Vance, in short, is rediscovering political gravity. And yet he remains the Right’s most viable and promising leader, and will likely retain that status regardless of what happens in November 2026 — or even 2028. Post-Trump, he is the only figure who can hold together a Republican Party that could otherwise easily splinter into four or five mutually suspicious factions. He has maintained bridges to each of these factions, and has learned to address himself acutely to the one anxiety all share, a fear that recently found a name — France.

France functions for America’s various conservative factions as a kind of crystal ball. In the looting, arson, and rioting that tore through major French cities over the past fortnight, America’s conservative groupings see their own future: that is, unless mass migration is halted and, at least to some extent, reversed. In France, they see the tipping point already past. So many culturally incompatible newcomers have piled on, in their telling, that society, properly speaking, is no more. What remains is an agglomeration of strangers, arrayed now in hostility, now in cold peace.

Several years’ worth of public and private conversations with Vance have convinced me that this is his central animating cause, the source of both his fears and his ambitions. The various factions on the Right, he feels, might have their disagreements — among themselves and with the Left — over issues ranging from tech policy to social welfare to war and peace. But all those other discussions must take second place to the complex of issues around immigration, assimilation, demography, and social cohesion.

For Vance, those other disagreements determine the shape of the polity — whereas the migration issue determines whether Americans have a polity at all. As he has repeatedly told me, it’s impossible to build up social solidarity “if society is always in flux”.

Turmoil in France has served as a foil for American statesmen going back to the two nations’ launch as twin revolutionary republics founded on Enlightenment ideals. Among the founding generation, Thomas Jefferson went furthest in championing the French revolutionary cause. As he saw it, the Jacobins had unleashed in the Old World the same spirit that had inspired American colonists: the spirit of a freedom that could no longer accept the yoke of kings and priests.

Yes, Jefferson wrote in a 1793 letter, the French Revolution had had its excesses: most notably, the killing of “guilty persons” without trial (how had they been judged guilty without trial? Jefferson didn’t say). But these excesses were par for the course in a “struggle which was necessary”. So necessary, in fact, that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated”, with only “an Adam and Eve left in every country”.

Others of Jefferson’s generation disagreed. Alexander Hamilton, speaking for the conservative Federalists, followed news of the Reign of Terror with great distress. Directly contradicting Jefferson, he argued in 1793 that the difference between the American and French revolutions is “no less great than that between liberty and licentiousness” — between orderly self-government and mob rule.

The French Revolution’s assault on religion didn’t seem to bother Jefferson one bit. But to early American conservatives, it was not only blasphemous, but self-defeating. While far from orthodox in their personal religious belief and practice, the more conservative-leaning Founding Fathers saw virtue as a necessary precondition of self-government, and they held up religion, in turn, as an indispensable support to virtue.

Thus, John Adams observed of revolutionary France: “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.” On National Fast Day on 9 May 1798, instituted by President Adams amid deteriorating relations with the French republic, the head of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, took to the pulpit to warn that “to destroy us, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath” — as they already had in Paris.

As has often been the case since, America’s geopolitical interests dissolved these ideological boundaries. When it became undeniable that the French Revolution had empowered a new emperor with an appetite for world domination, Jefferson shrank from his earlier Francophilia. In 1802, and now President, he described Napoleonic France as “our natural and habitual enemy”. France’s encroachments on New Orleans, and along the Mississippi on what was then the western frontier, should prompt the Americans to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation”.

More from this author

How America became the Middle East

By Sohrab Ahmari

Through the 19th century, France’s image in America more or less solidified into what it is today: as a place that riots a lot, and whose politics seesaw between the extremes of revolt and reaction. There was an undeniable element of hypocrisy in this reception. Americans had their own volatile divisions, which escalated into civil war in the middle of the century, claiming some 600,000 lives. Class struggle in Gilded Age America and in the early 20th century didn’t look so different from the Paris Commune.

Then again, which quarrelsome couple doesn’t feel better about itself while listening to the family shouting match in the apartment next door? American conservatives have long framed their society’s internal contradictions and domestic rancor as foreign. An entire genre of US conservative thought is devoted to uncovering the European — specifically German and French — roots of progressivism, to the neglect of its origins in Anglo-American liberalism.

Which brings us to today’s French anxieties on the American Right: to US fears of immigrant “no-go zones” and seething multitudes apt to riot when their “paper” country — France — defeats their real homes — Algeria, Morocco — in a football match. Fear of ill-assimilated banlieues encircling major cities like Paris and Marseilles. Fear of Islamo-gauchisme, with the white Leftists mouthing the lofty slogans and the Arab or African toughs doing the nihilistic looting, all while making it clear that their political attachment to France is all but nonexistent.

It’s easy to caricature these fears as overblown, ignorant — or, at any rate, irrelevant. American immigration and assimilation dynamics are different from those in France (and Western Europe more generally). Unlike with the French or the British, Americans haven’t struggled to define a place for the descendants of former colonial subjects — they haven’t had to deal with the transition from empire to nation-state. And it’s a cliché but nevertheless true that US culture is easier to assimilate into precisely because it’s relatively “thin”: the culture of a commercial empire with a voracious appetite for labor and dynamism.

All the same, it’s a mistake to dismiss wholesale the American Right’s current French anxieties. For starters, there is more than a kernel of truth to the American conservative diagnosis. There are sensitive areas in France where the police must tread carefully. There are mosques and imams whose preaching casts into severe doubt the very possibility of expecting political loyalty of certain communities. Take a walk through Parc Georges-Valbon and Saint-Denis into central Paris — I did so at Christmas last year — and you can’t help but feel that the rate of demographic churn is so high that, in certain areas, majority-minority distinctions completely break down, leaving only different minorities mustering different levels of street-level and institutional “strength”. France, such as it is, is something vestigial in these areas, marked only in streets named after long-forgotten saints, kings, novelists.

Riots aside, this generates what I’ve described in these pages as diversity stress: a kind of constant, low-grade anxiety associated with having to negotiate normative and linguistic differences, public-resource competition, and simple unfamiliarity. It challenges people’s expectation of order and familiarity, which is just as much a part of being human as is the taste for novelty.

While the nature and source of the migration differs between Europe and the United States, moreover, the underlying dynamic is the same: the mass movement of people from the Global South to the Global North that began in the postwar decades and was turbo-charged beginning in the mid-2010s (coinciding, for an obvious reason, with the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic)

Why so many in the past decade — more than a million to Europe under Angela Merkel’s Wir schaffen das regime, and some eight million in the Biden wave? Partly to shore up aging demographics and the pension systems that depend on fresh labor; partly because migration is another form of wage arbitrage for employers; and partly (above all, perhaps) because migrants can more easily reach the West, thanks to prosperity in the Global South that allows a growing subset of people to cross vast distances relatively cheaply and quickly.

The upshot of all this is that the migration anxieties that twice catapulted Trump to the White House will long outlast his messy reign. A majority of Americans might disapprove of his handling of immigration, recoiling from the performative cruelty of ICE. But those same majorities still tell pollsters that they prefer the same or lower levels of migration as today (when Trump has already sealed the southern border and drastically cut legal migration and naturalization).

The result is that immigration restrictionism will remain the American Right’s top concern for the foreseeable future. It is the one cause upon which an otherwise notoriously fractious movement can converge even after Trump leaves the historical stage. Today, the movement is divided between five main factions. We might call them the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists. All demand less migration, albeit for different reasons and in a different tone.

Start with the Restorationists, those who hope to restore the GOP’s old ideological fusion of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and moral traditionalism. Historically, this group was the most amenable to mass migration, not least because it’s what the pro-business donor class insisted upon. But things have changed. For one thing, this faction has been chastened by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, and its most classically liberal elements have more or less defected to the Democratic Party (where they will have to contend with an ascendant democratic socialism).

More important, supporters have come to view mass migration as one of the main drivers of anti-Israel sentiment — and they’re not entirely wrong. Politicians with names like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani are products of post-1965 immigration, when the United States threw open the gates to newcomers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The children and grandchildren of those migrants attended US universities where various grievance-studies courses were commonplace, where questioning American exceptionalism was de rigueur, and where campus activism meant backing Students for Justice in Palestine if you, as a member of, say, the Asian and Pacific Islander group, hoped to win support for your own pet causes. This is also why Vance, in a leaked address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, argued that anti-Israel sentiment could be mitigated by cutting migration. He was pushing on an open door: the remnants of the old-school GOP today are far less hospitable to migration than were their predecessors in the Reagan or Bush era.

Which brings us to the Tech Accelerationists — those who believe fervently that America’s salvation lies in staying ahead of China when it comes to artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies. This group, too, could historically be expected to support certain kinds of immigration to fill positions in research, data science, and the like with STEM workers from the developing world who’d work for much less than their American-born peers — and who didn’t dare demand higher wages or organize into unions, since their right to stay was often tied to a single employer.

But this, too, is changing. Like the Restorationists, the Accelerationists have been chastened by the populist tide. Insofar as they wish to remain part of the Right, they have to bargain and compromise with populism, just like every other faction. In December 2024, one of their chief spokesmen, Vivek Ramaswamy — a vocal champion of guest-worker programs — was attacked online after he blamed American cultural mediocrity for tech firms’ reliance on foreign labor (the subtext being that America still needs visa schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Asian, and specifically Indian, tech workers).

Then, too, the rise of AI and automation is rendering many lower-level tech jobs redundant, and an automated economy doesn’t need endless low-wage migrants. Here, too, Vance can bridge the gap between populists and Big Tech: as he told me in a 2024 interview for the New Statesman, immigration restrictionism is the “tech-forward” position, since the easy availability of cheap labor in certain sectors discourages firms from investing in efficiency boosting technologies.

More from this author

America's diversity stress

By Sohrab Ahmari

Of the Populists, not much need be said, since they are the most likely to oppose all immigration, legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled, for reasons that range from economic and cultural to nativism and outright racism. The Christian Nationalists form an adjacent and overlapping faction. They once served as the evangelical backbone of the old GOP but have now gone their own way, having concluded that the bargain with pro-business libertarians and foreign-policy hawks wasn’t worth the candle (the libertarians got their tax cuts, the hawks got their wars, but the Christians who marshaled the votes got… much less).

Largely because Protestantism is Christianity nationalized, this group has never been as comfortable with pro-migration moral universalism as Catholics. In places like Texas, this group’s economic anxieties about migration have blended with cultural concerns over the rapid build-out of mosques and Hindu temples associated with recent migrant flows. When Vance addresses the civilizational discomfiture brought on by mass migration in Europe, he hits this group’s sweet spot.

That leaves the Catholic solidarists (or the Common-Gooders, if you will). This group — in which, cards on the table, I count myself — isn’t exclusively made up of Roman Catholic intellectuals. But they tend to prevail and set the tone. Their objections to mass migration aren’t racial or identitarian — apart from anything else, Catholic doctrine bars that — but practical: mass migration undercuts the wages and bargaining power of American-born workers, squeezes welfare systems, and makes it harder to foster class-based solidarity. Union density in the United States is inversely proportional to migrant flows; for good reason, Whole Foods uses “heat maps” to track the risk of unionization at its stores, with those in diverse, high-migration areas seen as lowest risk, while those in relatively homogenous areas register as high-risk.

Here, again, Vance appears as a bridge figure. His Catholic conversion memoir, Communion, published this year, is in many ways a critique of the old religious Right that preached personal virtue and uplift while neglecting the material and political-economic foundations needed to shape virtuous souls. At one point in the book, he even favorably cites Herbert McCabe, an Irish Dominican friar who sympathetically engaged with Marxism and who once wrote, “The class struggle is not something we are in a position to refrain from. It is just there; we are either on one side or the other.”

Vance’s answer to those who criticize the second Trump administration for neglecting its pro-labor promise is, more or less: stop immigration first. That might be self-serving. But it isn’t illogical, for the same reason that most of the Right’s Solidarists emphasize restrictionism. At any rate, it’s what Vance believes the half of the country that elected him wants.

The danger in this tying of everything to immigration should be obvious. It can look like — and, perhaps for some, it is — an attempt to evade the domestic, homegrown sources of American malaise. But after decades in which discontent with high migration flows was pooh-poohed or written off as bigoted, there remains a lot of political space for addressing what nearly all of the Right’s factions view as a generational crisis. The negative example thrown up by France this month has been too urgent and searing to ignore.

It was hard to disagree. At 72, Clement Attlee had been Labour leader for 20 years, with 1955 his fifth general election. His own analysis of the defeat implicitly agreed with the Mirror. “The old folk did not let us down,” he reflected. The Conservatives had no time for such nostalgia. They were led by the dashing Sir Anthony Eden, who, at 57, was positively youthful compared to his exhausted socialist rival — even as the Tories swept to power on the enthusiasm of the young. And if that’s one hint at how much Britain has changed since 1955, there are many other examples too, from a fractured electoral map to the slow death of social engagement.

