CapX, London (2025)

07/11/2025

Islington is one of the nicest districts in London. Much of it consists of row after row of beautiful terraced houses, built to a common pattern: white rusticated stucco on the ground floor, giving way to London stock brick surrounding generous sash windows on the upper floors. They will typically be four stories high, plus a basement, although the basic pattern is flexible enough to be extended upwards.

But like many beautiful places, Islington is pockmarked with the architectural errors of the past. On one side of the street, terraces; on the other, a 1960s monstrosity. The postmodernism of the 1990s mixes with restrained Georgian classicism. Islington may be beautiful, but in many respects it is an architectural mess.

In theory, there is a mechanism to fix this. The Borough has over 40 conservation areas, covering all of the beautiful areas. Under the planning system, if a planning application is made in a conservation area, the planning authority has to pay ‘special attention to the desirability of preserving or enhancing the character or appearance of the area’.

But this is only one planning consideration among many. It does not create a mandate to build beautifully. Most of Islington’s conservation areas were designated over 50 years ago, and many of the offending buildings are younger than that. Even though the conservation area has probably helped make things less bad, it has not made them better. Ultimately, the planning system is reactive to proposals put forward by developers: civic authorities have little ability or incentive to restore the appearance of beautiful districts proactively.

To fix this, we should set up an institution which I call the Islington Restoration Trust. Its primary purpose would be to conserve and restore the built environment of Islington. Properly understood, ‘conservation’ does not mean pickling Georgian terraces in aspic, never allowing the area to change: tradition, as Gustav Mahler said, is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. Conserving the beauty of Islington means enabling building, demolishing the ugliness and putting something beautiful its place.

✍️Benedict Springbett

Parts of Islington are beautiful, but the area has become an architectural mess

06/11/2025

Last year, in Baku, Azerbaijan, the 29th UN’s Conference of the Parties on Climate Change excelled itself in providing the global stage for cant and hypocrisy.

The petrostate’s government had declared the event as ‘The COP of Peace’ despite Azerbaijan military forces invading the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh the year before, displacing 100,000 ethnic Armenians and imprisoning many others as political prisoners.

Then COP29 chief executive and Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister, Elnur Soltanov, was filmed agreeing to facilitate commercial oil or gas deals at the climate summit by the campaign group Global Witness.

The subsequent failure of COP29 to satisfy demands from emerging nations – including China – for a huge transfer of wealth of £1 trillion was lost in the sandstorm of outrage when Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s address included the immortal words that oil and gas was a ‘gift from God’. In the end, ‘only’ £230 billion of climate subsidies were committed to.

Surely, COP30 – to be held in Belém, Brazil, where the clearance of Amazonian rainforest is, we might say, topical, could not trump Azerbaijan’s unravelled sanctimony.

✍️Brian Monteith

While Brazil is hosting COP this year, it is also accelerating deforestation

05/11/2025

Mamdani’s support base was broad, but the bulk of his success almost certainly came from galvanising the voter group a Marxist can always rely on: the young professional elite. He is, ultimately, one of them. The Millennial son of an academic and a filmmaker, who met his ceramicist wife on Hinge, was always going to appeal to right-on, recently graduated Zoomers.

You can’t blame them for looking for an alternative. Although the case was dismissed, Eric Adams, the former mayor of New York, was indicted on a number of corruption charges, having been accused of accepting bribes from Turkish officials. Before the Adams debacle, an independent investigation overseen by the New York Attorney General’s office had concluded that Cuomo – when New York’s Governor – had s*xually harassed 11 women, eventually leading to his resignation.

Sleaze notwithstanding, successive administrations have also failed to address the litany of social and economic issues that make New Yorkers’ lives miserable, particularly for young people.

A chronic housing shortage has pushed up rents dramatically. For a Manhattan resident, the average monthly rent on a flat is $5,706. And in a story that will be familiar to many Britons, the pace at which New York has built houses has lagged behind the demands of its growing population. Between 2011 and 2023, the Big Apple added almost 900,000 new jobs, but only 350,000 new homes. Moreover, when you step out of your extortionately priced shoebox, you walk down streets that are often filthy, while stalked by the general feeling of unease that comes with living in a city where homelessness and mental illness are out of control.

Yet by voting in Mamdani, New Yorkers will have only themselves to blame when things quickly get a lot worse.

