Explore every episode of the podcast The Capitalist

Can Britain strike a deal with President Trump and avoid the looming tariff trap? Why are leaders in the UK and the US falling short of the so-called "Reagan test"? And, could the UK be on the cusp of creating its own billion-pound tech titan? Join Douglas Carswell from the Mississippi Centre for Public Policy and author of The Conservative Futurist, James Pethokoukis, as we delve into crucial questions and explore how free market principles can pave the way for future prosperity.

Follow Douglas and James on X, and make sure you're subscribed to CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster.

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As rents climb ever higher, you’d think the Government would aim to make renting easier. Yet the new Renters' Rights Bill threatens to do just the opposite. Instead of delivering on its promises, the legislation risks making the rental market less accessible and less equitable.

Despatch is a fresh addition to The Capitalist, delivering standout writing from the team behind CapX’s indispensable daily briefings. This article was written by Reem Ibrahim and read by Benjamin Wilson. For more sharp insights and thoughtful commentary, subscribe to CapX’s daily briefings. And don't miss the new episodes of The Capitalist every Tuesday.

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In this debut edition of The Capitalist: a bold new political movement takes aim at red tape to get Britain building, the Chancellor faces criticism over an economy teetering on the edge, and the Conservatives grapple with the path to reinvention. Insightful, sharp, and always forward-looking.

Find out more about Looking for Growth by visiting their website. And make sure you're subscribed to CapX's unmissable daily briefings from the heart of Westminster.

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Despatch is a fresh addition to The Capitalist, delivering standout writing from the team behind CapX’s indispensable daily briefings. In this debut edition, Emma Revell, External Affairs Director at the Centre for Policy Studies, explores why the case for conservatism must be reimagined and communicated in a language that resonates with modern audiences.  

And don’t miss the premiere of The Capitalist, our new weekly podcast, launching next week.

This article was written by Emma Revell and read by Benjamin Wilson. For more sharp insights and thoughtful commentary, subscribe to CapX’s daily briefings.

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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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Would we all be better off if only we had better politicians?

It's a comforting illusion, but really the problem isn't those who sweep in and out of power, but you and me, the public - that's the basic argument put forward by political scientist Ben Ansell in his new book Why Politics Fails. 

Drawing on examples from Ancient Greece to Brexit and Covid lockdowns, Ben argues compellingly that the problem with politics is that self interest and collective goals rub up against each other to create five inescapable 'traps'. The 'democracy trap' for instance, is that we want a say in how we're governed, but all have rather different ideas of what that entails – the idea of a 'will of the people' is the stuff of utopian fantasy, not political reality.

So how do we resolve those tensions and paradoxes while keeping in place the democratic processes we all take for granted? Our editor John Ashmore sat down with Ben to find out...

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How did an NHS clinic end up prescribing young people potential dangerous medical treatment with next to no data on the long-term effects? And why did that same clinic fail to respond to the concerns not just of outsiders, but its own staff?

These are just some of the many questions posed by BBC journalist Hannah Barnes in her new book 'Time To Think', which details the rise and fall of the Tavistock and Portman Trust's Gender Identity Development Service, commonly known as GIDS.

The clinic will shut its doors later this year after a series of damning reports and reviews, and an 'inadequate' rating from the Care Quality Commissions. The story of how what was once considered a ground-breaking medical service became mired in infamy is a fascinating tale of managerial failure, groupthink and a failure to observe basic clinical practice - a story Hannah sets out in painstaking and at times very moving detail in her book.

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It's that special time of year again when the Chancellor delivers a Budget, before commentators, policy wonks and political opponents rush to tear it apart in the ensuing days.

In that noblest of British traditions, we invited our editor-in-chief, Robert Colvile and the Centre for Policy Studies tax and policy guru, Tom Clougherty, for a special Budget edition podcast.

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How bad was the British Empire? That's the question Nigel Biggar, Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, has attempted to answer in his book Colonialism a Moral Reckoning. But in doing so, he has confronted those who don’t just want to tell a one-sided story of an imperial project motivated solely by racism and exploitation, but who want to silence alternative narratives – and who almost succeeded in preventing his book being published.

I was delighted to have the chance to talk to him, not just about his own personal battle with the culture warriors, but about the deeper philosophical issues at play. How do you make a moral assessment of a vast sweep of history, with multiple actors each with their own motivations – one which includes both enthusiastic participation in the slave trade and being instrumental in its abolition? And what happens if we allow shame about the past dictate how we do things today?

