost as wide ranging as the land it covers…
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As with so much modern political theatre, the debate on artificial intelligence has become polarised to a point that is often profoundly unhelpful, with a false dichotomy between 'doomers' and utopians who see AI as a solution to the world's many problems, both technical and social.
Between those positions is a world of nuance and wildly varying predictions on what this expanding new technology could mean. All the while commentators and politicians talk about 'AI policy' as if it were a single thing, rather than a whole suite of overlapping issues: they range from the banal – discriminatory algorithms and deepfake of politicians, say – to the unnerving prospect of AI reaching a human-like level of intelligence. As one of our guests in this week's episode puts it, at this stage talking about 'AI policy' is about as useful as talking about 'electricity policy'.
To hammer out some of those questions we brought together Connor Axiotes, the Lead on Risk Policy at the Adam Smith Institute, and our own Head of Tech from the Centre for Policy Studies, Matthew Feeney.
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There are few political questions as vexed as how to tax hard-pressed motorists. For many years, the Treasury has treated British drivers as a cash cow, levying high taxes while investing relatively little in the road network.
Now, however, things are changing rapidly. The take-up of electric vehicles and the upcoming ban on new petrol and diesel cars presents a big fiscal headache for the Government. How will they replace all that fuel duty revenue in a world where far fewer people are driving gas-guzzling vehicles?
Thankfully, we at the Centre for Policy Studies have the answer, as this week's guest - our Energy and Environment Researcher, Dillon Smith - sets out in a new report this week.
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What is National Conservatism?
That's the question we're grappling with this week following the big National Conservatism Conference in London. While it certainly generated lots of media heat, it's still not particularly clear what this US-imported idea actually stands for. Indeed, the answer seemed to vary depending on which of the eclectic cast of speakers was on stage.
CapX's deputy editor Alys Denby and our CPS colleague Karl Williams both dropped into the conference to take the pulse of this burgeoning movement and assess if it's got much of a future on this side of the pond.
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Our guest this week played an instrumental role in the UK's departure from the European Union. As Boris Johnson's Europe adviser and then chief negotiator in the exit talks with the EU, Lord Frost drew on a lifetime of experience as a civil servant and foreign office diplomat to help get the Trade and Cooperation Agreement over the line.
Since leaving government at the end of 2021, he has continued to be a vocal advocate for a smaller state, lower taxes and a version of Brexit that takes full advantage of potential divergence from the Brussels way of doing things.
We sat down for a wide-ranging discussion, including the Tories' electoral plight, the shape of Brexit seven years after the referendum and whether the Government should go for a full-throttle war on Woke.
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Here at CapX we love an unfashionable cause – and in a cost of living crisis, few demographics are less popular than those who seem to be struggling less.
But we're also fans of basic economic concepts, and with the tax burden the highest it’s been since the era of state socialism under Attlee, the Laffer Curve inevitably comes to mind. Because while calls to ‘tax the rich’ may be popular, if it means less money for public services, they will ultimately prove counterproductive.
And it’s not just about Treasury revenues. The only way we’ll get out of the hole we’re in is by growing the economy and that means enabling businesses to thrive, to generate profits and – in the end – to make some people wealthy.
To discuss whether the Government and society at large are doing enough to incentivise wealth creation, we were delighted to welcome broadcaster and commentator Emily Carver, Martin Vander Weyer, Business Editor at The Spectator, Merryn Somerset Webb, Senior Columnist at Bloomberg and entrepreneur Luke Johnson –founder and partner at Risk Capital Partners and chairman of Gail’s bakeries among other businesses.
This fascinating conversation ranged from the deep cultural roots of Britain's distaste for the dirty business of making money, the moral obligations of the wealthy, to working out who really counts as 'rich'.
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Did you know that every time you fill up your car, you are paying for the UK’s biofuels mandate, the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO)? In fact, some 6% of the price Brits pay at the pump goes on biofuel being blended into petrol and diesel.
More concerning still at a time of soaring food prices, crops such as wheat and corn are still a central part of the industry. That's why a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies calls on the Government to phase out food crops, both to bolster food security and help the environment.
For this weeks' episode of the CapX Podcast I invited the author of that report, our Energy and Environment researcher Dillon Smith, to explain just what's going on here, and what kind of reform we need to see.
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Things can seem a bit gloomy at the moment, and no one is better suited to explaining why than our guest this week, the Tory writer and self-proclaimed doom-monger Ed West.
In an eclectic career that has spanned lad mags, religious publications and a very popular personal Substack, Ed has become one of the most entertaining, thought-provoking writers on the British right, and it was a pleasure to sit down and shoot the breeze with him for this week's episode.
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Breathless predictions of AI-induced doom are all around, with some experts in the field saying the technology has already advanced beyond the point of no return. The recent open letter signed by the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Andrew Yang was just the latest example of the unease that programmes such as Chat GPT-4 have provoked.
So how well-founded are the fears that a super-intelligent AI might render humanity obsolete? And what of the more prosaic and immediate concern that chatbots will turf millions of people out of work, spread disinformation and generally make our already topsy-turvy world even more unstable?
To find out, we invited out colleague Matthew Feeney, Head of Tech at the Centre for Policy Studies, for an illuminating discussion on the history of artificial intelligence, where the tech is now and where it could take us in the future.
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After years where prices barely seemed to rise and interest rates remained stubbornly low, the last two years have seen inflation come roaring back - combined with union strife and an energy crisis it has felt like we've been living through the 1970s all over again.
What better time then, for an economist to publish a handy explainer on just what inflation is, where it comes from and why central banks have so often failed to deal with it.
Stephen D King is an economist and writer who is a senior adviser at HSBC and the author of four books, including his latest We Need To Talk About Inflation - 14 urgent lessons from the last 2,000 years.
We sat down at CapX Towers to talk through the history of inflation and what the UK might have in store in the years to come...
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