✍️Joseph Dinnage

The UK has all of the preconditions for a succesful socialist demagogue

03/11/2025

Nish Kumar and James Acaster are campaigning against a much-needed development in Peckham

✍️James Ball

Nish Kumar and James Acaster are campaigning against a much-needed development in Peckham

31/10/2025

When panic ensues about declining birth rates, politicians tend to reach for the chequebook: baby bonuses, childcare subsidies, tax credits and sometimes, direct cash handouts. These government-led interventions are incredibly expensive, and yet often have limited impact on fertility. France, for example, spends nearly 3.5% of its GDP on family benefits, and yet its birth rate is only modestly higher than Britain’s.

Interestingly, economic freedom shows strong associations with smaller fertility gaps.

The UK has exceptionally high housing and childcare costs. Easing stringent regulations in those sectors would almost certainly make life easier for many parents, and by extension, lead to more people becoming parents in the first place.

A 2017 study found ‘a significant negative relationship between land use restrictions and fertility rates across all measures and geographies’.

Britain’s suffocating planning system has made homes smaller, scarcer and far more expensive. It is no coincidence that the average age of first-time buyers, and of first-time parents, continues to creep up together.

✍️Reem Ibrahim on how to fix the baby bust

The fertility crisis is a symptom of deeper economic malaise

30/10/2025

Adam Smith’s warning against the 'man of system' was not a rejection of order, but of imposed, top down order that ignores the living autonomy of humans. He thought that societies thrive when they harness the judgments and attachments of individuals. Treating people as pieces to be arranged – whether by mercantilist schemes or by machine learning models – forgets that our ‘principle of motion’ is what makes us free agents in the first place.

✍️Brendan McCord on the future of freedom in an AI-powered world

AI must not become an 'auto-complete' for life

30/10/2025

Keir Starmer’s proposed digital ID scheme is misguided – yet even its fiercest critics should not be opposed to digital ID in principle. When done right, digital ID can make government more efficient, services faster and citizens’ lives easier. The problem lies not in digital ID, but in the British state’s attempt to control it.

A month has passed since Starmer announced his plan to introduce mandatory digital ID by 2029. Polling now shows 45% of Britons oppose it, and nearly 3 million have signed an e-petition against it. The backlash is understandable. Mandating digital ID for everyone seeking employment violates our basic right to choose. Rousseau and Locke reminded us that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. A compulsory ID system is the very opposite of that principle.

Worse, Labour justifies their proposal as a tool to curb illegal immigration – the same populist reasoning that doomed Tony Blair’s ID card scheme two decades ago. Short-termism should never drive policy, especially one with the potential to transform the relationship between citizen and state.

Yet I would mourn the death of this policy. Properly designed, digital ID is a non-invasive, voluntary technology that streamlines public services and strengthens privacy. Many countries like Estonia and Australia already run such systems successfully – but the model that Britain should seek to emulate is not those state-run frameworks, but Sweden’s privatised BankID.

✍️Viggo Terling

We should embrace digital ID, but it must be run by private enterprise

29/10/2025

David Lammy didn’t cover himself in glory this week in Parliament. Our Lord Chancellor chortled and guffawed while his shadow Robert Jenrick tried to hold him to account for the release in error of Hadush Kebatu, an illegal migrant and child s*x offender who was due for deportation. The shelf life of ‘but the Tories’ as a reflexive response to every ill is running out. It has kept Labour MPs well fed and with some justification, but voters are less easy to satisfy.

The news cycle fell voraciously upon this ludicrous and embarrassing blunder, and we now have the cooling carcass of yet another story almost designed to collapse public confidence in our justice system. But another scandalous revelation has dropped almost unremarked, and it is one that should give the Justice Secretary even less cause for mirth: the wreckage of our probation system...

✍️Ian Acheson

Reoffending costs £20 billion a year – the human toll is incalculable

28/10/2025

Democrat Governors in California, Maryland, Virginia and the Republican Governor of Utah are wrestling with a key question: could a strong approach to the issues facing boys and men win back lost support?

In the United States, the Democrats’ journey into identitarianism led to half the population thinking their presidential candidate didn’t care about the male population in the same way that Donald Trump did. The now famous campaign slogan – ‘Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you’ – captured the festering resentment and grievance felt among many men from all backgrounds.

The question for us is whether men in the UK feel similarly disenfranchised.

