CapX, London (2025)

16/05/2025

In 1988, Julie Hayward, a canteen cook at Cammell Laird shipyards, won a decade-long legal battle to be paid the same as the yard’s painters and joiners. This landmark case established a curious principle in British law: that jobs bearing no resemblance to one another could be deemed of ‘equal value’ by tribunals and courts. Few noticed at the time, but such rulings would plant a fiscal timebomb in Britain’s public finances and corporate balance sheets, one that now threatens to detonate with spectacular force.

Birmingham City Council’s effective bankruptcy last year, with £1.1 billion already paid in equal value settlements and hundreds of millions more pending, is merely the most visible sign of the damage. Glasgow Council has quietly disbursed over £700 million. Meanwhile, Asda faces a potential £1.2bn liability after a February ruling that found store staff deserved the same pay as warehouse workers. Across the nation, essential services are being cut, and prices are rising to cover these mounting costs.

The culprit? A legal principle that defies common sense. Dinner ladies must be paid the same as bin men, classroom assistants the same as groundskeepers, checkout operators the same as warehouse workers – regardless of their fundamentally different working conditions, skill requirements, and market demands.

The roots of this crisis lie in well-intentioned but flawed legislation. While the 1970 Equal Pay Act sensibly required equal pay for the same work, a 1983 amendment, driven by European directives, expanded this to include jobs of ‘equal value’ even when fundamentally different in nature. The 2010 Equality Act simply consolidated these provisions without addressing their fundamental flaws.

✍️Melisa Tourt

In 1988, Julie Hayward, a canteen cook at Cammell Laird shipyards, won a decade-long legal battle to be paid the same as the yard’s painters and joiners. This landmark case established a curious principle in British law: that jobs bearing no resemblance to one another could be deemed of ‘equal v...

16/05/2025

The newly redecorated Oval Office is a sight to behold. Donald Trump has encrusted all pieces of furniture with gold and covered every shelf and mantlepiece with trophies, cups and various other triumphant trinkets. Even the flags that now cover every curtain remind you of just how many different branches the US military has – and most importantly, who the Commander-in-Chief is.

Everything speaks of grandiosity and achievements. Yet something’s missing. He should put up a sign that reads ‘the buck stops here’.

Buck-passing is not just a Trumpian phenomenon, it is a feature of any advanced liberal democracy that has to contend with vast bureaucracies and competing social and economic interests. The worrying thing is that the rate at which politicians shirk responsibility has increased, and is quickly becoming the norm. Trump is simply the latest and most dazzling example.

In the US, Congress is morphing from the first branch of government into a rubber-stamping chamber. And often, not even that; executive orders in the current Trump administration already number 151, nearing the amount Biden signed in four years. This might look like decisive action, but many of these executive orders look to be plainly unconstitutional and, once they slowly make their way up to the Supreme Court, the time will be ripe to pass the blame onto the Justices of the court for striking them down.

But the original sin always rests with the legislatures. They have concluded that settling controversial policy issues in law is too hard and equally dangerous for their chances of re-election. Therefore, let the executive make law. Or, even better, let the courts decide. This is how we get both Roe v Wade and its recent reversal. And how we got the Chevron Deference and its overturning too.

If key political questions are not legislated on by elected representatives, everything turns into a legal question.

✍️Tommaso Rabitti

The newly redecorated Oval Office is a sight to behold. Donald Trump has encrusted all pieces of furniture with gold and covered every shelf and mantlepiece with trophies, cups and various other triumphant trinkets. Even the flags that now cover every curtain remind you of just how many different br...

16/05/2025

There has been an undeniable, perhaps still underappreciated, shift in British politics. In just a few years, we’ve gone from James Forsyth – the former Spectator journalist and key Sunak confidante in No.10 – declaring that immigration is no longer ‘a political problem’, to the Leader of the Opposition calling for mass deportations and Reform, the party leading the polls, promising to appoint a Minister for Deportations in the Home Office.

To top it all off, on May 12, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a White Paper on immigration that admits – finally – that the economic orthodoxy around immigration is flawed. Delivering what has been dubbed the ‘island of strangers’ speech, he conceded the so-called ‘open borders experiment’ had not delivered the promised economic boons on which it was sold. His speech, and the Government’s White Paper, also contains overtures to the real, felt impacts of immigration on British workers.