In 1955, Labour fought the battles of the past, clear enough in which voters the party managed to retain. While workers in the industrial heartlands, recalling the traumatic Twenties and the hungry Thirties, stayed loyal, most of the country had little wish to look back. The times were changing. Identity cards and rationing had been abolished, and the talk was of prosperity not austerity.

This, after all, was the year that the young designer Mary Quant opened her first boutique in Chelsea, before going on to revolutionize international fashion, and the year that rock ’n’ roll arrived in the shape of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”. While the politicians were out on the campaign trail, an actor named John Osborne was sat on Morecambe Pier, writing Look Back in Anger, the play that would introduce the public to a generation of Angry Young Men.

More from this author

What Callaghan can teach Labour

By Alwyn Turner

Most obviously, there was the imminent arrival of ITV to break the BBC’s monopoly on television. The legislation had been passed, and broadcasting was due to start later in 1955, with a promise to give viewers what they wanted, not just what was considered good for them. Attlee disapproved of the whole thing. “They will have to reduce their programs to the lowest common denominator so they become cheaper and more and more vulgar,” he said, and Labour went into the election committed to cancelling ITV if they won. But they didn’t, and the upstart service proved so wildly popular that the Tories boasted about it in the next election campaign. “BBC or ITV?” read a poster in 1959. “You’ve a choice — thanks to the Conservatives, because Conservatives believe in opportunity.”

Attlee finally stepped down after the 1955 defeat, replaced by 49-year-old Hugh Gaitskell, the youngest leader of a major party for 60 years and the first born in the 20th century. He struck a very different note. “We are glad to see people better-off,” he admitted, “and have no patience with those who are comfortably-off themselves yet seem to resent the prosperity of others.”

But as the party’s 60-seat majority in 1955 so vividly implies, the Conservatives had already made this generational break. The election came after the octogenarian Winston Churchill finally returned to the back benches, making way for his nephew-by-marriage Eden. An unmistakably modern man, the polyglot ex-Foreign Secretary was as elegant as a film star. He had recently been named “the best dressed politician in the world” by Tailor & Cutter, and was, said the Sunday Pictorial, “admired” by millions of women (“or is that too weak a word?”).

More important than Sir Anthony himself, though, was the party organization outside Parliament. For these were the days of mass parties, where one in nine people on the electoral register was a member of one of the two big parties. Membership figures are notoriously untrustworthy, but in the mid-Fifties Labour claimed a million members. Remarkably, the Conservatives could boast some three million, making the organization as much a social group as a political party. Members weren’t expected to debate policy, and unlike Labour the annual conference was not a place for activists to argue over the party’s program. Instead they put on dances and whist drives, garden parties and coffee mornings, part of the fabric of community life.

Within that, a key role was played by the Young Conservatives, numbering around half a million. There were weekend conferences, and meetings addressed by MPs, but mostly the local branches were again less interested in ideological pursuits than in staging barbecues and beauty pageants. In 1955, the reigning Miss Young Conservative in Leeds was 19-year-old Jacqueline Pishorn, judged at an annual ball attended by 500 people to have “the best dress sense and the greatest poise, charm and personality”. For those under 18, not yet old enough to join the YCs, there was another group, the Young Britons, and there were 8,000 of them. (Their slogan: “Learning to serve.”)

At the time, the apolitical nature of the YCs was the subject of gentle ridicule. Consider a 1961 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. Here, the sitcom’s eponymous star hoped to do “something for the benefit of the country as a whole” — and is torn between becoming a blood donor or joining the Young Conservatives. He decides on the former, because “I’m not looking for a wife and I can’t play table tennis”. (Also, he was 37 at the time, and the cut-off point was 30.) Despite the mockery, it was an appealing image, drawing in not just the established middle-class, but those with social aspirations. And beneath the fun, it did much to entrench the basic tenets of Toryism: nation, church, monarchy. Other parties looked on in envy; in 1955 even the Young Communist League admitted that they could learn from the “colorful and attractive methods of the Young Conservatives”.

Much of this was down to Lord Woolton, appointed Tory chairman in 1946 and tasked with rebuilding a demoralized party after Labour’s shock landslide the previous year. Uncle Fred, as he was known in YC circles, sought an infusion of new blood, recruiting particularly in universities, and designated 1955 as “youth year”, targeting the nine million voters under the age of 30. The campaign worked. The number of under 30s who voted Conservative reached a post-war peak, with first-time voters reported to be breaking three-to-two in favor of the Tories — a reversal of where young people had been a decade earlier.

More from this author

How Thatcher lost her culture war

By Alwyn Turner

All this, of course, has long since passed into history. At last year’s election, according to YouGov’s survey, only 8% of under-30s voted Tory, less than a fifth of those supporting Labour. The universities have been comprehensively lost, so that the Conservatives now do better among those with the lowest educational qualifications: securing the support of 31% of those with no more than GCSEs, but just 18% of university graduates. Party memberships have collapsed too. In the last Tory leadership election, when Kemi Badenoch defeated Robert Jenrick, 95,000 members cast a vote out of a total of 130,000.

The Labour Party has held up a little better. ​​When Keir Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, nearly half a million votes were cast, even as political activists still knock on doors. Yet taken together, 1955 looks like a lost world, especially now that vast hinterland of social interaction with everyday apolitical life has vanished. In retrospect, the turning-point was likely that controversial introduction of ITV, which turned television into the country’s dominant cultural pursuit, all while squeezing out other forms of recreation. Cinema admissions fell from 1,400 million a year in 1950 to 500 million by the end of the decade, and that was just with two channels.

Since then, the story has been of an increasingly atomized, homebound society. The desire for shared experience, for active engagement, remains — but has proved no match for the ever-growing power of technology. These cultural changes have inevitably influenced politics, with falling membership rolls reshaping the electoral map more broadly. Between them, Tories and Labour got 96% of the vote in 1955. Last year, they managed 57%. Turnout was also considerably higher back then: the government of Anthony Eden attracted the support of 38% of registered voters, as opposed to the 20% that voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour. As for the Tories in 2024, just one in seven of those who could have voted for them did so. It was only the old folk who didn’t let them down: a third of those in their 60s, and nearly half of over-70s, voted Conservative. Now that’s an old man’s party.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive — or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

More from this author

Why tradwives aren't trad enough

By Mary Harrington

Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far-Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

Suggested reading

The case for polyamory

By Olympia Campbell

What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life — in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter — only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years — to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”. With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

Suggested reading

My Greek town doesn't need more tradwives

By Stella Tsantekidou

It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

Suggested reading

On choking during sex

By Mary Gaitskill

When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

***

This article was first published on 6 May, 2024

Much of the force of the new “weird” insult is directed at Vance but threatens to become contagious. Contrary to popular belief, guilt-by-association is not really a thing: attributions of guilt only make sense in terms of what an individual does, not who he stands next to. In contrast, weirdness-by-association is absolutely real. As every child in the playground instinctively knows, making friends with the weirdo who has just arrived in class can make you vulnerable to unflattering reappraisal.

Not helped by his awkward attempts at a statesmanlike public persona, Vance has been caught out by old comments of his, such as riffing about “childless cat ladies” running the Democrats. What presumably came across to Fox News fans at the time as edgy pugilism now appears to the wider world as an unnecessarily mean and aggressive attempt to sow division. The incident encapsulates the general PR problem of the popular conservative echo chamber, which for years has gloried in transgressive puerility and irony-soaked radical-posturing as a counter to the po-faced pieties of the Left — but now looks psychopathic to those normies not in on the “joke”.

Indeed, a true irony of the current situation is that the coarsening of discourse allowed by Trump and the online Right is arguably what has allowed Walz and co. to lean so heavily into cheap insults and get away with it. Even so, the sight of leading progressives enthusiastically bandying around jibes like “weird” and “creepy” is still somewhat disorienting. The robust language has a transgressive ring of danger about it, compared with the past oversensitive decade strewn with dog whistles and fig leaves everywhere they looked.

In fact, it must be highly galling for those who have built careers policing language, condemning “othering”, and deconstructing the concept of normality in the name of progress, to see their party of choice revalidating mainstream instincts and the scapegoating of social outliers in such a big way. It’s also a blow to anyone with remaining fantasies of a new enlightened political discourse on the Left: “weird” is more an instinctive expression of distaste than a rational analysis, which is partly why it works so well. Judgements of what is weird and creepy come from the gut not the brains.

A lot of scrambling is now taking place in internet circles, trying to convince the general public that the Democrats are the real weirdos. The X account Libs of Tiktok, for instance, has pronounced of Walz’s time as Governor of Minnesota: “This is the guy who signed laws requiring tampons in boys bathrooms, allows kids to get their body parts chopped off, and wants p**n in schools.” Conservative activist Christopher Rufo elaborated further: “He’s hip to ‘Gender Queer’. He loves non-binary children. He knows that graphic depictions of vibrators, blowjobs, and strap-on dildos belong in every classroom.”

Suggested reading

Tommy Robinson is copying the progressive playbook

By Simon Cottee

These strategies might play well to the like-minded, but in terms of convincing neutral onlookers that Republicans are not weird — which surely should be the goal — they look monumentally self-defeating. Far too much backstory is required to explain the provenance of the supposed gotchas to the casual observer, and without it the accusations look paranoid and prurient, only proving the initial point.

And whatever the results of Walz’s liberalised policies in practice, nobody who wasn’t already viciously opposed to him could think it was a fair description of his mindset that he positively “wants” porn in schools, or intentionally aims to get pictures of vibrators “in every classroom”. Rather, insofar as the man thinks about sexually explicit books in school libraries at all, he presumably frames them as equipping young minds with tools to reduce shame and help them deal with a complicated modern world. It may be a lazy and wrongheaded take, but it scarcely makes him a modern day Marquis de Sade.

This overreach on the part of his critics smacks of desperation, and is part of what generates an impression of loss of perspective amongst those doing it. It’s a fair criticism of the Left that they often only see the world they would like, and do not notice the one we actually have. But equally, those conservatives caught up in exaggerated, febrile visions of a progressive-ruled world seem unable to notice salient aspects of reality too. Things may be bad in lots of ways but they are not as bad as some apparently would wish, for the purposes of self-vindication if nothing else.

And it is not just US Right-wing commentators who suffer from this affliction. Their British counterparts are also having a moment in response to the riots of the past days, with reactions that look increasingly bizarre to those who don’t already agree with them on the basics. Here too we find an online commentariat whose dystopian prognostications and telling ellipses seem to reveal more about their own psyches than about the riots. Given the originating subject matter, there are fewer hints of suppressed sexual excitement in this case — but then again, arousal comes in many forms.

For instance, one day after rioters tried to burn down a hotel full of asylum seekers, leaving the shell covered in explicitly racist slogans, academic Matthew Goodwin published a blog implying that the Labour Party wanted you “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears”, Orwell-style; yet he himself had no mention of this specific incident as he railed against comparatively more peaceful pro-Palestinian marches as evidence of supposedly two-tier policing. (In a previous blog, for what it’s worth, he conceded that “violence against police is never justified”.)

Bundling the Southport crime, committed by a British-born citizen for as yet unknown motives, together with past grooming gang scandals and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, he accused Labour of “doing all they can to distract us from asking for the real reasons why our children have been blown up at pop concerts, murdered at dance classes, and subjected to industrial-scale, anti-White rape across dozens of English towns” — though fastidiously avoided spelling out the “real reasons” himself. Meanwhile over on X, Laurence Fox has been continuing his public nervous breakdown by writing cringeworthy free verse about the “Sun god cult”, and Kellie Jay-Keen (aka Posie Parker) has implied that the British public has only two real choices — the National Front or the Paedophile Information Exchange. As Donald Trump said on a different occasion, they aren’t sending their best.

More from this author

Prepare for a Hot Keir Summer

By Kathleen Stock

Nonetheless, it remains reasonable for people on both Left and Right to complain about the way mass immigration is habitually managed in this country, and to insist that not all protestors are violent rioters. They are correct to point out that the Establishment too often designates such complaints as “far-Right”, and that some institutions, including judicial ones, are making what look like unacceptably unfair decisions based on ethnic factors.

Yet when even Tommy Robinson is attempting to distance himself from the excesses of “lads in balaclavas wearing black”, talking heads who continue to sentimentalise or excuse the worst culprits over the past few days most definitely have a PR problem. Attempting to cast opportunistic recreational violence by bored dickheads as some kind of noble quest on behalf of the working classes only seems plausible if you are already desperate for it to be true.