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The Government's Net Zero target is nothing if not ambitious - to decarbonise the British economy - energy, manufacturing, transport and agriculture included - all in the space of just a few decades.

But while there is a glut of potentially exciting new low-carbon technologies, and some encouraging signs that renewables are getting a lot cheaper, there's still a huge question mark over how feasible the 2050 target is.

In his new book 'Not Zero', journalist Ross Clark suggests the Government has bitten off far more than it can chew, with a policy agenda that threatens to make Brits a lot worse off, with almost no benefit to the environment.

I sat down with Ross to talk about just what Net Zero entails, how far the Government is from its target and if we aren't going to make it to Net Zero, what we should do instead.

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This week we're talking about moola, lolly, dough or dosh - the thing that makes the world go round...Money. 

In his recent book Money in One Lesson the economic journalist Gavin Jackson tries to answer a seemingly basic but very tricky question: what is money and how does it work? It's a grand tour of the monetary world, from pigs in Papua New Guina to sea shells in West Africa, the foundation of the world's first central bank and the links between currency and nationhood – all of which gave us plenty to talk about on this week's episode.

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Nicola Sturgeon's resignation on Wednesday morning was a slightly puzzling political event – 'shocking', in the sense that it heralds the departure of a politician who has occupied the highest perch in Scottish politics for so long, but also not all that surprising, given both the First Minister's recent political travails and the fact she had started to openly discuss how long she'd be in the top job.

So what comes next? Who will succeed Sturgeon and how will her exit affect the cause of independence?

To run the rule over Sturgeon's record and the shape of the succession, we were delighted to welcome one of Scottish journalism's leading lights to this week's CapX Podcast.

Alex Massie is the Scotland Editor of The Spectator, a Times and Sunday Times columnist and, of course, has been a regular contributor to CapX down the years. He joined our editors John Ashmore and Alys Denby down the line from his home in Scotland to discuss the 'surface finery' of Sturgeon's politics, the SNP's dire domestic record and who the runners and riders are to success her as First Minister.

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Britain isn’t working well for many of us right now. The cost of energy, housing, and food are too high, while decent jobs with real prospects are hard to come by.

That is the clarion call of a new campaign group that aims to get Britain building again - Britain Remade starts from the conviction that Britain has been a great hub of industry and science in the past, and there's no reason we shouldn't be in the future, provided we have the right policies in place .

Their agenda is very much the same one that animates both CapX and our parent organisation the Centre for Policy Studies, so we were very happy to have one of Britain Remade's founders, Sam Richards, on the podcast this week. Sam is a former director of the Conservative Environment Network and before launching Britain Remade worked as a special advisor in 10 Downing St, focusing on energy and environment.

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Few political questions are as basic, or as pressing, as how a government raises the money it spends – and the last year in British politics has provided ample examples of the political pitfalls of tax reform.

In principle a good tax system should be a winning combination of fairness, efficiency, smooth revenue raising and growth-enhancing incentives. The UK does reasonably well on some of these fronts, but overall our system is a burdensome, convoluted mess that is ripe for reform.

So if Jeremy Hunt really wants us to have the 'most competitive tax system of any major country', what does he need to do? And what, in the short time between now and the next election, are the most politically feasible reforms he could come up with?

To run a critical eye over the iniquities of the British tax system, we called on the expertise of the Centre for Policy Studies' Head of Tax, Tom Clougherty.

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From sin taxes to plain packaging, smoking bans to warnings about the perils of office cake, the reach of Britain's nanny state has never felt more pervasive or pedantic.

Only this week the public health panjandrums came up with a new wheeze - proposing reducing the calorie content of certain naughty foods by 10% in a bid to shrink the nation's waistlines.

Few know the intricacies of the public health bureaucracy – and the redundancy of many of their arguments – like our guest this week, the scourge of the scolds, Christopher Snowdon.

As Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Chris is one of the most passionate and articulate defenders of individual liberty against misguided, over-zealous paternalism. He joined our editors John Ashmore and Alys Denby for a fun-filled chat about booze, fags and how to deal with the Covid 'Smileys'.

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Our guest this week. John Longworth, is a real titan of UK PLC. As a scientist, business, entrepreneur and advocate for the interests of British business, there aren't many who have John's breadth or depth of experience - something he's bringing to bear now as chairman of the Independent Business Network, which represents our often ignored small and family businesses. 

We sat down for a fascinating chat about how the Government can make a success of Brexit, the longstanding problems with the British economy and what British healthcare will look like in the decades to come.