For all the rhetoric, the paper does not lay out any specific targets, either in terms of net migration numbers or visas, merely an indication of what is considered acceptable. Continually, the period 2021-2024 is identified as an outlier of unacceptably high levels of immigration. All this means that the Government thinks the near one million net migration figure of 2023 ought to come down. Quite where to is never made explicit, the level of the 2010s – so between 200,000 and 300,000 per annum – seems to be the intended destination.

Many rightly welcome the Government’s intentions to alter our migration policies, as they have proven to have both a chaotic and sclerotic effect on our politics. But substantially, the proposals of this paper amount to tinkering with the current policies and system, and does nothing to address the foundational problem of our immigration policy: that we have no policy on integration, no functioning structural mechanisms to manage legal immigration, and practically no capacity to forcefully remove convicted foreign nationals on the scale that is necessary.

How surprising, then, to hear that Keir Starmer’s ‘islands of strangers’ speech was compared to the famous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech given by Enoch Powell. Apparently, any speech on immigration that uses a syntactic ‘x of y’ phrase is resurrecting Enoch Powell’s language.

✍️Jake Scott

There has been an undeniable, perhaps still underappreciated, shift in British politics. In just a few years, we’ve gone from James Forsyth – the former Spectator journalist and key Sunak confidante in No.10 – declaring that immigration is no longer ‘a political problem’, to the Leader of ...

14/05/2025

On May 13, in what was meant to be a curtain-raiser for World No To***co Day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) hosted a webinar entitled ‘Exposing Lies, Protecting Lives: Unmask the Appeal of To***co and Ni****ne Products’. What it actually unmasked was how committed the WHO remains to conflating science with ideology, and to undermining the critical tools that could finally make a No To***co Day possible.

The speakers, presented as so-called global health experts, delivered a strange mix of moral panic, half-truths and outright misinformation. The most glaring theme was a stubborn refusal to distinguish between combustible to***co – which kills 8 million people a year – and significantly safer alternatives like vapes, snus, ni****ne pouches and heated to***co, which actually save lives.

The most jaw-dropping moment came from WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who claimed in his introductory speech that reduced-risk products like vapes ’cause disease and death’. A statement not just misleading, but provably false. There is no evidence of a single death caused by regulated ni****ne va**ng products anywhere in the world. The same is true for ni****ne pouches, heated to***co and snus. It is unconscionable that an organisation tasked with global public health would peddle such misinformation while claiming to ‘protect lives’.

Yet, from the first speaker to the last, this kind of distortion was the norm. The phrase ‘can cause’ echoed throughout the webinar like a magic spell, implying risk without evidence, and conveniently sidestepping the reality that millions of smokers have switched away from deadly ci******es precisely because of these alternatives.

✍️Martin Cullip

On May 13, in what was meant to be a curtain-raiser for World No To***co Day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) hosted a webinar entitled ‘Exposing Lies, Protecting Lives: Unmask the Appeal of To***co and Ni****ne Products’. What it actually unmasked was how committed the WHO remains to confla...

14/05/2025

The Institute for Government was sceptical, to say the least, in its initial response to Pat McFadden’s bonfire of the quangos. As it stated, ‘the number of bodies is the wrong measure of success’, given that it is ‘an easy metric on which the media can focus’, but which can ‘create an illusion that major savings are being made when they aren’t’. The organisation added, ‘in previous purges, the government has not been good at eliminating functions’.

At least on that analysis, they’re bang on the money. There can be merit in merging bodies, even if it means no reduction in functions – at the very least, it can reduce some administrative costs, or streamline the relations between regulators and regulated. But more often than not it’s a PR exercise, rather than a big win for British taxpayers or British governance.

But if the IfG is doubting whether or not we desperately need a bonfire of the quangos, it is sorely mistaken. Two stories from this week clearly demonstrate this.

First is new research from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, which reveals the extent to which the quangocracy has spun out of control. While the number of arms-length bodies has fallen precipitously, from 561 in 2012-13 to 304 in 2022-23, spending and staffing numbers have shot up dramatically.