And here too, as in the case of US commentators, the fact that most people don’t keep up with the intricacies of online political wars, and don’t have time to read endless Substacks, means they have no real idea what or who you are railing against as you churn out your hot takes. You may imagine you are bravely fighting dragons in public to widespread applause, but all they can see is you wrestling with your own shadow — and you look really weird doing it.

A quicker way of saying all this is that keyboard warriors coyly hinting at ethnonationalist sympathies still look like unsavoury losers to most UK onlookers — and thank God for that. Perhaps the figures involved don’t care — after all, as one points out, they can make a lot of money out of it — but more mainstream politicians on the Right probably should. Whatever the motives, their associates are a reputational liability. The impression they leave for neutrals of embarrassing, unpleasant weirdness is likely to be contagious, unless distancing measures are swiftly brought in.

Scruton had the gnawing sense that the Conservative party had wasted its time out of power. “During 13 years of opposition the Tory Party had the opportunity to think,” Scruton wrote despairingly. “[But] the Party entered into coalition government with virtually no intellectual contribution of its own.” By resurrecting his club, he hoped to recapture some of its original energy and purpose and inject some intellectual vigour into Cameron’s Tories. “He did not succeed,” his friend Paul Goodman, then editor of Conservative Home, noted dryly.

Perhaps this is the fate of all restorationists, romantically driven to recreate long-lost worlds which cannot be brought back from the dead. Either way, I could not help thinking of Scruton after speaking to some of the new Labour MPs, ministers and aides enjoying their first taste of power in 14 years, bouncing from summit to summit, press conference to press conference, excited by it all but not yet quite sure what they are hoping to achieve or how.

In one sense, this is only natural. We are not even two weeks into what might yet be a decade of Starmerite rule. Nevertheless, I have already been struck by the strange sense of disorder lurking just under the surface of this government — the sense that the struggle to settle the hierarchy in the court of King Starmer is still playing out. This confusion about who really holds the authority in No 10 is fuelling a strange unease among Labour aides, even a paranoia about their own prospects. And so soon.

Suggested reading

Roger Scruton still gives me strength

By Maurice Glasman

One charitable explanation is that it is little more than the inevitable result of the sudden transfer of power. Unlike many other countries, there is no formal transition here: it takes place in an ill-defined and ad-hoc fashion and a period of mild upheaval is the inevitable result.

Remember that barely two months ago, almost everyone in British politics — including the Labour Party and the civil service — expected the general election to take place in November. Instead, it is July and Labour is in power and being asked to negotiate communiques at Nato summits it never expected to attend and to host European Political Community summits at Blenheim Palace it played no role in preparing. For all the sugary homilies to the beauty of the British political system compared with the chaotic scenes in the United States or France, there is also a case for saying this is not a very sensible way to run a modern bureaucratic state.

Another explanation, however, is that the uncertainty within No. 10 and the Government overall is the result of an ongoing power struggle taking place between Sue Gray and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s two most important aides. This was certainly the analysis of at least two senior figures I spoke to. They maintain McSweeney has Starmer’s ear, reporting directly to the Prime Minister as his chief political strategist, responsible for setting the direction of the Government. In his team are some of the most important figures in the new Downing Street: Paul Ovenden, Vidhya Alekson, Henna Shah, Claire Stewart. Those who know McSweeney well say since the election he has remained purposefully in the shadows, less visible than Sue Gray, but that he has emerged with his influence enhanced.

Everyone, it seems, is figuring out what to do. This is the transition period. In the Treasury, Rachel Reeves is working out how to break the bad news that taxes will have to rise, while in the Justice Department, Shabana Mahmood is locked away trying to work out what on earth to do about the prison fiasco she has inherited. In defence, John Healey has commissioned former Nato general secretary, George Robertson, and ex-Trump administration official, Fiona Hill, to come up with the framework for the government’s security policy, while the new Foreign Secretary David Lammy has begun working out how to change the “vibes” in British foreign policy before moving onto any substantive changes.

All of this might be sensible, but it is striking how little actual policy has been pre-prepared in opposition, other than Reeves’ changes to the planning laws and Ed Miliband’s tweaks to make it easier to erect onshore wind turbines and build solar farms. These might be important reforms, but they are not defining policies — and certainly not on the scale of Bank of England independence announced shortly after Labour’s election victory in 1997. Nor do they tell a wider story about the ideals of this Government.

On the question of Europe, for example, despite some more excitable headlines, the ambition is limited — at least in the short term. There are clear red lines: no rejoining the EU, no single market, no customs union, no freedom of movement and no unpicking the Windsor Agreement managing the Irish Sea border with Northern Ireland. As long as these boundaries remain in place, there is not a huge amount that can be done to radically reshape Britain’s relationship with the EU.

The ambition, in effect, is to create a new post-Brexit relationship. Beyond that a lot still remains up in the air. Should the new defence review prioritise Britain’s relationship with the EU over a global role? There is a push among some of the Cameron-era diplomats for this, but it quickly runs up against substantive new developments which have happened since 2016: AUKUS, say, or the growing security partnership with Japan. There is little in the biographies of George Robertson and Fiona Hill to suggest they would recommend anything which jeopardised these developments or the ties with the United States. And there is little in it for the French in opening up the EU’s procurement rules to British defence firms.

More important, though, there is no obvious overarching narrative tying these various challenges together in one clear story about the mission of this government. The closest Keir Starmer has come to telling this story was at the Labour party conference last year when he reached into the Labour party’s past. “If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm; that in 1964 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology; in 1945 to build a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice,” he declared: “Then in 2024 it will have to be all three.” This was a neat summation of the challenge, but did not dwell on the moral of the story he was trying to tell: why Britain needed rebuilding and upon which principles it should be rebuilt? Was Britain too unequal to succeed before or just too poor? Was it too open to global markets or too closed; too short-termist in its outlook or too bloated and inefficient? Was the state broken, as Dominic Cummings and Tony Blair have argued in different ways, or simply underfunded? What was the fundamental cause of Britain’s problems and the moral failing at the root of this failure?

The Tories, in their last few months, attempted to narrow down the mission of government to a single word: “growth.” The problem for Labour is that “growth” alone is not a political mission and in one sense is actually profoundly anti-political, devoid of any moral content. For Margaret Thatcher, for example, growth would come once the moral defects of the state were cured. What was needed was strength and thrift: Methodism in practice. For Harold Wilson, growth would come once the amateur gentleman running things moved over for the clever men of tomorrow to take charge. What was needed was national planning: Socialism in practice.

When Scruton refounded the Conservative Philosophy Group he hoped to prompt a re-examination of “the core beliefs and assumptions of Tory politics”, so the party could take the lead on what he saw as the big issues of the day: “The environment, marriage and the family, the place of religion in the public square, press freedom, policing, the armed forces.” What are the core beliefs and assumptions for either party on such issues and into the next generation as we attempt to manage our demographic decline, build social cohesion, ensure safe tenure of housing and protect the beauty in our country while building the houses we need? What are the Labour or Tory positions on these questions — and based on which principles?

Suggested reading

Jeremy Corbyn's Labour would crush civil society

By Roger Scruton

Though Scruton was a conservative, his writings have useful lessons for both parties. In 2017 he wrote Where We Are, which he described as “a personal response to the ‘Brexit’ decision”. The book, Scruton argued, was neither an argument for nor against Brexit, but rather an attempt to understand how to “bring the ‘leavers’ and the ‘remainers’ together” in a new national endeavour. In many senses this task has fallen to the new Labour government: to Make Brexit Work.

One of the problems facing Remainers in the referendum, Scruton argued, was that too many “sounded like people who could settle anywhere and always be on top of things”. For those who did not feel like that, the question of who governed us and from where was more important. In Scruton’s view this was because there were simply more important things than economics or geopolitics, most notably people’s sense of identity: “Who are we, where are we, and what holds us together in a shared political order?”

Labour would only regain its status as a party of government, he thought, “if it recognises the residual patriotism of its traditional voters, and concedes that it is possible to be a working-class socialist, a believer in national sovereignty, and a normal decent human being, who is neither racist nor xenophobic when it comes to dealing with the wider world”. Morgan McSweeney might well have uttered this at any time since Starmer became Labour leader in 2020.

Growth, while helpful for ensuring national stability, was not the most important thing, said Scruton: “It depends far more upon this sense that we belong together.” Such an observation should not be controversial for the socialist who believes in solidarity and collective action. But his analysis also demands the intellectual curiosity of the Conservative. If the job of a national government is to conserve a sense of national unity, as Scruton wrote, then the free market is not enough.

Suggested reading

Trashy Tories should read Roger Scruton

By Giles Fraser

One way to understand the role of government in Scruton’s view, then, is to create a sense of “home” where people become at ease in the shared comforts and rules governing them. This, in a sense, was the Scrutonian answer to the question of “populism” which Labour MPs are already defining as the central mission of this government. “When human beings cease their wandering and mark out a place of their own, their first instinct is to furnish it with things which have no function — ornaments, pictures, knick-knacks,” he had written in England: An Elegy published in 2000. “This instinct for the purposeless has a purpose — namely to make these objects into an expression of ourselves and our common dwelling place, to endow them with the marks of order, legitimacy and peaceful possession.” If this were true of our personal lives, it was true of our national life too: he believed in the knick-knacks of the state; the black rod and the King’s speech; archaic parliamentary language and oddities of the House of Lords. For politics to tread more lightly on people’s lives, as Starmer has repeatedly declared as his aim, people need to feel at home — comfortable in the predictable order of the nation.

“When people feel at home, they allow themselves freedoms, hobbies and eccentricities,” Scurton wrote. “They become amateurs, experts and cranks. They collect stamps, butterflies or biscuit tins; they grow vegetables so large that nobody can eat them, and breed dogs so ugly that only Englishman could look them in what might charitably be called the face.” And they stop being so angry. In Scruton’s view, it was only when such contented order began to be lost, that people began to understand what it was that they were losing—the fate we are now living through in our age of disorder. “‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the gathering of the dusk,” Scruton liked to quote of Hegel.

The mission of Keir Starmer’s government, is to find a post-Brexit settlement in which the tensions which have roiled the country for so long finally settle into a more peaceful national contentment where populism and separatism are no longer so attractive to voters. To do so, Starmer does not need to make Britain great again, he needs to make it feel like home. Bring forth the doileys of State.

My book Hillbilly Elegy is really an exploration of the American Dream as it was experienced by me and my family and the broader community in which I lived.

It chronicled a real decline in the American Dream, not because people weren’t consuming as much as they have in the past – if you look at the trend lines, we’re certainly able to buy more stuff today than we ever have been able to. It’s a story about family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline, decline of the manufacturing sector, and all these senses of dignity and purpose and meaning that comes along with it.

When I was growing up, what the American Dream meant to me was that I had a decent enough job to support my family, and I could be a good husband and a good father. That’s what I most wanted out of my life. It wasn’t the American Dream of ‘the striver’. It wasn’t the American Dream, frankly, that I think animates much of Washington DC. I didn’t care if I went to Ivy League law school, I didn’t care if I got a best-selling book, I didn’t care if I had a lot of money. What I wanted was to be able to give my family and my children the things I hadn’t had as a kid.

That was the sense in which the American Dream mattered most to me. Now, that American Dream is undoubtedly in decline, what should a conservative politics do in response? I think a first and preliminary step is that we have to distinguish between conservative politics and libertarian politics.

Suggested reading

Why do we fetishise the poverty memoir?

By Douglas Murray

I don’t mean to criticise libertarianism. I first learned about conservatism as an idea from Friedrich Hayek – The Road to Serfdom is one of the best books that I’ve ever read about conservative thought. But I believe that conservatives have outsourced our economic and domestic policy thinking to libertarians, and because that’s such a loaded word, and because labels mean different things to different people, I want to define it as precisely as I can.

What I’m going after is this view that so long as public outcomes and social goods are produced by free individual choices, we shouldn’t be too concerned about what those goods ultimately produce. An example: in Silicon Valley, it is common for neuroscientists to make much more at technology companies like Apple or Facebook, where I think they quite literally are making money addicting our children to devices and applications that warp their brains, than folks who are neuroscientists trying to cure Alzheimer’s. I know a lot of Libertarians who will say ‘Well, that is the consequence of free choices. That is the consequence of people buying and selling labour on an open market, and so long as there isn’t any government coercion in that relationship, we shouldn’t be so concerned about it.’

What I’m arguing is that conservatives should be concerned about it. We should be concerned that our economy is geared more towards the development of applications than curing terrible diseases, and we should care about a whole host of public goods, in addition to that, and actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish some of those public goods.

Suggested reading

What has 'flyover country' got to complain about?

