CapX

Andy Burnham told the Observer last week that the populist surge across the West is being driven by inequality. But if populism really were a revolt against inequality, Jean-Luc Mélenchon would be in the Élysée and Jeremy Corbyn would have led Labour to a thumping majority.

The parties actually growing prescribe something different. They speak to the cost of housing, energy and food. They speak to immigration they feel the political class chose to make irreversible without consulting anyone. And they speak to a felt sense among voters that their attachments to nation, family and place are treated by their rulers as either embarrassing or sinister.

✍️Roger Partridge

Burnham's prescription will make Britain sicker The Left has populism backwards

21 large charities get 99% of their money from taxpayers – the line between independent civic advocacy and state-sponsored lobbying is getting blurred

✍️Benjamin Elks

When does a charity become an arm of the state? 21 large charities get 99% of their money from taxpayers

If British conservatives are serious about reversing their nation’s steady drift towards state capitalism and something akin to the economic misery of the 1970s, industrial policy is precisely the wrong way to go. The only ‘national champion’ Britain’s centre-right should be promoting is the force that has consistently delivered sustained prosperity: the creative and disciplined power of free markets.

✍️Samuel Gregg

capx.co | 504: Gateway time-out

The North West is currently in the headlines, so let’s take what pretty well everyone would say was a hard case, my home city of Liverpool. By the early 1980s, the city was in a desperate state. The Mersey Docks & Harbour Board had gone bust; The British Leyland plant in Speke closed in the late 1970s. Unemployment was over 20%. The Toxteth riots took place in 1981.

Fast forward to 2008, and Grosvenor Investments opened the massive Liverpool One shopping centre, raising almost £1 billion for a 42 acre regeneration project involving 40 new shops. That year, Liverpool was feted as the European Capital of Culture, with tourists flocking to admire its heritage and spend money in its shops.

So how did we get from arson in the streets to the largest open air shopping centre in the UK, second only to Trafford Park in the North West ?

✍️John Alty

How the private sector saved Liverpool Liverpool went from riots and deprivation to investment and international recognition

Common sense is frequently represented as inherently flawed and charged with naïve acceptance of unexamined opinions. It is invariably dismissed as a medium for communicating prejudice. Those ‘accused’ of seeing the world through the prism of common sense are regarded as potential threats to expertise and science.

Anxiety about the influence exercised by common sense is motivated by the fear that populist common sense makes more sense to millions of people than the outlook promoted by the technocratic-managerial elites. That is why, as long as it can communicate this sentiment, populism is assured of a powerful role in public life.

✍️Frank Furedi

Why elites fear common sense Common sense speaks to people outside the technocratic-managerial class

Departments will always need specialist expertise, and there is nothing inherently wrong with buying it in. But there is a significant difference between bringing in expertise to solve a problem and structuring an entire delivery model around expertise that was never meant to stay. Right now, Whitehall largely does the latter – and every contract that fails to transfer knowledge leaves another department locked into consultancy dependency.

✍️Katie Carruthers says Whitehall won’t deliver growth until it breaks its consultancy addiction

READ MORE Whitehall won’t deliver growth until it breaks its consultancy addiction

Whether through pig ignorance or wilful blindness, politicians of all stripes have presided over the slow decay of Britain’s economy for at least the past two decades.

Under the Conservatives, taxation and public spending increased while growth and productivity slumped. It was largely this legacy that saw them ejected from office in 2024 when, after 14 years, many Britons felt less well off than they did in 2010. And with good reason: the bottom 20% of households have seen practically no growth in real disposable income since 2008.

On the eve of the election, just after he lost his seat, former Tory minister Steve Baker appeared on Good Morning Britain and delivered a legendary takedown of both Ed Balls and George Osborne for their roles in creating this economic settlement. During the tirade, he predicted that Labour’s attempt at fixing our limping economy would be ‘an absolute circus’. Prophetic.

Rather than deliver on their promise to make the tough decisions necessary to get Britain growing, Labour have done the opposite, retreating to their worst, most destructive instincts on tax and spend. Business, the powerhouse of economic growth, has been hamstrung by higher taxes and new regulation. The much-vaunted housebuilding revolution has been a total disappointment, with the Government set to fall 400,000 homes short of its national housebuilding target by the end of this parliament. Our welfare bill has continued to skyrocket as the Government has been bullied by its backbenchers into shelving much of its flagship Welfare Reform Bill.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) this week issued a stark warning to Britain’s policymakers. While the body upgraded its growth forecast for the UK – from 0.8% to 1% – it stressed that there is little room for broad cost-of-living support and that fiscal restraint is needed to keep us on a sound footing in the face of the war in the Middle East. If the Government ignores the IMF and refuses to rein in spending and borrowing, then a punitive market reaction will follow.

✍️Joseph Dinnage

READ MORE The IMF has issued a stark warning to Britain's policymakers

Labour claim to be the party of working people. The facts say otherwise

✍️Helen Whately

READ MORE Labour claim to be the party of working people. The facts say otherwise