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CapX regulars know all too well the parlous state of British housing. We don't build enough, what we do build is often shoddy and angrily opposed by local people, and both rents and mortgages are increasingly out of the reach of even those on middling income. There is no single silver bullet, no snapping of the fingers that will suddenly deliver a properly functioning, prosperity-enhancing British housing sector.

But that doesn't mean we can't do anything - far from it. To get into the weeds of just where we can improve housing policy, what can be done in the short and long term and, crucially, how to make beautiful design central to development, we were delighted to welcome to the CapX Podcast the Centre for Policy Studies' own Head of Housing, Samuel Hughes.

Samuel is one of the leading lights of British housing policy, who combines his work at the CPS with a role as a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Theology and Religion.

There's a great deal for experts and laymen, Nimbys and Yimbys alike to get stuck into here, and there's no doubt you'll come away from the conversation better informed about the state of one of the UK economy's most important sectors.

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Trying to boil down this eventful, hectic and often tragic year into a single podcast was always going to be a hell of a challenge - but here on the CapX Podcast we like to shoot for the moon and cram in as much content for our loyal listeners as possible.

To that end, our editors John and Alys brought together some of Westminster's sharpest commentators to run the rule over their heroes and villains of 2022. We also found room for separate Politician and Policy of the Year awards and, to lighten the mood of a gloomy 2022, a Reasons to be Cheerful heading into the New Year.

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Wherever you look workers are going on strike and our schools are no exception - even though Jeremy Hunt managed to find an extra few billion behind the Treasury couch for education at his recent Autumn Statement.

So what's going on here, why are union leaders still balloting, and what's the state of English schools after 12 years of Tory-led governments?

To get the lowdown on all things educational I caught up with my Centre for Policy Studies colleague Mark Lehain, our Head of Education.

Mark's no ordinary policy wonk. he's worked as a teacher, including as a headteacher and set up his own free school, as wel as working in the heart of government as a special adviser - what he doesn't know about English education over the last few years really isn't worth knowing.

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What kind of country is Britain today?

That might be a rather broad question, but thanks to the recently published census, we can have a stab at answering it – at least for England and Wales. For this week's topical podcast we kick off with deep dive into those findings, what they say about Britain's demography and, in particular, the rapidly declining status of Christianity.

And if it's British institutions you're worried about, you might be interested in hearing about this week's hoo-ha at the Wellcome Trust, where the museum's own board appear uncomfortable with the very concept of a museum.

We'll also trawl through the iniquities of the Online Safety Bill with our colleague Matthew Feeney, the Head of Tech and Innovation at the Centre for Policy Studies.

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Baroness Dambisa Moyo is a seriously impressive woman. She’s worked at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs analysing global economic trends, and sat on the boards of numerous FTSE100 companies including Barclays and Chevron. She’s also the author of five books including best-sellers Dead Aid – a critique of development policy in Africa – and How the West was Lost, about a series of mistakes and failures of postwar economic policy that have seen the balance of power tip towards China.

On top of all that she’s a sought-after speaker and writer, and advises the Government on racial and ethnic disparities.

I caught up with her backstage at the Centre for Policy Studies’ Margaret Thatcher Conference to discuss the macro-economic challenges facing the world, what Britain can do about them, and why international finance is no longer a man’s world.

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Our guest this week is one of a kind. A truly polymathic personality, there's not much Tyler Cowen doesn't have a well informed view on, from the merits of Bradford curry houses to the future of cryptocurrencies and the fate of Trussonomics.

That breadth of interest is evident from his prolific writing on his Marginal Revolution blog, in the pages of various newspapers and in the 20-odd books he's written in the last three decades or so. Tyler is also an avowed friend of the free market ,as Professor of Economics at George Mason University where he is chair and faculty director of the Mercatus Center.

His latest book, co-authored with Daniel Gross, is Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World.  As Tyler explains on the podcast, it's essentially a one-stop shop for companies and organisations looking to zero in on the best possible employees.

As you would imagine with Tyler, our discussion was as wide-ranging and entertaining as the man himself.

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We're turning our gaze Stateside this week where the mid-term elections promised a red wave and delivered ,well, something more like a ripple. A bad night for Donald Trump, a pretty good one for Joe Biden and a fascinating tee-up for the presidential race in a couple of years' time. 

To chew over the results we welcomed back to the podcast my predecessor as editor, Oliver Wiseman, who since leaving CapX has written for a number of outlets with breadth and eloquence about the US political scene. 