By Peter Franklin

I want to tell a story, one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve heard since my book came out. A woman I met in southeastern Ohio — which is really ground zero for the opioid problem and so many other social problems that all of us care about in this country — was telling me about a young patient she had who had become addicted to opioids. He was eight years old and he was already addicted to Percocets. The way that this kid became addicted to opioids is that he would do drug runs for his family. Because they didn’t have a lot of money, if he made a successful drug run, they would actually give him a Percocet as a reward. That was how this kid, at the tender age of eight, became addicted to opioids.

I think there’s a tendency in our politics on the right to look at this kid and say ‘You know, it’s a tragedy what’s happened to him, but it’s fundamentally a tragedy that political power can’t touch. Parents need to make better decisions. This child, God willing, needs to make better decision when he grows up.’

I think that ignores the way in which human beings actually live their lives – the cultural, economic, and environmental contexts in which this kid grows up. It ignores the fact that this kid lives in a community that has too few spare dollars to spend and too many spare opioids. That is a political problem. That is something that we decided to do using political power. We allowed commercial actors to sell these drugs in our communities. We allowed our regulatory state to approve these drugs and to do nothing when it was very clear that these substances were starting to affect our communities. That was a political choice and political power can actually fix it.

That kid lives in a community where even if he makes good choices later on in life, he lives in a place where there are virtually no good jobs for a kid of his educational status and his social class. If he wants to earn a decent wage, if he wants to work at a good job, those jobs in his community have largely gone overseas thanks to forces of globalisation that we unleashed because of political choices. We made the choice that we wanted that kid to be able to buy cheaper consumer goods at Walmart instead of having access to a good job. And maybe that was a defensible choice – I don’t think it was– but it was a choice and we have to stop pretending that it wasn’t.

Suggested reading

Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

I’ve been blown away by some of the research that I’ve seen in the past year about the way in which pornography warps young adults’ minds, and how they interact with their environment, and how they interact with their own sexuality. We know that young adults are marrying less — they’re having less children. They’re engaging in healthier and productive relationships less and less, and we know that at least one of the causes of this is that we have allowed — under the guise of libertarianism — pornography to seep even into our youngest minds through the channels of the Internet.

Again, we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than public goods like marriage and family and happiness. We can’t ignore the fact that we made that choice, and we shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.

And even if this kid marches through an opioid epidemic in an environment and a community where there are very few good jobs, and even if he finds himself in a healthy relationship and wants to do the thing that I most defined as core to my American Dream – start a family and have happy, healthy children – he will confront a society and a culture and a market economy that is more hostile to people having children than maybe at any period in American history.

There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the way that I measure a healthy society, or I think the most important way to measure healthy society, is whether a nation – whether the American nation – is having enough children to replace itself.

Do people look to the future and see a place that’s worth having children? Do they have good enough jobs so that they can make the necessary sacrifices so that one of the parents can be home with that kid most of the time? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a roof over their kid’s head, put food on the table and provide that child with a good education?

Suggested reading

What hope for America's Deplorables?

By Justin Webb

By every statistic that we have, what we see is that people are answering ‘No’ to all of those questions. For the first extended period in the history of the American nation, our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us. Now I know some libertarians will say “Well, that choice comes from free individuals. If people are choosing not to have children, if they’re choosing to spend their money on vacations or nicer cars or nicer apartments, then we should be okay with that.”

I think there is a good libertarian sympathetic response to that. We can point out, for example, that areas of the world and areas of the country with fewer children are less dynamic. We can point out that we have a social safety net that’s entirely built on the idea that you will have more workers and more people coming into the system than retire, and to do that, you need to have children being born. But I think to make this about economics is to concede too much of a premise that we don’t want to concede.

When I think about my own life, the thing that has made my life best is the fact that I am the father of a two year-old son. When I think about the demons of my own childhood, and a way that those demons have melted away in the love and laughter of my eldest son; when I see friends of mine who’ve grown up in tough circumstances and who’ve become fathers and have become more connected to their communities, to their families, to their faith, because of the role of their own children, I say we want babies not just because they’re economically useful. We want more babies because children are good.

Libertarians aren’t heartless, and I don’t mean to suggest that they are. I think they also recognise many of the same problems that we recognise. But they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don’t want to actually use it to solve or even to try to help address some of these problems.

Suggested reading

How greed corrupted the American dream

By Sarah Churchwell

If people are spending too much time addicted to devices that are designed to addict them, we can’t just blame consumer choice. We have to blame ourselves for not doing something to stop it. If people are killing themselves because they’re being bullied in online chatrooms, we can’t just say parents need to exercise more responsibility. You have to accept that parents live and swim in the same cultural pond as the rest of us.

It is one thing to be a good parent who monitors your kids screen time. It is another thing to tell a kid whose entire environment, whose school friends, whose school bullies, whose teachers, whose work friends all use these technologies and use them in a way that is increasingly causing social problems and say, “we can’t do anything about that other than let our parents be better about screen time.” We live in an environment and in a culture that is shaped by our laws and public policy, and we can’t hide from that fact anymore.

The question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish these things?

I serve my child, and it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters. I cannot defend commerce when it is used to addict his toddler brain to screens, and it will be used to addict his adolescent brain to pornography. I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poison to his neighbours without any consequence, because those people chose to take those drugs.

It is time, as Ronald Reagan once said, for choosing, and I choose my son. I choose the civic constitution necessary to support and sustain a good life for him, and I choose a healthy American nation so necessary to defend and support that civic constitution.

This is an edited version of a speech entitled ‘Beyond Libertarianism’, delivered by JD Vance at the National Conservatism: Founding Conference in Washington DC on 16 July

In fact, conservatism — not to be mistaken for its loud, overdressed cousin, the Conservative Party, which somehow lives on — will probably not even get a proper funeral. Its passing will not be marked by sonorous gloom and penitence, and stern dark poetry borne away on the wind at the muddy edge of a deep, sad grave. Nobody can stand that sort of thing now. It will get a cheerful informal send-off with jokes and applause. After all, it won’t be there to hate it. I shan’t be there either. There will be no call for me.

The past few weeks have totally liberated me from a last and lingering temporal duty. I thought I had it, but it turns out to have been illusory. I thought that there were still quite a few people who actually wanted and liked conservatism. But in fact, there are hardly any. The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.

But you probably know what I mean. And all my life these things have been slipping away from me. I am using them as metaphors for conservatism in politics, in education, literature and music as well. My problems arise from the fact that I missed the last train of the old life. But I saw it go. I arrived, out of breath, on the station platform just in time to see it depart.

I saw official London when it was still black and battered, a great imperial capital. I saw the Church of England when it still possessed majesty, dominion and power. I saw, on a sultry August day in 1960, the final astonishing relic of British global naval might, the Royal Navy’s last battleship, towed to the breakers, a modern version of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. The scene was made more melancholy when the colossal vessel, reluctant to die, grounded on the Portsmouth mud. A great lump rose to my throat, and I still feel a sense of deep half-understood loss when I recall it.

But the nation swiftly got over it, as it had got over the Suez failure in 1956 and our (still unrepaid) default on our First World War debt to the USA in 1934. I felt and heard and lived amid a completely different set of rules from the ones which now exist. British people of that time had been formed by a completely different set of morals, manners and standards. I remember how they spoke and carried themselves, how they expressed disapproval, how even in their hours of relaxation they filled each moment with purposeful activity.

And for many years I thought I might persuade others that it was a pity this rather admirable society had gone and that it might be worth rescuing, and even restoring. But life without these old restraints was much more fun, especially if you were reasonably well off, than it had been before. It would take many years before the social costs of our weakened morals would begin to show. It is fascinating that the Conservative Party never made any serious attempt to reverse or even moderate the social revolution of the Sixties. It turned out that easier divorce, feebler criminal justice, devalued examinations and the rest were actually quite popular.

The most successful song in the music charts in 1967, the supposed Summer of Love, was the appalling dirge “Please Release Me” by Engelbert Humperdinck. It kept the Beatles’ release of “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” (on the same disc) off the number one slot. It was inescapable. It was an anthem to divorce, which everyone knew was about to become vastly easier the following year. In a similar betrayal of the rules that had created it, the British middle class positively loved comprehensive schools, or thought they did, because they no longer had to worry about their children failing to win places at the much better grammar schools. Again, they found out later that many of the new schools were really not very good. A softer, more absent police force was also welcome in a world where illegal drugs were increasingly common in the schools and homes of the well-off. Easy abortion, likewise, was welcome if the alternative was a shotgun marriage. It was around this point that official Christianity, much like the Tory Party, began to make more and more compromises with the modern world — leaving first the Roman Catholic Church and then only its more determined core to defend principles which had been non-negotiable throughout Christian Britain 50 years before.

Until quite recently, this country boasted a kind of half-timbered theme-park nostalgia for some aspects of itself, but this was pretty shallow. Nobody really misses all those horse-brasses and toby jugs that used to clutter our pubs, and the hunting enthusiasts — when it came to it — could find little support when the Blairites spitefully banned their picturesque if bloody gallops across the countryside. Great aristocratic houses are all very well for a day out, and I still share Evelyn Waugh’s melancholy over their wanton destruction. But they are slipping out of the national consciousness, their original purpose a mystery, like most of our history.

Suggested reading

The gravediggers of British conservatism

By Aris Roussinos

It is almost funny that conservative media protests against the political correcting of the National Trust and the destruction of statues for dogmatic reasons. Alas, most people under 30 have no idea what the fuss is about, as nobody has told them any history. The parish churches of England are an unmatched storehouse of beauty and I fear for their future as their congregations wither. For what does any young person make of them? They are written in a language as unreadable as Assyrian, and the stories they tell are of long ages of which most of us know nothing and, I fear, care less. Thus, the English countryside is a beautiful effigy of its former self, preserved by the last generation which understood it, but not at all guaranteed to survive much longer.

The man who strove hardest to preserve conservatism was the late Sir Roger Scruton. His experience is instructive, especially the way the Conservative Party turned savagely on him when he was falsely accused of some Wrongthink or other by a Left-wing magazine. This was typical of that party, happy to wear Sir Roger in its lapel as a trophy, but terrified that he might actually do something dangerous.

Sir Roger’s life perhaps provides us with a clue as to what will happen in the end to conservatism. For his greatest achievement was to go to the aid of Czechoslovak dissenters under icy Communist rule in the Eighties. He and a band of equally brave men and women travelled dangerously to Prague and other Czechoslovak cities, smuggling unobtainable books, giving tutorials in philosophy, and otherwise aiding the survival of free thought in those sad regions.

Nobody knew then that this great castle of lies would fall so soon. Oddly when it did, conservatism did not really prosper much. One of the successes of Communism was (with few exceptions) its systematic blocking and poisoning of the wells of Christianity from which true conservatism springs. The peoples of the USSR and Eastern Europe did not want to be free in the old-fashioned English way espoused by Roger Scruton. They wanted to be free in an American Way. So, we had a double paradox. The collapse of the USSR freed the Western Left, which in Western Europe and North America could no longer be accused of sympathy with the enemy. But it did not liberate conservatism in the former Soviet Empire, a conservatism which now barely exists.

Suggested reading

The McSweeney Project

By Tom McTague

The nearest thing to it, and it is not very near, is the populist nationalism now so strong in Poland and Hungary. And perhaps it will not be long before these countries are sending us civilising missions of philosophers, and parcels of books, to see if they can revive or sustain the sinking fires of Christian conservatism in England. I doubt it. For we too, in the form of Noisy Nigel and his raucous followers, have decided to prefer the populist and nationalist path to the conservative one.

Why wouldn’t we? Surely the foundation of our world, in the unchosen but indispensable alliance of the free world with Stalin in 1941, was the end of all serious hope of conservatism or of any kind of true principle. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy is the only serious work to have dealt with this, and even Waugh recoiled from taking it to its conclusion.

Its first volume, Men at Arms, begins with Guy Crouchback, last of a long line of Roman Catholic squires, deserted by his flighty, pleasure-seeking wife, exiled in Italy, too old for normal military service — but greatly moved to righteousness by the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939. Here at last, he feels, is the modern world in arms. He can honourably take up his sword against it. There is a touching scene in the church of the Italian town where he has been living, where he visits the tomb of an English knight, killed in some forgotten act of chivalry while on his way to the crusades. He never imagines, during his training and early service, that by the end of the war he will be Stalin’s ally.

Towards the end of the trilogy, in Unconditional Surrender, a Jewish refugee — who Guy is unsuccessfully trying to protect — reproaches him with his early illusions. She says to him that there had been a general will to war in 1939, a sort of death wish.  “Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war,” she says.  Guy, by this time utterly without illusions, replies: “God forgive me. I was one of them.”

I have always thought that the book should have ended there. But it plods on into a sort of happy ending with English middle-class life seemingly restored. So it seemed to be. But there was, as we now see, no substance to it. There was no call for it.

Everything about these places lent itself to a faster pace of life. These were hothouse conditions for, among other things, treason, conspiracy, republican asabiyyah, artistic experiments, scientific experiments, murder, usurpation.