This is exactly the point the IfG made. What looked like a bonfire of the quangos was really a great welding. We ended up with bigger bodies with more staff and funding that further diminished ministerial power. Spending by quangos in 2012-13 was a still chunky £100 billion, yet within just five years this soared to £272 billion, ending up at £344 billion in the latest year, 2022-23. Staffing increased from 239,000 to 391,000.

What’s really revealing though is how much quangos are now spending as a percentage of total public sector spending. Essentially, how their proportional spend has changed, not just their nominal. In 2012-13, around the time the bonfire began, quangos made up 13.2% of public sector spending, or total managed expenditure. Or one in £6 spent, roughly. Even in the more intense period of the bonfire, when the flames were burning brightest, this jumped up as high as 31.9%, even as the number of bodies was slashed by over 260. This settled at 29.6% in 2022-23.

✍️Elliot Keck

The Institute for Government was sceptical, to say the least, in its initial response to Pat McFadden’s bonfire of the quangos. As it stated, ‘the number of bodies is the wrong measure of success’, given that it is ‘an easy metric on which the media can focus’, but which can ‘create an i...

14/05/2025

“Police and employers are cracking down on staff secretly working numerous full-time jobs after a rise in ‘polygamous working’”, reports The Times. This refers to the practice of someone working from home holding down more than one full-time job; apparently, there is a burgeoning network of online advice for people attempting this.

It is easy for right-wingers and free-marketeers to reflexively side with the employers here, and legally many of these ‘polygamous’ workers will be committing fraud if they have signed contracts on the basis that one or more of their jobs is their sole employment.

But setting aside for one moment the current state of the law, there is another perspective: that if a worker can work multiple jobs simultaneously to each of their employers’ satisfaction, then the combined income is the real market value of their labour – and our tendency to default to ‘full-time’ employment is a serious market failure.

It goes without saying that none of the following arguments apply to those who take on more work than they can do, and thus underperform in one or more of the roles they undertake. But in those circumstances, employers ought to be able to identify the problem – poor performance – easily enough, even without knowing about other employment.

Yet few of those cases written up by The Times really evidence this; in most examples, the worker in question is simply caught out, for example being overheard on a Zoom call. Nor would elaborate investigations by the National Fraud Initiative seem necessary to identify obvious underperformance, except perhaps to make it easier to fire someone.

✍️Henry Hill

“Police and employers are cracking down on staff secretly working numerous full-time jobs after a rise in ‘polygamous working’”, reports The Times. This refers to the practice of someone working from home holding down more than one full-time job; apparently, there is a burgeoning network of ...

12/05/2025

William Hague once described the Conservatives as an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide. In his memoirs, David Cameron went further, describing the party as being ‘interrupted by incredibly violent bouts’ of the killing of its crowned.

This is a key part of the Tories’ success over the years; the power of the party has always rested on its anti-sentimentality. Dispatching unpopular heads quickly, ruthlessly and without remorse prevents electoral liabilities from infecting the body with their sickness. In the Tory Party, loyalty has always played a poor second to viability.

But this aphorism, so well-beloved and well-used over the years, must now sadly be discarded. It is simply no longer true. The monarchy is certainly no longer absolute, and has not been for some time; over its last 14 years – which some feel may be its last 14 years – the party has been characterised more by factionalism than totalitarianism.

What could replace it? Perhaps a more accurate description is to call the Tory Party a self-annihilation machine, moderated by occasional bouts of extropy; an occasional pulse of adaption or energy – a Trussian experiment in growth, a brief crackdown on migration, the emergence of a genuinely right-wing figure – that may delay, but has yet to reverse, the irresistible death drive. But it never lasts. The party panics at its own vitality, as if startled by the prospect of change, and reverts.

Since the members have had a part in choosing the leader, they have consistently made poor choices. Some errors were forgivable: William Hague, an undeniably talented figure, assumed the mantle far too young, and during a period when the party was exhausted and directionless. Others, less so; Iain Duncan Smith – isolated, uncertain, and fatally lacking authority – oversaw a grey, faltering interlude that the party was quick to erase. In many, they were simply not involved; Theresa May was an establishment compromise who governed in fear of the factions around her.

But time and again, the party has chosen figures who either reflect its worst tendencies or refuse to confront them. Johnson was chosen not in spite of his recklessness but because of it; Liz Truss, in a moment of confused yearning for ideology, and an invocation of the iron spectre that haunts the Conservative Party. The self-annihilation machine does not change its design; it merely burns through components.

