The Telegraph has reported that the UK government is drawing up plans to encourage retailers to introduce price caps on basic food items, such as bread and milk, to help tackle soaring inflation. This is a recipe for trouble. At best, the scheme will prove to be a harmless gimmick. The proposed cap would be voluntary and the prices of many staples, including bread and milk, are now falling anyway. But the evidence base for state intervention on food prices is remarkably weak. There is a great deal of hype about ‘profiteering’ and specifically about ‘greedflation’. This term can cov ..read more

The National Conservatism conference took place earlier this month, and for a week or so dominated much of the political coverage. Its organisers can count it as a media triumph. In terms of setting out a coherent and politically winning agenda, it was less successful. However, it was intellectually alive and focused on the present in a way that the modern free-market, centre-right, liberal and/or conservative side of politics rarely feels. There were multiple interesting strands. What united them was a rejection of politics in recent years, and a feeling that the Conservative Party, which cla ..read more

Recent ONS figures show that in 2022, net migration into the UK exceeded 600,000 people, with more than 1m people newly arriving here. This, combine with reports that the figures might go even higher this year, has unsurprisingly caused outrage and concern among immigration sceptics, but the worries seem to go beyond the usual suspects. For example, Albie Amankona, a GB News host and commentator who usually defends high immigration, said of the reports: “Even this pushes my hardline economic liberalism to the limit”. I understand the intuitive response to landmark figures. But I also question ..read more

On 22 May, the IEA organsied a panel discussion with the title “The Road to Serfdom: Was Hayek Right?” The IEA’s Kristian Niemietz was one of the panellists. The article below is based on his opening remarks.   Friedrich August von Hayek was the indirect founding father of this institute. Not only was Anthony Fisher, the future founder of the IEA, deeply influenced by Hayek on an intellectual level. Hayek personally persuaded Fisher to dedicate himself to the battle of ideas, instead of entering politics. Hayek’s paper The Intellectuals and Socialism is the closest thing the IEA has t ..read more

Factories in developing countries are often framed as the ultimate capitalist evil. It’s not hard to see why. So-called sweatshops conjure a powerful image of the world’s poorest working long hours in gruelling conditions, just to provide textiles, toys and electronics for pampered Westerners. Nor is it surprising that appalling events such as the 2013 Rana Plaza factory disaster in Bangladesh provoked a profound sense of moral outrage. The collapse of a building housing five garment factories killed 1,135 people and injured another 2,500. The sheer scale of the tragedy led to both substantia ..read more

For a brief period in the mid-late 2010s, it looked like the Culture War might be an environment in which liberalism could thrive. Take the now-ridiculed ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, a group of thinkers from the progressive Left, conservative Right, and everything in between who united around shared liberal values like freedom of speech and racial colour-blindness in response to the growing authoritarianism and race-essentialism of the Left. The prospect of people like Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, and Bret Weinstein uniting to defeat the illiberal Left was enticing. Shapiro, a prominent American soci ..read more

For too long the UK’s approach to regulation has been warped by a strange kind of numbers game: how many laws can be removed? What percentage of EU laws on the UK rule book can be dispensed with? How many quangos can go on the bonfire? It’s the kind of misguided approach that has led to headline-grabbing projects like the revival of imperial measures – a purely symbolic gesture that did nothing to improve competition, liberalise the economy or raise people’s living standards. Rather than this rather performative approach, our new book Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy suggest ..read more

In his 2008 book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, the late Nigel Lawson presented a persuasive argument for why adaptation trumps mitigation when it comes to dealing with climate change. Adaptation, according to Lawson, is a more robust strategy, because it makes sense under a broad range of scenarios, whereas mitigation would only work under fairly specific conditions. Adaptation does not require us to do anything fundamentally new, or different. It just requires us to do more of some of the things we already do, and were already doing before climate change. Building ..read more

In recent weeks Bank of England officials have made comments which have garnered lots of attention. I want to focus on four comments because they show different aspects of the Bank of England’s views that economists usually debate without much public fanfare. But since they have gone public, it’s worth discussing them in this blog. Two of them are exhortations from Governor Bailey to workers not to demand too much in the way of pay rises and to business owners to show restraint in meeting pay demands to help keep price inflation low. Both are rather strange requests from the head of the Bank ..read more

Off the radar, because it was announced eighteen months ago, April saw a major change in taxation of travel by air. For some years now passengers catching a flight from nearly all UK airports have been paying a tax on departure as an adjustment to the price of their airline ticket – a tax referred to as an Air Passenger Duty (APD), and one that has a professed environmental objective. APD applies to domestic as well as overseas flights, but bears most heavily on the latter. True to form, bureaucrats this year introduced further complexity to the tax with more categorisation, whilst ignoring gl ..read more