Yet to a certain kind of urbanist and architect in 2020s Britain, the salient feature of the cities of the Italian Renaissance is that they were walkable. Saying no to the tyranny of the vehicle, the citizens of these places opted instead for interwoven quilts of local and communal belonging. Milan under the iron rule of the insane torturer and patron of the arts Galaezzo Sforza was in fact a “15-minute city” of human-scaled vernacular buildings and pedestrianised Great British high streets. Shops, housing, employment, open spaces: all sat happily within walkable and cyclable distance.

But to the extent that these cities really were walkable, this was a product, not of choice, but of necessity. They were under constant siege and so had to be corseted by walls — living nose-to-nose was more a matter of civic defence than anything else. Not that they would even need to spread much further out: Florence in 1400, mistress of cities, was roughly the size of modern-day Weymouth.

And anyway, would a Renaissance prince really have turned their nose up at a car, if they had existed? Cesare Borgia would probably have allowed cars into buildings. And whatever the virtues of vibrant close-knit townscapes, most condottieri tried to escape them as soon as possible, raising a palace on Lake Como or a monolith fortress attached to the city walls.

That the city states of Italy might ever be identified with settled torpor is the result of a longstanding intellectual current in English life. This is young fogeyism — the conservatism of the literate middle classes which, for one reason or another, is estranged from those forces that made Britain a modern country: the Reformation, industrialisation, and parliamentary supremacy.

In many cases, this was more of a personal effect. Towards the end of the last century nothing was more common than a tweedy journalist who felt the dissolution of the monasteries like a wound, but baulked at, say, Norman Tebbit.

Suggested article

New Towns will never be classless utopias

By John Boughton

But this kind of showboating belied a number of sincere beliefs and assumptions that have since been incredibly influential. Chief among them is the idea that what traditional European society really meant was strong community bonds, particularly at a local and rural level. This means that anything that might disturb this idyll — like Bolshevism, fascism, urbanisation, Thatcherism, or the break with Rome — is simply part of a generalised “modernity” that can be dismissed in toto. For fogeys this is the omnicause that effaces all others. Confronted with a transcendent evil like this, many would retreat into the quietism of architecture and antiques.

Young fogeyism, this cast of mind, endures to this day. If anything, it has become more influential. For one, its modern adherents are all business. People like Auberon Waugh and Peregrine Worsthorne were sustained by journalism, but in the 2010s and 2020s tweed and flat caps are now more commonly found in think tanks, the Spad-ocracy, architectural practice, and strategic comms. Modern young fogeys are active and driven; unlike the earlier generation, who had no real use for books or ideas, except for those found in novels, today’s young fogeys have a worked-out theoretical justification for their beliefs — drawn from Roger Scruton, Edmund Burke, and the table talk of Charles III.

And here we find the same opposition to anything that might act as a solvent to Community. For the new young fogeys, this is the car. In the output of the think tank and urban design consultancy Create Streets, one of the main young fogey outfits, the car takes on an almost demonic aspect — shrieking down “dual carriageways” at breakneck speeds, leaving small children “sheltering timidly at home”. For the young fogeys of the 2020s, the car is nothing less than the Revolution on wheels: breaking up social bonds, reconfiguring the towns and cities in their image, destroying Britain’s stock of Georgian and Victorian buildings, and causing — that old chestnut — atomisation.

This is more than idle talk. Keir Starmer, like Michael Gove before him, has announced plans for the mass construction of Victorian mansion blocks and Georgian terraces as the solution to Britain’s housing shortage. And by a strange turn of the wheel, this new generation of fogeys has now been given something like a carte blanche over these plans: it is now the politicians that approach the fogeys, not the other way round. Labour Together and Onward, two think tanks of the main parties, both appeared at Create Streets’ “Restitched” urban design conference in March.

Suggested reading

The rise of California's vanlords

By Matt Feeney

This was no small feat, and these people should be congratulated on their achievement. Through a mix of royal patronage, dogged activism and a small group of devoted practices, the young fogey’s vision of urban life has emerged from the long years of obscurity and ridicule to win a final victory in the “style wars” of British architecture, which began with John Betjeman’s rescue of St Pancras station in 1967. Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian, and other vernacular styles now outpoll all others among the public.

To an extent, theirs was a victory by default. Other solutions to the problem of housing, like help-to-buy, or Gordon Brown’s eco-towns, had all run to nothing or made things worse; and proposed reforms to the planning permissions system collapsed at the Chesham and Amersham by-election of 2021. Young fogeyism in architecture was the only organised force left standing, and so now Britain’s new housing will be built on the pattern of Charles III’s Poundbury: as walkable garden suburbs of pedestrianised lanes, piazzas, trams, and gently dense traditional buildings.

The ambitions of groups like Create Streets are grand. They hope to recreate the beloved urban villages of London, only on a wider scale, and in so doing “restitch” a frayed social fabric. This is not to be discounted. These people have thought seriously and conscientiously about the problems at hand and have offered a number of valuable solutions.

But this project will, at the end of the day, be carried out according to the worst prejudices of the young fogeys: the awe for community in the abstract; the anti-modernism; the historical claptraps about traditional life. These will ensure that, in practice, little of Marylebone, Hampstead, or Dulwich will be recreated at all. They will, more than anything else, make these young fogeys the willing catspaws of some of the most retrograde forces in English society.

There are three reasons for this. The first: that the young fogeys often evince little sympathy for the people who will live in these new districts. They are, in the main, small traders, and professionals — often with families — who have been priced out of urban centres. For these people, the car is simply a fact of life. Small traders need to move goods and equipment, and white-collar workers have to commute to the centre of town. Things like commuter rail are often thin on the ground and unlikely to expand anytime soon, and, in any case, are of little use to an electrician who needs to transport their kit.

This is the material reality for millions of people, but all too often the young fogeys can only answer this with scorn. Cars are agents of vulgar modernity, you see: they require infrastructure that is manifestly not “human-scaled”, and the constant movement that they enable is an affront to ideas of local community and belonging. Other than this, these would-be planners can now simply fob people off with the climate (Did you know that “Conservation” is actually the most important type of “Conservatism”?).

All this has made young fogeys into some of the premier apologists — Create Streets is an honourable exception in this regard — for genuinely obnoxious measures like low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and Ulez, things which really do make life harder and more expensive for the middle and working classes. One such scheme piloted by Lambeth Council caused local bus journeys of less than three miles to take over two hours.

And so, under the fogeys’ direction, Britain’s new garden districts will likely use all kinds of baroque devices to inconvenience cars and those who drive them as much as possible. Sensing trouble, a recent report from Create Streets titled Move Free urged their more fire-eating colleagues in local government and urban design not to “wage a war against motorists”. It has even argued that “15-minute cities” need not necessarily mean restrictions on transport. But having conceded the principle that a person’s right to go where they please is less important than communal and climate solidarity, it’s difficult to see how these things could ever be separable in practice.

Suggested reading

The battle for Thamesmead

By John Boughton

What’s more, it’s nonsense to suppose that things like walking, cycling, and public transport are somehow more in communion with traditional patterns of life. For the original owners of the Georgian terraces that are now to be aped, the main way of getting around was the carriage or the horse: in other words, an individualist if not aristocratic form of transport in which free movement was taken for granted. Most townhouses from this era came equipped with an outside scraper to wipe off muddy riding boots. Which, then, is more in keeping with the society that produced these buildings in the first place: the car or the bollarded sham piazza?

Second is the determination to turn every urban environment into a sort of market square. One shibboleth of urban planning is that demand rises to meet supply, and so constructing new road capacity for cars is self-defeating. This is not an insight that is ever applied to pedestrians. By assigning large stretches of these new neighbourhoods exclusively to walkers, the young fogeys will simply encourage more foot congestion, which can be just as bad as traffic.

Walkability for its own sake is the fastest way to kill a real place and turn it into an extended playground for who knows what. By turning the surrounding area into a permanent mandatory funzone it has ruined the Southbank Centre, just as it will surely ruin Soho if the demands to de-car it are ever met. Pedestrianisation is well underway in the City of London, and if left unchecked it will transform what is a stately place of business into the same theme-park melange.

Again, this has nothing to do with old-school ways of living, and it will do nothing to recreate, say, the gentle society of garden squares in places like Marylebone and Chelsea. These societies, these places, all recognised the need for exclusive areas of quiet and seclusion from the wider world — in other words, the willingness to tell people to get lost. Too often, “human-scaled” development turns out simply to mean teeming humanity everywhere, at all hours, and from which there is no privacy: once again, young fogeyism as applied here succeeds only in recreating what could often be so dreadful about traditional societies.

Suggested reading

Welcome to Britain's prefab nightmare

By Wessie Du Toit

Third and last is the devotion to Community with a capital C. What this leaves out is what was perhaps the most important feature of traditional urban life: exclusivity and discrimination. Residents of 15th-century Florence or Edwardian London enjoyed a freedom of association and disassociation that would be unthinkable to us today. Community with your fellow creatures was almost entirely voluntary, and it was one of the main reasons why civilised living in these compact conditions was possible.

This is not what’s on offer here. Local community is not a good thing in and of itself, and it will do little to repair any social fabric in these new garden suburbs. In many cases it will do the opposite. These new developments will include requirements for affordable and council housing, the latter of which, we are reminded, does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. People will resist housebuilding if they come to see it as a proxy for immigration, and they will in fact resent being “restitched” to the things that they moved out to the burbs to disassociate from. In this context, gentle density and the emphasis on community spaces would sharpen these problems in a way that divided and car-centric Metroland would not.

Young fogeyism shows little appreciation for these questions, seeing in this blatant social engineering only the best philanthropic traditions of the Church of England. If a lack of community is bad, then artificial and forced community is worse. What really did it for the civilisation of the mansion blocks and the Georgian terraces was not cars, but the “New Jerusalem” — that everyone was to now live together in a shared community in which all distinctions were effaced.

In the face of these Ruritanias, who is truly advancing the cause of urban living in Britain today? That honour belongs to one group and one group only: the assorted part-time yoga instructors, small tradesmen, and consultant astrologists who combine to overthrow LTNs, or else burn, melt, and pull down Ulez cameras. These people’s cause is the cause of modernity: that Britain’s cities really should be integrated economic zones free of fines, customs barriers or restrictions on free travel. They, and the small traders and suburban transplants that they act for, will see in the proposals of the young fogeys only another attempt to constrain and reduce them.

Many will also notice a strange combination: traditional aesthetics, paired with all the stuff of Clarksonian nightmare. In people like Charles III, and indeed even in Keir Starmer, the two are already well combined. Future generations may wonder why we ever made the distinction.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive – or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

More from this author

Why tradwives aren't trad enough

By Mary Harrington

Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

Suggested reading

The case for polyamory

By Olympia Campbell

What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life – in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter – only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years – to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”.  With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

Suggested reading

My Greek town doesn't need more tradwives

By Stella Tsantekidou

It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

Suggested reading

On choking during sex

By Mary Gaitskill

When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

Yet Israel, too, has very little to show for its incursion, launched with sudden fury, but no discernible exit plan. As the IDF has withdrawn the vast majority of its troops, the Hamas leadership remains intact, the group can still fire rockets into Israel and is still killing Israeli soldiers on the ground. Netanyahu’s fragile Right-wing coalition — which survived months of mass protests even before Hamas’s brutal October rampage — is increasingly unpopular within Israel, with 71% of Israelis desiring him to step down.

Even as Netanyahu, against the Biden administration’s expressed will, pledges to launch an assault on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees have fled, his own defence minister openly contradicts him, asserting that no date for the operation has been set. When even the most committed American supporters of Israel, such as the New York Times’s Bret Stephens, and Thomas Friedman, feel compelled to state that “In a thousand years, Jews will remember Netanyahu’s name with scorn” for his “utterly insane strategy” which has “locked Israel into a politically unwinnable war”, it looks increasingly apparent that Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War will be remembered by history as a diplomatic and strategic error of historic proportions.

Yet there is very little reflection of these dynamics to be found in British conservative discourse which, for parochial culture-war reasons, committed itself to Israel’s ill-thought-out campaign early on and now finds itself held hostage by Netanyahu’s ineptitude. Like much of Britain’s talk-show populism, as a political strategy it is not a very popular one: even a plurality of Conservative voters now believes Britain should withhold arms sales to Israel, a debate roiling our moribund Conservative Party. While the optics of simultaneously dropping aid on Gaza and arming Israel indeed look absurd, in truth British arms sales represent only a miniscule fraction of Israel’s military capabilities, with the increasingly heated debate on both sides existing in a purely symbolic realm. Britain has no cause to enter this war, yet our political class seems determined nevertheless to reap all the domestic turmoil involvement would bring. Indeed, the full-throttle support for Israel’s war displayed by Suella Braverman or the Daily Mail columnist  Boris Johnson is worthy of analysis for its pure novelty. It signifies a partisan approach to the Middle East’s most intractable conflict that is a startling divergence from a century of British, and particularly Tory, policy.