Let’s look at a few UK statistics. Men die from su***de at three times the rate of women, and that rate is going up, with 14.4 men a day dying by their own hand in 2023. Reported loneliness among men has skyrocketed since 2008. Boys are behind girls at every stage of their education, so that by the time GCSE’s are taken, boys are a full six percentage points behind girls in achieving a Grade 4 – the new C grade. Fewer boys study A levels than girls and this year, 44,000 fewer teenage boys went to university than teenage girls. Among the under 25s, men make up nearly two thirds of the unemployed and those who are economically inactive. Finally we have enough men in prison to fill Wembley stadium. I could go on.

Moreover, this story of male distress is unevenly distributed: decades of relative neglect has meant those living across the North of England have su***de rates twice the rest of the country. Despair in these communities is a way of life for many men.

✍️Nick Isles

We need a bipartisan, non-ideological approach to improving men's wellbeing

27/10/2025

Politics is changing – because it must.

We are living through a turning point in British political history. The two main parties that have dominated the 20th century are now in a state of crisis so deep that there are good reasons to suspect that they might collapse into oblivion. They are seen to have ignored voters, ignored principles and been unwilling to take actions to once again ensure Britain can actually be run effectively by its leaders. But out of this failure, and this gap in leadership, new movements and platforms are emerging, and new crowds are entering politics that never would have considered doing so before.

Last Thursday, at the O2 Indigo Theatre, Looking for Growth (LFG), of which I am a co-founder, gathered a crowd of 1,300 people. It brought together speakers from across the political spectrum and from those outside of politics: Matt Clifford, Liv Boeree, Labour MPs Chris Curtis and Sarah Coombes, Conservative MP Katie Lam, Reform MP Danny Kruger, Marc Warner, Dominic Cummings and the TS Domestics (a group that has been cleaning their local area because their council has failed to do so). These speakers came together to make the case for one cause: growing the British economy with radical ideas that speak to changing the very roots of government.

But it is the crowd at LFG events that make me most optimistic about Britain.

✍️Lawrence Newport

We are living through a turning point in British political history

27/10/2025

A wealth tax is a hugely attractive concept for many, as it sounds simple and fair: the wealthy, of course, are those whom we ought to be taxing, since they have, as Labour politicians forever remind us, the ‘broadest shoulders’. It is certainly popular with the voters, and a YouGov poll last week found that 75% of those surveyed supported its introduction. By contrast, only 22% supported a higher rate of income tax or an increase in National Insurance Contributions, while 14% of people backed a rise in VAT.

The reason is obvious: we all pay VAT, and half of us pay income tax and National Insurance. But we instinctively assume that a wealth tax will fall on someone else, someone higher up the socio-economic scale. Oxfam sums up the mindset perfectly: ‘wealth taxes typically only affect people whose assets exceed the specified limit. This ensures it targets only the wealthiest members of society’.

A wealth tax is a bad idea. Assessing an individual’s overall wealth is extremely difficult, and the tax applies most obviously to those who are most mobile, potentially causing capital flight and discouraging investment and economic activity. Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg and Sweden all introduced wealth taxes in the 1990s and 2000s, and by 2007 all had repealed them. In Europe, only Spain, Switzerland and Norway retain them.

✍️Eliot Wilson

The Green Party's plans for Britain's economy will make us all poorer

24/10/2025

Effective trade policy is built on one thing above all: a sound grasp of competitive advantage in overseas markets. Understand this, and a country can feel its way towards export-driven prosperity. Ignore it, and trade policy is flying blind – and so is industrial policy.

The UK has been free to craft its own trade policy since we exited the Customs Union, and yet there’s no real evidence of self-awareness when it comes to national competitive advantage. This is baffling. It is also dangerous since in today’s highly interventionist world, we are likely to invest money and energy into the wrong industries.

Here’s a simple test: the next time an economist digresses on UK trade, ask them: ‘What UK goods or services have proved most successful in overseas markets over the past 15 or 20 years?‘ If that draws a blank, ask a more general follow up: ‘What are the UK’s top five goods exports?’

My new research at Civitas looks deep into the past 25 years of UK trade data to uncover national competitive advantage. And it makes a surprising discovery. Despite all the disruption of the Covid pandemic, Brexit and a stalling economy, three British industries have quietly triumphed: premium cars, civil aerospace and specialist machinery.

The combined threats of US tariffs, domestic taxes and cyber attacks may further disrupt these industries. But according to the trade data, these are the UK industries that have demonstrated competitive advantage in overseas markets, and they should be the focus of government policy.

✍️Phil Radford

We cannot neglect the industries that have demonstrated competitive advantage

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