✍️Tom Jones

William Hague once described the Conservatives as an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide. In his memoirs, David Cameron went further, describing the party as being ‘interrupted by incredibly violent bouts’ of the killing of its crowned. This is a key part of the Tories’ success over the y...

09/05/2025

It has been an important week for the UK. It can now count a hat trick of firsts since leaving the EU in the ex*****on of its independent trade policy. First accession country to the CPTPP. First major country to have a trade deal with India (negotiated in three years), and now first country to have an Economic Prosperity Deal (EPD) with the Trump 47 administration.

It is important to look at what the UK and US have agreed and divide this into what has so far been agreed and what remains to be decided. The UK-US EPD is a framework agreement which includes some downpayments (things that are absolutely agreed and don’t depend on further discussions) and some things that are still being negotiated.

While the Digital Services Tax of the UK survives for now, there is an intriguing discussion of digital trade corridors between the UK and US to make customs processes smoother. Both the UK Cabinet Office and US Customs and Border Protection and the Commerce department have been separately discussing pilot programmes on digital trade and these could be brought together in the form of a digital trade corridor...

✍️Shanker Singham

The UK can now count a hat trick of trade-related firsts since leaving the EU

09/05/2025

In 2024, the then Conservative government agreed to a host of recommendations contained in the hard-hitting cross-party parliamentary report on birth trauma led by myself and Rosie Duffield MP. It was called: ‘Listen to Mums: ending the postcode lottery on perinatal care’.

Sadly, one year on from the publication we find this Labour government has failed to implement any of its recommendations and consequently, it is failing to improve the poor care new mums still face in what is fast becoming another component of a continuing national healthcare scandal around maternity services.

The inquiry report found poor maternity care was tolerated as normal and that care was often geographically inconsistent. Change was needed, and we felt the government and the opposition had listened. Before he became Health Secretary, Wes Streeting was briefed by myself on the report and he warmly welcomed it. The then Health Secretary Victoria Akins was able to go further and she agreed to support a new comprehensive national maternity strategy to improve care. The government also announced new standalone GP appointments at six to eight weeks for new mums to ask those crucial questions about whether she is okay, especially following birth trauma. NHS England was asked to co-produce a new decision-making tool for new mums to help guide through choices on how they give birth, what interventions could happen and what pain relief they should be offered. Improved perinatal pelvic and mental health services were also to be rolled out, including guidance to better support women who experience serious tears. Finally, the National Institute for Health and Care Research was commissioned to collate new research into the economic impact of birth trauma, including how this affects women returning to work.

In May 2024, we had huge progress. In May 2025, nothing – and, to make matters worse, we are moving backwards. The government recently announced the ringfenced national Service Development Funding for maternity services will drop from £95m in 2024-25 to just £2m in 2025-26. Ministers say Independent Care Boards will decide how to spend the money instead. Many campaigners are appalled and fear, like I do, the money will be sent to other services, leaving new mums even more unsafe.

✍️Theo Clarke

The Government is cutting ringfenced funding for maternity services by 97%

09/05/2025

Taxing imports is bad. Tariffs harm the populations that their advocates claim to be helping. This has been well known since at least the early 19th century. But imposing tariffs, especially in the shambolic way Trump did in early April, is even worse than the tariffs themselves.

To see why, imagine two American women, each considering starting a candle-making business. Molly’s idea is to make candles from cheap wax imported from a friend in Congo. Polly plans to make candles from more expensive American wax. Polly’s Great American Candle Company will succeed if cheap imported Congolese wax is taxed. Molly’s Light of Africa will succeed if it isn’t.

You might then think that America is sure to get one new candle company – Polly’s or Molly’s, depending on whether Trump imposes a tariff on Congolese wax. In fact, America may well get no new candle company.

Whatever policy Trump settles on in the coming months, Molly and Polly can’t be sure what he will do in the future, or what his successors will do. This uncertainty might deter both from starting their business, even though they have opposite interests regarding tariffs.

This is the problem of ‘regime uncertainty’. Returns on an investment depend, among other things, on the rules under which the business will operate. If those rules are liable to change in unpredictable ways that might harm the business, people become reluctant to make the investment.