Suggested reading

Is this the end of Israel?

By Howard Jacobson

For a party that has failed to escape Thatcher’s long shadow, afflicted in its dotage with a cargo-cult weakness for matronly blondes of dubious merit, perhaps what is most remarkable is how far the current Conservative Party’s aspiring populist wing diverges from Thatcher’s own approach to the conflict. Following its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a disaster that she correctly foresaw would birth new and harder threats to both the Western order and Israel’s own security, Thatcher placed an embargo on British weapons sales to Israel, a policy that was not lifted until 1994. Her rationale, as she told ITN, was that Israeli troops had “gone across the borders of Israel, a totally independent country, which is not a party to the hostility and there are very very great hostilities, bombing, terrible things happening there. Of course one has to condemn them. It is someone else’s country. You must condemn that. After all, that is why we have gone to the Falklands, to repossess our country which has been taken by someone else.”

A famously unsentimental woman, Thatcher framed the conflict in terms that seem strikingly empathetic to today’s eyes. In 1985, she visited an “utterly hopeless” Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, where, as she recounts in her 1993 memoirs, The Downing Street Years, “I talked to one old lady, half blind, lying in the shade of a tree outside her family’s hut. She was said to be about 100. But she had one thing above all on her mind, and spoke about it: the restoration of the Palestinians’ rights.” For Thatcher — perhaps counterintuitively, viewed through the prism of today’s Conservative party — the “plight of the landless Palestinians” was a major foreign-policy concern. Under her helm, the British government worked hard to bring about a peace deal, though her efforts were frustrated at every turn by both Israeli and American intransigence: as she “scrawled” on one cable from the British ambassador in Washington: “The US just does not realise the resentment she is causing in the Middle East.”

Striving to find a workable peace, Thatcher asserted the only possible solution to the conflict was an approach which balanced “the right of all the states in the region — including Israel — to existence and security, but also demanded justice for all peoples, which implied recognition of of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination”. Writing of her visit to Israel in 1986, the first by a British prime minister, Thatcher remarked that “The Israelis knew… that they were dealing with someone who harboured no lurking hostility towards them, who understood their anxieties, but who was not going to pursue an unqualified Zionist approach.” Instead, she “believed that the real challenge was to strengthen moderate Palestinians, probably in association with Jordan, who would eventually push aside the… extremists. But this would never happen if Israel did not encourage it; and the miserable conditions under which Arabs on the West Bank and in Gaza were having to live only made things worse.”

The British-Jewish historian Azriel Bermant’s excellent 2016 book, Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East, makes for enlightening and perhaps discomfiting reading in the light of the Gaza War. An idealistic supporter of both Anglo-Jewry and Israel, whose own daughter Carol volunteered on a kibbutz, Thatcher nevertheless approached the country with a critical detachment. With a keener eye to Israel’s internal dynamics than Braverman or Johnson, Thatcher viewed the Right-wing Likud leaders Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir with distaste, as former terrorists against the British state with whom she was forced to deal by circumstance. Her preference throughout was for the Labor leader Shimon Peres who she viewed as a moderate, committed to a lasting peace settlement. To Thatcher, peace would entail not an independent Palestinian state — she thought this unviable, and most probably undesirable — but the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza under the rule of Jordan’s Anglophile King Hussein.

Yet when Thatcher signed on to an European Community declaration of support for Palestinian statehood, just days after the PLO confirmed its commitment to the destruction of Israel, and was condemned for this by the Labour leader Jim Callaghan — British attitudes on the conflict were yet to assume their present form — Thatcher responded in robust terms. “The words in the communiqué I support entirely,” she told the House. “They concern the right of the Palestinian people to determine their own future. If one wishes to call that ‘self- determination’, I shall not quarrel with it. I am interested that the Right Hon. Gentleman appears to be attempting to deny that right. I do not understand how anyone can demand a right for people on one side of a boundary and deny it to people on the other side of that boundary. That seems to deny certain rights, or to allocate them with discrimination from one person to another.”

Strikingly, Thatcher condemned Israel for its annexation of the Golan Heights from Syria, for its attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear power plant, and for its seizure of Palestinian land for settlements, including the housing of Soviet Jewish refugees: as she told the House in 1990, “Soviet Jews who leave the Soviet Union – and we have urged for years that they should be allowed to leave – should not be settled in the Occupied Territories or in East Jerusalem. It undermines our position when those people are settled in land that really belongs to others.” Indeed, as she later remarked in her memoirs, “I only wished that Israeli emphasis on the human rights of the Russian refuseniks was matched by proper appreciation of the plight of landless and stateless Palestinians.” With such sentiments, it is doubtful that today’s self-proclaimed Thatcherites would find a prominent place for Thatcher herself in their nascent faction.

While Thatcher’s views on Israel were balanced by the need to placate opinion in her 20% Jewish seat — the stated “Finchley factor” frequently cropped up in moments of self-doubt — her moderate stance on the conflict was sustained by the diversity of opinion then held by British Jews on Israel’s conduct. As Bermant notes: “Within British Jewry, the consensus on Israel had been seriously eroded with the invasion of Lebanon and, particularly, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” with the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, releasing a statement condemning the massacre, while “an editorial in the Anglo-Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, called on Begin and Sharon to resign in the wake of the killings”. In some ways, it could be argued that British Jewish opinion on the Palestine question back then was more akin to the conflicted attitudes expressed by American Jews today, while Thatcher lamented the then hardline American support for Israel, which she felt distorted US policy in self-defeating ways.

Yet just as Labour’s about-turn on Israel followed the 1982 Lebanon invasion, American attitudes to the country are today undergoing a historic convulsion, with what are sure to be significant consequences to Israel’s future security. The Biden administration is under increasing domestic pressure for its support for Netanyahu’s campaign, with even organs of middlebrow liberal opinion like The Atlantic, CNN and the Daily Show turning against Israel’s war and America’s support for it. The increasingly radical American Right is also turning against Israel, expressing dissent in often markedly antisemitic ways. In this dramatically shifting political landscape, the discourse in Britain’s media sphere seems strangely parochial, partly a reflection of American conservative fashions a generation ago, and partly an expression of Britain’s own anxieties over mass immigration, projected, like Brexit, onto more comfortable rhetorical ground.

Cameron’s largely moderate stance on the conflict, supporting Israel’s right to strike Hamas after its October brutalities while emphasising Britain’s opposition to Israel’s immoderate violence against Palestinian (and now British) civilians, and its commitment to a future Palestinian state, is broadly the correct one, even if the Conservative party’s Overton Window has drifted closer to Likud in intervening years than Thatcher would have permitted. Thatcher herself, as Bermant notes, “underlined that Israel’s policies were having a problematic impact on the geopolitics of the region: it was very unhelpful that the United States was being perceived as ‘Israel’s lawyer’, while the Soviet Union was being seen ‘as the friend of the Arabs’” — a dynamic Putin is happily exploiting this today, while America’s stock dwindles in both the Red Sea and the court of world opinion. Instead, Bermant observes: “Thatcher argued for Britain and the EC to play a role as ‘a third party’ which was ‘not bound by US or Soviet policies.’” Though perhaps, as I argued at the beginning of the war, it would have been better for us to stay out of the matter entirely: better for Britain, better for the Palestinians, and ultimately better for Israel and its Western advocates.

Suggested reading

Israel is no longer Britain's war

By Aris Roussinos

When the war ends, when journalists are allowed into Gaza as the full civilian toll is unearthed and counted, the more outlandish expressions of solidarity with Netanyahu’s campaign made by Right-wing pundits will surely come to be seen as a needless, unforced error. As Bermant recently observed: “the Netanyahu government refuses to spell out its objectives for the end of the Gaza war and has allowed the most extreme elements in his government to exert influence over the management of the war… Israel’s prime minister has yet to come out against those in his government who have called for the displacement of Palestinians and the Jewish resettlement of Gaza.” The results have been, and will be, precisely what any detached observer or sufficiently critical friend would have expected.

Losing the American support on which its continued existence depends, with France now mooting sanctions against Israel, and a simultaneous genocide case working its way through the Hague, Netanyahu has dramatically worsened Israel’s strategic position. Within the context of this self-inflicted diplomatic injury, the focus on Right-wing discourse or campus radicals or pro-Palestine protests looks, at the most charitable interpretation, wrongheaded.

Perhaps the last word is best left to Thatcher herself. Summing up her years-long engagement with the region, she noted that “the United States, which was the power most responsible for the establishment of the state of Israel, will and must always stand behind Israel’s security. It is equally, though, right that the Palestinians should be restored in their land and dignity: and, as often happens in my experience, what is morally right eventually turns out to be politically expedient. Removing, even in limited measure, the Palestinian grievance is a necessary if not sufficient condition for cutting the cancer of Middle East terrorism out by the roots. The only way this can happen, as has long been clear, is for Israel to exchange ‘land for peace’, returning occupied territories to the Palestinians in exchange for credible undertakings to respect Israel’s security.”

More Likudist than the vast majority of Israelis, more uncompromisingly heartless than Thatcher herself, the Tory commentators who claim the Iron Lady’s mantle would do well to reflect on her example.

And in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele. Most recently, we can see this in the adulatory response from the online Right to Bukele’s offer of 5,000 free visas to “highly skilled scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, and philosophers”.

These visas, accompanied by tax breaks and help-with-moving costs, aim to tempt the cream of what the modern world likes to call “human capital” to make their homes in El Salvador. But if you build it, will they come? In recent years, El Salvador has made headlines for adopting an approach to law and order that, while effective, is viewed with alarm by Western liberals as encroaching unacceptably on human rights. Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.

These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country. Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.

And yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.

Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room, Bukele’s offer to the people of El Salvador seems as energetically futurist as it does authoritarian on public safety. As Geoff Schullenberger recently reported, this is part of his appeal to Salvadorean voters: a sense of going somewhere, of there being a future to feel hopeful about.

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety, let alone any current mainstream Tory. It has as yet no party-political or institutional representation in Britain, and is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” And it’s not hard to see the appeal of Bukele as a poster-boy for such movements: while China is arguably a far larger and more successful instance of high-tech authoritarianism, it’s both (by Western standards) off-puttingly collectivist, and also a little too powerful for comfort. By contrast, El Salvador offers a worked example of what it might look like to roll out Right-wing progressivism in a previously dysfunctional polity: a project that both has underdog appeal, and also poses no direct material threat to American geopolitical interests.

For Anglophone Rightists, then, El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.

For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model. It’s a far cry from the kind of can’t-we-all-just-get-along liberalism that characterises our current crop of hapless Tories. As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.

But Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership. As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity. Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.

It’s clear in Bukele’s visa announcement that he sees global mobility in these terms, as desirable only at small scale and for elites. El Salvador’s population is smaller than that of London; these 5,000 visas represent, he declares, “less than 0.1% of our population, so granting them full citizen status, including voting rights, poses no issue”. Though he doesn’t elaborate on what kind of “issue” large-scale immigration might “pose”, we might perhaps point to the undertone of ethnic lobbying that increasingly characterises politics in very “diverse” parts of the UK, as minority voting blocs grow large enough to sway the political process.

Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites. It’s a far cry from 20th-century conservatism, which until relatively recently assumed a measure of cultural continuity between national elites and the masses. Instead, Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.

More from this author

Why we demand Kate's sacrifice

By Mary Harrington

There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet. At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.

How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask. Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion. The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likelihood of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.

Of course, this depends on elite incomers wanting to settle in your country. And it remains to be seen whether this will be the case for El Salvador. But however this initiative goes, Bukele’s second term will be the point where both Salvadoreans and international watchers get to evaluate his progressive experiment. And those future-oriented Right-wingers currently plotting in the shadows in other countries will doubtless learn from it.

In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics. And after a few years of the Starmy Army, who knows where Britain will be? Perhaps we’ll be tired of progress. But I think it more likely that we’ll be tired of egalitarianism, and eager for some progress — any progress — towards a future that feels more hopeful.

As such, Kondylis wrote, it was already dead: for “outside this social and intellectual historical framework, conservatism can only be referred to metaphorically or with polemical or apologetic intent”, or indeed as “the epitaph of a process that has already (essentially) run its course”. With the 19th-century victory of bourgeois liberalism — and its replacement, in turn, by “mass democracy”, of which both fascism and Soviet Communism were extremist sub-categories — conservatism was left a meaningless husk, a rhetorical flourish to distinguish one form of liberalism from its electoral rivals through the mere narcissism of small differences. 

