What today's migration figures miss
The Home Secretary mustn't rest on her laurels
Hold on to your wallet. Would-be Labour leader Wes Streeting is calling for ‘a wealth tax that works’ – by vowing to equalise the rates of capital gains tax and income tax, which he claims will bring in £12 billion a year to spend on his favoured projects. But even the head of the IFS warned it would reduce investment and could actually shrink the tax take.
Meanwhile Rachel Reeves is tackling the cost of living by addressing the economy’s underlying problems bringing in tax gimmicks, including a VAT reduction on family outings for the summer. Still, there's a lesson there for the Chancellor – if a VAT cut is good enough for a family day out, what might a bolder approach to tax reduction do elsewhere?
Below you’ll find the latest pieces from CapX, plus what we’re reading from around the web.
Marc Sidwell
Editor, CapX
Today’s Takes
Fresh thinking from CapX
What today’s migration figures miss
Karl Williams
‘The so-called ‘Boriswave’ of post-2020 migration has some claim to be the most demographically significant event in modern British history.’
Shabana Mahmood will be pleased. New data shows that net migration fell to 171,000 in 2025, the lowest level (outside of Covid) in any calendar year since 2008. But we’re not out the woods yet. While the flow of migration might have slowed, the impact of recent demographic change remains there for voters to see. Read More
Nimbys are holding back British tech
James Price
‘Thames Water alone loses roughly 20 times more water to leaks each year than the entire British data centre sector consumes.’
A terrifying alliance of Nimbys, eco-zealots and Liberal Democrats has decided that we can’t have any more data centres, because they are draining our water supply. While data centres do indeed consume water, it's not as much as these activists think. Besides, if they’re really that concerned, why don’t they campaign to build more reservoirs rather than stifle our tech revolution? Read More
How Big Consulting captured the British state
Kate Carruthers
‘The Post Office Horizon scandal showed, in its most extreme form, what a loss of oversight can produce.’
As public services grow more complex and the pace of technological change accelerates, departments across Whitehall have turned to external contractors to fill the gap. What began as a pragmatic short-term fix has since become the established model. This has meant that civil servants are often handed a system, but rarely the know-how to run it, fix or improve it independently. Read More
The Capitalist
In this week’s special episode of CapX podcast, we share a speech by Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride on the economy, including:
Why Britain’s gilt yields are the highest in the G7
How the ‘Burnham premium’ could cost every working household £300
Labour’s plans to borrow a quarter of a trillion pounds more across a single Parliament
Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
The CapX Reading List
The best of the web today
What is stopping homes being built in London?
Michael Hill, The Spectator
‘Those in favour of ‘affordable homes’ often say that normal or ‘luxury flats’ do not meet local needs. But this misunderstands how markets work.’
The Aylesham Centre is a rundown half-empty shopping centre in the heart of Peckham, South London, built in the 1980s. It is hard to think of a better site for new homes in a city that needs them desperately. Predictably, a proposal for 870 new homes on the site has been rejected on the ground of insufficient ‘affordable’ housing. Yet local politicians sit and wonder why they’re facing a housing shortage. Read More
'Manchesterism' is a myth
Ayushma Maharjan, City AM
‘Britain should strip the Manchesterism myth away from Burnham and weigh him against his abandoned promises.’
Despite what Andy Burnham would have you believe, Manchester’s transformation did not begin under socialism. The city’s post-war municipal socialism achieved limited results. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the council moved away from full-fat socialist ideas such as full public ownership of the airport and resistance to private capital. Read More
The Chancellor's proposed price controls
Ryan Bourne, Substack
Stat of the Day
And if you want more...
– Labour’s misguided plans for British Steel (The Daily Telegraph 🔒)
– Why Wes Streeting’s wealth tax won’t work (CapX Archive)
– Are we in the ‘foothills of the singularity’? (Semafor)
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