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Law and order has shot up the political agenda in the last year or so, with the chaos in the Channel, damning reports into the culture of the Met Police and chaos in the prison system. Just this week we've seen the firebombing of a migrant centre in Dover and uproar over the treatment of asylum seekers at an asylum centre in the Kent village of Manston.

Few commentators are better equipped to address this range of security issues than CapX regular Ian Acheson - a former prison governor, home office civil servant and community police officer, and now a senior adviser to the counter-extremism project. Ian brings a huge wealth of experience to bare in his regular pieces for CapX. In a media landscape where 'essential reading' has become a cliche, Ian's pieces genuinely fit the description – and his contribution to the CapX Podcast didn't disappoint either.

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Typical isn’t it – you wait ages for a new Prime Minister and then three come along in six months. Rishi Sunak has taken command of a party that’s been through a bruising ideological battle and taken a battering in the polls as a result.

He inherits an economy that’s in even worse shape than it was when Liz Truss took charge, which, to be clear, was already very bad.

So where does he go from here? Will we see a return to the economic orthodoxy Liz Truss was reacting against, or will the third PM this parliament find a third way to get us out of the crisis and on a path to growth.

To discuss this, the CapX Podcast is joined by two of our Centre for Policy Studies colleagues: our Research Director and Head of Tax, Tom Clougherty, and our Senior Researcher, Karl Williams.

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Volodymyr Zelensky became a a global icon almost overnight following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of this year. The force of his leadership and defiance in the face of overwhelming Russian force offered hope in his country's darkest hour.

For our guest this week, Zelensky's heroic defiance came as no great surprise. Iuliia Mendel worked as the president's press secretary from his election in 2019 until 2021, and her new book 'The Fight of Our Lives' is both a close personal account of working for Zelensky, and a moving tribute to a country whose very existence has been imperilled by the Putin regime.

Iuliia joined us down the line from Kyiv, a city still living under the daily threat of Russian bombardment.

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We aren't in the habit of quoting Lenin on CapX, but his observation that there are 'decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen' has felt pretty apposite recently.

So there's plenty to discuss in our latest topical podcast: from chaos in the gilt markets to the Government's growing list of u-turns. We also take on the broader question on the UK's miserable growth path and long-term demographic prospects – and whether it's the proper role of the state to try and get the birth rate up.

Joining our editors John and Alys on this week's episode is Gerard B Lyons, Business Researcher at our parent organisation, the Centre for Policy Studies.

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When we think of the fight for gender equality, more often than not it's framed in terms of the unequal, often violent, treatment suffered by women and girls.

In many, many places, that is very much still the case - but in the West the 'battle of the sexes' is not as clear cut as it once was. Though there are certainly a host of challenges facing women and girls, it's also the case that – in the US in particular – the social and economic life of men has been turned upside down. Men are losing ground in the labour market, falling behind in education and increasingly missing out on family life – for Black men in particular, these problems are even more acute.

In his new book Of Boys and Men, the writer and policy expert Richard Reeves takes on these issues head-on and suggests some perhaps surprising solutions.

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There's no doubt it's been tough week for proponents of so-called 'Trussonomics', with the Government's Growth Plan taking pelters from all sides and the Bank of England stepping in to calm down the gilt markets. But does that mean the game is up for supply-side reformers?

Our guest this week, Julian Jessop, has been in the vanguard of the pro-liberalisation reforms set out by Kwasi Kwarteng and, despite this week's ructions, remains confident that the supply-siders have the right recipe to put Britain back on the path to economic growth.

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From ancient Mesopatamia to the Monetary Policy Committee, the story of trade, commerce and capitalism is also the story of interest rates. 

Few people are as intimately acquainted with that topsy-turvy narrative as our guest this week, the financial journalist and historian Edward Chancellor.

In his recent book The Price of Time, Edward offers not only a sprawling, fascinating history of interest and credit, but a compelling argument about how years of long, low rates have led us to the verge of economic crisis. 

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In a world of relentless, high-velocity news, sometimes it pays to take a step back and look at the big picture.

Our guest this week, the US economist Brad DeLong, does that with some aplomb in his new book 'Slouching Towards Utopia', a sweeping survey of economic development from the late 19th century to the present day, and an attempt to work out how we've ended up in this period of roiling economic crises.

As well as making a big argument about the nature of economic life in the long 20th century that started in 1870, Brad's book is full of winning vignettes and works just as well as a piece of narrative history as an argument about economics.

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