Kondylis died in 1998, and therefore only partly witnessed the total intellectual collapse of Britain’s Conservative Party as a vehicle for Right-wing politics. Yet had he survived to observe the last flailing days of Europe’s oldest political party, still squatting in office to no discernible purpose, even he would surely have been shocked at the vacuousness and self-defeating liberalism of the faction which in Britain bears conservatism’s name. We can only hope that the party’s coming crushing electoral defeat will herald not only its ejection from power but its total dissolution: for even at the modest task which Kondylis assigns conservatism, the temporary preservation of yesterday’s liberalism, the Tories are abject failures.

Last week’s redefinition of political extremism by Michael Gove, the party’s sole intellectual and most competent administrator, is a case in point. While the 2011 definition brought in by Cameron’s government was unnecessary and objectionable in itself, its notional appeal to “fundamental British values” could at least have served conservative ends if applied by a competent Right-wing government. Yet Gove’s redefinition strips out even that one marginal good, declaring that extremism is “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance”.

Suggested reading

Penny Mordaunt: the perfect head for the headless Tories

By Mary Harrington

Leaving aside the question of political violence, which the law already adequately proscribes, it is not difficult to foresee how the technocratic liberal managerialism of the coming Starmer administration will interpret its vague definition of “intolerance”, defined as “creating a permissive environment” to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others”. Like the 2011 Prevent definition, its 2024 replacement is a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived Islamist threat that, through moral cowardice at defining its opponent clearly, will instead disproportionately fall upon the political Right. That the liberal Left’s initial reactions to Gove’s tinkering centred on whether the party’s donors could be defined as extremists, or whether Gove’s chosen reading material defined him as one himself, highlights the inevitable direction of travel. 

In an attempt to make short-lived political capital at the disquiet over recent pro-Palestine protests, Gove has created a powerful weapon against the Right. Just as Blair’s Human Rights Act enshrined progressivism into the state’s essence, the new definition will shrink conservatism’s space for querying or opposing the most sweeping progressive innovations. It is of a piece with the Online Safety Act, a hurried piece of legislation brought in as a response to a Conservative MP’s murder by a jihadist, which instead functions as a muzzle on “harmful” Right-wing discourse. None of the alleged “culture war” dividing lines on which the Conservatives have rhetorically sought to distinguish themselves from Labour — on mass immigration, the ECHR, gender politics or progressive activist judges and civil servants — will survive the expansive interpretations of “the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” that will surely follow. If the Conservative Party is to be judged on its actions, and not on its rhetoric, it is not a vehicle for the implementation of Right-wing politics but for its suppression. In its last days in the Westminster bunker, the Conservative Party has chosen suicide as its final act.

My concerns here are motivated by self-interest: like the majority of the country, I do not believe that Parliament is a well-functioning system responsive to the electorate’s desires. Through my “intent to undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy” with something functional I am, by Gove’s definition, a political extremist. The same could no doubt be said of Scottish, Welsh and Irish separatists (though Labour will hardly apply this new definition to them), advocates of proportional representation, Swiss-style direct democracy, or of any future Right-wing reformist analogue to Blair’s constitutional experimentation. 

It is no wonder that, after a generation of Conservative Party rule, 46% of British adults now support “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliamentary elections”, a figure which rises to 65% of those aged 18-35. By Gove’s definition, the majority of the electorate will soon be composed of extremists: this widening gulf between the governing and the governed is not a recipe for political stability.

More from this author

How to decolonise Britain

By Aris Roussinos

But until then, to shore up its fragile legitimacy, the British political system has a greater need for extremists than British politics can supply. The recent Hope Not Hate report on political extremism highlights the problem: listed alongside its catalogue of neo-Nazis and Ulster Loyalist paramilitaries are such inoffensive conservatives as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, ascribed to a nebulous “radical Right”, along with the Telegraph and Spectator, for advocating, among other things, halving Britain’s current rate of immigration. Yet under the Conservative Party, immigration soared to unprecedented levels: halving last year’s influx would still mean an immigration rate two and a half times the rate under New Labour, which was itself seen at the time as a reckless and destabilising experiment. Even the radical progressivism of the Nineties is now beyond the pale of acceptable politics.

By any reasonable analysis this is absurd thinking, but this is the narrow and destructive path into which British political discourse is increasingly channelled. In Britain, almost uniquely in Western democracies, the space available for political reform is shrinking. The failure of the populism of the 2010s, both on the Left and Right, lay in its belief that the political system actually could be reformed. Yet rather than a threat to democracy, as technocratic centrists claimed, British political populism was undone by its touching faith in its existence. Twice in the past decade, through both the original Brexit vote and the 2019 vote to actually implement it, the British people have voted for total change: twice the British political system closed ranks to prevent reform. Brexit voters, a narrow majority of the country, were characterised as either extremists or the unwitting dupes of a Russian plot, as a wave of conspiratorial fantasising overtook the country’s political establishment. 

There is little hope to be placed in the incoming Starmer government: the problems facing Britain, both economic and political, are structural, and beyond the capacity of Labour’s underwhelming front bench to address. If we were to zoom out and view our current predicament with the grand-historical scale of a Kondylis, the contours of the situation become clear. During the Nineties, through a combination of misguided intellectual fashions and vague Boomer idealism, the belief took hold across the elites of Western societies that the unfettered movement of goods, money and people across national borders would herald a new era of cosmopolitan prosperity and social harmony. Eventually, reality intervened: as with other Western societies, only more so, Britain is now poorer, unhappier and less harmonious as a result. Yet the mental maps of Britain’s political class are still those of Nineties Britain. With no existing conservatism to temper their political innovations, liberals have brought about a world that threatens to eat them whole. 

To the horror of our political class, trapped in their Nineties reveries, George Galloway’s recent election victory reveals the actually existing Britain of the 2020s. A more or less open opportunist, who rides the dissatisfaction of Britain’s most solidly Muslim constituencies with Western foreign policy as his vehicle to power, Galloway’s understanding of Britain’s new political faultlines cannot be faulted: he is a realist, who navigates the country as it now is. If anything, Galloway’s open contempt for Westminster’s pieties more accurately reflects the opinion of the average voter than anything else in British political discourse. Yet the electoral Right flounders in a country it no longer understands. Lee Anderson’s defection to the Reform Party after accusing Sadiq Khan of being an Islamist highlights their outdated mental maps; Khan is not an Islamist, but instead a generic progressive, a cookie-cutter Twitter-brained liberal whose power rests on London’s transformed demographics, an optimistic globaliser of a kind that already looks outdated.

For if Britain’s politicians have locked themselves away in an eternal Nineties, the wider world has moved on. The world of the 2020s is an unstable, threatening place, sliding towards global war. Locked in political stasis, unable to reform itself or correct its drift, the British state will meet the coming storm in a dangerously brittle fashion. Britain’s economy is stagnant, its populace is restive and disenchanted, and its underequipped armed forces and non-existent industrial base poorly match the hawkishness of its foreign policy. 

It is an increasingly common trope to compare the ramshackle British state — “Ukania” in the Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn’s formulation — with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in its dotage. This is a more flattering comparison than Britain deserves: in 1914, Austria-Hungary was a major power, and a military, industrial and scientific powerhouse far beyond the wildest imaginings of 2020s Britain.

It was only in retrospect that the Habsburg state’s collapse came to seem inevitable: the likelihood of 2020s Britain emerging from a new era of great power conflict as a stable, victorious unitary state is surely far lower. Like the barbarians in Cavafy’s famous poem, the shock of defeat might even bring some sort of solution. In office but out of power, with no political capacity to arrest the nation’s course, conservatives are condemned to cultivate the “stoic apatheia” that Gottfried ascribes to Kondylis: unwilling dissidents in a state built to constrain them, they must watch from the sidelines as history brings Britain’s dysfunction to a close.

At the start of the year, Sunak set out what was supposed to be his response to this same question. The point of his government, he said, was to concentrate on “the people’s priorities”. And these, he claimed, were rising prices, NHS waiting times and illegal immigration. To show his seriousness, he then offered five pledges upon which he could be judged. He would halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce the national debt, cut waiting lists and pass new laws to stop the small boat crossings. “I will only promise what I can deliver,” he concluded in what was supposed to be a rousing peroration. “And I will deliver what I promise.” Here was Sunakian Blairism, where what matters is what works.

A year on, his record is decidedly mixed. His inflation target has been met and the economy has grown, albeit only just. But debt has also grown, waiting lists are up, and no new laws have been passed to stop the small boat crossings, even if the numbers have somewhat come down. If we really are supposed to judge him by results, he’s kept only two of five promises.

The thing is, though, this is not how government should work. Targets are not ends in themselves, but indications of underlying principles. Halving the rate of inflation isn’t the goal; the goal is to create a stable environment in which people can plan their lives.

Beyond Sunak’s five targets, do we have any idea what principles underpin his government, let alone his Conservative Party? Do we know what kind of country they would like to build and why? Again, as in 1960, the answer is surely no.

When you look back at Sunak’s time in power, what is striking is how much he has bounced from one idea to the next. When he first became Prime Minister, in October 2022, he presented himself as a safe pair of hands who would clean up the mess made by his predecessor. By October 2023, he was presenting himself as a radical who represented a break from a failed 30-year consensus. And then he hired David Cameron as his foreign secretary.

More from this author

Rishi Sunak's pointless revolution

By Tom McTague

Looking back at his record, there are three distinct periods of Sunak’s premiership: the technocratic honeymoon; the political reality check; and the desperate reset. From January to April, Sunak operated with the breezy confidence of a technocratic troubleshooter. After setting out his five tests on January 4, he started scraping off all the unwanted political barnacles he believed were making it harder for his government to function. First, Sunak blocked Nicola Sturgeon’s gender recognition reforms, flashing a bit of unionist muscle with a confidence that put the SNP in a position from which it has yet to really escape. Then, in February, Sunak concluded a deal with the European Union over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Here was a man in a hurry. By March, this new “Windsor Framework” was comfortably backed in the House of Commons by 515 votes to 29. Sunak was on a roll.

And then reality kicked in.

Over the next four months, from May to August, Sunak’s smooth technocratic sheen started to blister under the relentless pressure of events. First, in the local elections in May, the Tories lost more than 1,000 seats, registering an estimated 26% of the national vote, only a little better than their worst ever local election results in 1995 and 2013. Labour’s 35%, meanwhile, left them nine points ahead of the Tories, the largest lead that the party had recorded in any local election since 2010.

Then, in June, Partygate reared its head once again, with Boris Johnson suddenly announcing he would quit parliament rather than accept the Privileges Committee’s conclusion that he should be suspended for 90 days. Later that month, the Court of Appeal threw out the Government’s policy of sending refugees to Rwanda for processing, declaring the country unsafe. And then, in August, the “crumbly concrete” scandal broke when the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan revealed at least 100 schools would need to close because they were no longer safe. A few days later, Keegan was filmed angrily asking why journalists did not tell her she’s done “a fucking good job” because “everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing?”

By September, the Tories had fallen back in the polls to almost exactly where they were at the start of the year, hovering at around 25% to Labour’s 45%. The truth is, while inflation was on its way down, prices were still rising dramatically and interest rates were being jacked up to deal with it. One way of looking at 2023 is through the prism of individual events, but another is to look at the structural current dragging the Government across the rocks. The basic reality for most people in 2023 was that they were quite obviously getting poorer while their services were getting worse. On top of all this, the Government seemed unable to deal with the growing problem of industrial unrest with strikes hitting transport, schools and even hospitals.

Elsewhere, a new threat was beginning to emerge on the Right, as Reform steadily grew in the polls. It is at this point that we can see the third phase of Sunak’s troubled year begin: the desperate reset.

More from this author

Nigel Farage's plan for power

By Tom McTague

As summer’s glow faded, Sunak began to show a far sharper political edge than before in an attempt to create dividing lines with Labour and kill off the threat from Reform. First, in September, he watered down some of the Net Zero commitments made by his predecessors, putting himself on the side of the motorist and, as he would have it, “good Conservative common sense”. Then, in his speech to the Conservative Party conference in October, he went further, scrapping the northern leg of HS2, connecting Birmingham to Manchester, in order to save billions in public spending he could then start diverting around the country before the next election. Alongside Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement in November, cutting taxes with future spending cuts, the Tory election strategy began to become clear: Vote Tory to stop Labour tax rises. In other words: Sunak was preparing for the classic Tory election.

What was more unusual — or eccentric, even — about Sunak’s conference speech in Manchester, though, was that in setting up this tediously traditional dividing line, he claimed he was upending decades of political wisdom. “What I have learnt is that there is an undeniable sense that politics just doesn’t work the way it should,” he declared. “The feeling that Westminster is a broken system… In particular, politicians saying things, and then nothing ever changing.” Sunak then declared that he agreed with this assessment. “Politics doesn’t work the way it should. We’ve had 30 years of a political system which incentivises the easy decision, not the right one.” He, however, was different.