Trump’s fickle tariffs policy has provided a vivid example. But all democratically elected politicians busy themselves with creating regime uncertainty. For example, our new Labour Government has increased employers’ National Insurance contribution from 13.8% to 15% of the employee’s income. Because this tax doesn’t increase workers’ productivity, it makes employing people less profitable. We can expect it to increase unemployment.

But this is merely the obvious problem with the policy. As with Trump’s tariffs, the intervention also causes regime uncertainty. A government that does this will surely make more changes to tax rates, or to the other legal conditions of employment, and these may also spell trouble for profits. The uncertainty deters investment.

✍️Jamie Whyte

Regime uncertainty deters investors whatever policies win out

09/05/2025

People say nothing works in Britain. That we cannot build anything any more. We hear about a decade of form filling before a spade is in the ground. Then, when we finally get going, only our grandchildren have a hope of seeing it actually built. But that’s not true everywhere.

On March 14, digging started on a busy Coventry street to build a tram line. An experimental project aiming to do everything differently: modular pre-made sections of tracks; fast-tracked planning; and – crucially – a construction process so gentle that it would not touch the jungle of cables and pipes snaking beneath our streets. This ‘keyhole surgery’ approach to building the tram meant regular traffic was still running along the remaining lanes on the street.

Four hours later, 30 centimetres of asphalt was removed ready for the track to be laid. Most tram projects would dig twice or three times as deep, knocking into every pipe, cable and sewer on the way, all of which would be dug and laid nearby. But when I visited recently, shallow concrete slabs with track in place had already been laid. Trams could have been running.

On May 19, just eight weeks after work began, trams will flow up and down the street alongside normal traffic. To put that into perspective: Edinburgh took six years and Manchester four years to build their systems. That is not even counting planning time.

The other benefit? It is cheap. The track is expected to cost around £15 million per kilometre, far less than the £100m-plus that many British projects are coming in at. So how have they achieved delivery at a fifth of the cost and on a timescale that would make Edinburgh’s engineers wince?

✍️David Milner

People say Britain can't build any more. But that's not true everywhere.

01/05/2025

The increasingly volatile voter is clear; something is rotten in the state of Britain. According to last year’s British Social Attitudes survey, only 40% of respondents believed the current system delivers effective government. A record 45% said they ‘almost never’ trust any party in power to prioritise the country’s needs over political self-interest, and 79% thought Britain’s system of governance could be improved ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’. Last week, the Director of More In Common reported that focus groups in Beverley, Hull, Scunthorpe and Peterborough were the most disillusioned he’d ever heard; ‘in every group it was anger; despondency or misery about the state of Britain that doesn’t feel sustainable’. One of the respondents – Gary, a sales manager – said he had given up on the system, and that he believed ‘the country almost needs a coup-d’etat’.

For Labour, it was simply that the Conservatives were running it – a theory that seems to have lost favour now that they are in government themselves. Starmer then suggested it might be the fact that ‘too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline’, hinting at a recognition that the machinery of government needed to be reformed. Meanwhile, in a recent documentary, Liz Truss agreed with him, putting the blame squarely at the foot of a tangle of bureaucrats that conspired to bring down her policy agenda. Sadly, we won’t be treated to a part two of ‘The Prime Minister vs the Blob’; once he found the Civil Service hostile to his suggestions, Starmer quickly, spinelessly and predictably slithered away from them.

Others turn their eyes elsewhere. The way parliament functions has been described as ‘elective dictatorship’, with too much power concentrated in the executive and too little serious scrutiny from MPs. This creates an institution that acts more like a content mill than a deliberative body, churning outrage and soundbites for a dead-eyed media loop. While power may be hyper-centralised, responsibility is nowhere; ministers reshuffle like Hinge dates, rewarded for loyalty over competence, so policy is made to survive headlines rather than time. Meanwhile, political talent has been inverted: the competent rarely run, leaving a shallow pool of MPs who climb by staffer networks and party loyalty. Politics has become a dull PR firm with an office-wide drinking problem.

✍️Tom Jones

The increasingly volatile voter is clear; something is rotten in the state of Britain. According to last year’s British Social Attitudes survey, only 40% of respondents believed the current system delivers effective government. A record 45% said they ‘almost never’ trust any party in power to ...

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