Sunak’s assessment was revealing. By using this marker, he was dismissing the premierships of not only John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but also those of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss in which he had served. In effect, Sunak was declaring the last successful prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was, he claimed, her heir. “You either think this country needs to change or you don’t,” he declared with an apparently straight face.

The problem for Sunak is that he couldn’t look more like the system if he tried. There’s nothing radical about him, whether ideologically, stylistically or temperamentally. He went to Winchester, became a banker and then Boris Johnson’s chancellor. He believes in the system and shares its prejudices. He became prime minister when the Conservative Parliamentary Party decided it needed to throw out the Tory members’ choice, Liz Truss, because she couldn’t do the job. In both his first speech as Prime Minister and his set-piece address setting out his five pledges, Sunak claimed to be carrying the same ideological flame as Boris Johnson, only with more competence. “The mandate my party earned in 2019 is not the sole property of any one individual,” Sunak declared. “It is a mandate that belongs to and unites all of us.” When he then decided to keep Johnson’s Rwanda refugee plan, Sunak further tied himself to Johnson’s record. And yet, here he was at the Conservative Party conference, no longer pledging to honour the manifesto of his predecessor, but declaring him part of an era of failure.

Ultimately, it is difficult to take seriously either Sunak’s claim that he is an anti-establishment radical or that he is different from all his predecessors in placing more value on “long-term” decisions than short term gimmicks. All governments must combine principle and expediency, but in his short time in power, Sunak seems to have grown ever more attracted to expediency. In September, he announced he would ban the XL Bully breed of dogs before working out exactly how he would do so. In November, he cancelled a meeting with the Greek PM at the last minute because his opposite number said he wanted the Elgin Marbles returned to Greece. And then in December, he forced ministers to suddenly come up with a new high salary threshold for migrants to be allowed to come to Britain without working out what exactly this would mean for the economy. Far from the calm, confident technocrat of January, here was a Prime Minister thrashing around to get some kind of traction with the public — and with little success. As 2023 draws to a close, Sunak is more unpopular than he was at the beginning, and with the Tories on 22% in the polls, close to the nadir the Tory party reached under Truss.

More from this author

Suellaism is here to stay

By Tom McTague

If there is any hope for Sunak, it lies in the unpopularity of Keir Starmer, an improving economic picture and the fact that his own party just about kept itself together at its the moment of greatest crisis earlier this month — when it faced a choice between defeating the government over Sunak’s latest Rwanda plan or allowing it to die another day. The problem, though, remains the one that Utley put his finger on in 1960: what is the government’s purpose?

Throughout Utley’s career, he prodded and probed at this most elemental of questions about the purpose of Toryism. In 1974, he wrote a piece titled “Left, Right — or simply Tory?” in which he took aim at the inadequacy of the Conservative Party simply declaring itself the party of common sense, as Sunak did in his party conference speech. “On the rare and painful occasions when the Tory party feels constrained to re-examine its role in British politics,” Utley observed, “it normally starts its thinking with the assumption that, whatever other characteristics it should have, it should above all else be a party of ‘balance’ and ‘moderation’.”

Often, this means the party finds itself so desperate to avoid handing over any power to what it sees as its own “lunatic fringe” that it becomes captured by its “cliché ridden progressive wing” which is most obsessed with this notion of balance yet has few answers about the purpose of its rule. But, as Utley saw, Toryism needs to be about more than just moderating between other people’s ideologies — socialism and liberalism, say. And nor can it simply be about conserving the status quo, because that status quo could be wrong. This, though, is exactly where the Tory party finds itself once again, so desperate to avoid handing power to the various groups of lunatics that have formed on its Right that it has stopped thinking about what it actually believes.

In 1974, Utley suggested a series of maxims that made up authentic Toryism. On top of securing the nation against foreign attack and maintaining public order at home, he argued that the chief function of government was to use its influence and power to “maintain that minimum of cultural and moral unity within society without which a nation can be held together only by political tyranny”. Toryism, in other words, was neither liberalism nor libertarianism. It does not believe in a neutral state, but one that fosters a sense of common purpose, habit, custom, duty and morality. As part of this job, Utley wrote, Toryism also believes the State is “justified in intervening to protect sections of the community whose protection is seen to be a matter of special importance to the nation as a whole”. Finally, Utley argued that of all the groups which the State exists to protect, “none is of more fundamental importance than the family”. And to protect the family, the State needed to defend and — crucially — expand property ownership.

Looking at the record of the past 13 years of Conservative rule and it is hard to think of it as in any way particularly Tory. Almost nothing has been done to promote a sense of national unity across the whole of the UK. A trade border has been erected within the country and trade deals are signed that seem to actively put British producers at a disadvantage. Foreign governments are invited in to build core national infrastructure or run once-nationalised industries. Home ownership has collapsed and families are having fewer and fewer children in part because of the necessity for both parents to work full-time to afford the basics of life. State subsidies for childcare only apply to nurseries and other official settings and do nothing to help parents or grandparents look after their own children. And, uniquely in Europe, the tax system does not see family units, only individual workers.

Sunak has shown some signs of an instinctive Toryism with his ideas about banning social media for the young, but there is little evidence of a wider, coherent Tory vision of what his government is trying to do. On the whole, Conservative governments now seem to treat everything as economic. People must be made more healthy — to grow the economy. Mothers and the retired must return to work — to grow the economy. And immigration must increase — to grow the economy.

More from this author

Israel is trapped by Western guilt

By Tom McTague

While there is a good deal of lunacy on the Tory Right, it is also the case that there is more intellectual energy coming on the fringes of the party than around Sunak, Cameron and the old Left. The New Conservatives, for example, today offer a more authentic Utleyite Torysim on questions of immigration and the family than the party’s liberal wing, which claims to want to reduce immigration but baulks at the economic price of doing so. Miriam Cates, though now under investigation for apparently bringing Parliament into disrepute, is not anachronistic in her concern about the falling birth rate in Britain — this is now a distinctly modern problem affecting not only this country, but almost all Western democracies. How to deal with the new reality of low birth rates, low growth and mass immigration will, in fact, be one of the central questions facing all Western economies over the coming decades.

Most important of all is Utley’s central contention that Tory governments must endeavour to create a sense of national unity and harmony. How will Britain do this in what is now a multinational, multicultural state in a globalised world? The economist Dani Rodrik has argued that in today’s world a trilemma has emerged which cannot be escaped, in which countries must choose between democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration because it is impossible to have all three at the same time. The more you integrate your economy into the world, the less democratic sovereignty you will have over the material interests of your citizens. But the less you integrate into the global economy, the less efficient your economy will be, leaving your citizens poorer.

In some sense, Brexit is Britain’s answer to this trilemma, choosing sovereignty over integration. But, as we have seen, the trilemma does not go away, only emerges in different forms. What will be the Tory answer to these 21st-century dilemmas? The Tories have shown they can win General Elections: have they still got a philosophy of government? Right now, the answer is no.

In the past four years, we have had six Home Secretaries (including Braverman twice), four Prime Ministers, and eight Housing Ministers; in the past seven years of great geopolitical danger, we have had seven Foreign Secretaries. At around a year, the lifespan of those holding the great offices of state is as evanescent as that of a caged hamster, and their labours just as futile. If every Government minister resigned today, and let the civil service run the country until Starmer’s formal assumption of power, nothing meaningful would change.

But still the play drags on. In a desperate act of political necromancy, Sunak summoned Cameron from his lush Cotswolds exile to mark the end of the Conservative populist experiment. The Brexit referendum, which the former prime minister called and lost, was as much a rejection of his own record as of the distant European Union: of his underinvestment in infrastructure and demolition of state capacity, his failure to manage immigration, his reshaping of the British economy as a pliant provider of services to Chinese, Russian and Qatari capital, and of his misbegotten adventure in Libya, still collapsing African states like dominoes to this day. 

Through their pursuit of austerity, the Cameron and Osborne dyad created our current penumbra of decay and underinvestment. Britain’s trajectory of relative decline makes any town even in notionally prosperous southeast England visibly poorer and more neglected than a town of corresponding size in Poland or East Germany. In real terms, British workers are still worse paid than when Cameron came to power. 

Arguably then, Cameron did more than Blair to midwife 2020s Britain in all its squalid dysfunction. His was perhaps the last period when the unintended consequences of the Blairite revolution could have been painlessly undone; instead, he bedded them in, cementing Blair’s destructive post-1997 innovations as sacrosanct pillars of the eternal British constitution. The dismal calibre of Tory politicians we suffer today is the direct result of the selection procedures Cameron introduced, in an effort to weed out conservative thought from representation in the Conservative Party. Like Cummings’s recent appearance as a humble penitent before the Covid enquiry, subjecting himself to the mercy of a system he once wished to overthrow, Cameron’s return to Westminster is the symbolic endpoint to the Brexit revolution: whether or not the system is capable of reform, the Conservative Party is not the vehicle to achieve it. 

More from this author

Who will save us from boarding-house Britain?

By Aris Roussinos

Reform of the British state should have been carried out quietly, with an air of unruffled competence just as Blair achieved, in an administrative revolution imperceptible to surface-skimming lobby journalists. Instead we were given years of shrill noise, breakneck Westminster gossip, and inaction. As a result, through its own dysfunction, the Conservative Party has managed to place all British conservatives in the role of dissidents: increasingly hostile to institutions of the state — the police, the judiciary, border guards — that are in other European countries seen as the bedrock of conservative order. 

How many times must we write the same obituary? The effigies to be sculpted may change with ever-increasing rapidity, but the cause of death remains the same. The Conservative Party was a victim of its own electoral success: in constructing a ruthless vehicle for achieving power, it forgot that power is merely a temporary means to achieve lasting ideological ends. It is doubtful that it is in the interests of British conservatism for the Conservative Party to survive the next election, but if it does, it must use its time out of office to define its core aims and how to achieve them if ever granted power again.

The useful analogy, perhaps, is with America’s distinct but parallel attempt to ride the populist wave of discontent. The Trump administration, in its first iteration, was similarly chaotic, facing similar hysterical opposition from an ideologically hostile press and equivalent internal sabotage by dissident state functionaries. There too, at the end, public officials took care to signal their opposition to their notional political masters and their loyalty to the incoming regime. But where America differs from Britain is the overall vitality of its organised conservative movement.

Suggested reading

Suellaism is here to stay

By Tom McTague

As the likelihood of Trump returning to power grows, American conservative ideologues have spent the past few years devising a comprehensive strategy for effective governance. The Project 2025 strategy centres on the parallel belief that “the federal government is a behemoth, weaponised against American citizens and conservative values”, a politicised deep state which serves in practice to stifle Republican rule. An entire waiting cadre of loyal officials has been recruited, trained and motivated to reform American governance at every level from the first day of the second Trump administration. Whether or not the results will be positive for the country, experience of political failure has given the Republican Party a purist ideological zeal, a theory of governance and a desire to impose its will entirely absent from their British equivalents. Where Republicans recruit and nurture loyal conservative footsoldiers, the Conservative Party weeds them out like unwanted gatecrashers at a garden party: the results are as we see.

The ongoing Tory civil war, reignited first in the letter from the New Conservatives accusing Sunak of betraying the Red Wall realignment, and then in Braverman’s poisonous dissection of the Prime Minister’s failings, is surely no longer a campaign to win a last few dismal months in Downing Street, but instead a battle for what comes next: either a vision for a new iteration of the party, harder-edged and keener to win, or the opening salvoes of a new Right-wing force in British politics. Perhaps the Conservative Party’s surviving remnants, dusting off the rubble of defeat, will follow their American equivalents in political exile by addressing the causes of their failure directly, and by devising a strategy for governance underpinned by a meaningful conservative philosophy. But the causes of popular dissatisfaction remain as livid as ever, the popular mood more febrile, and the desire for radical change grows ever more insistent. 

More from this author

Will Dominic Cummings destroy Westminster?

By Aris Roussinos

The brutal October 7 Hamas attack on Israel has been theorised as a case of catastrophic success for the terrorist group, and much the same could be said of the Conservative Party’s current term in office. The 2019 election was a victory from which the Conservatives may never recover: they have been buried beneath their own landslide. The voting public granted the Tories the opportunity to remake Britain in their image, and unfortunately for us they succeeded. 

But as well as euthanising Braverman’s ministerial career, events in the Middle East remind us, through the very existence of the state of Israel, that even the most unlikely sounding political visions, undertaken in the least propitious circumstances, are eminently achievable. As Herzl famously declared: “If you will it, it is no dream.” The demands of the British public for a stable, secure and prosperous nation are not impossible to satisfy. For all its relative decline, Britain retains vast untapped potential waiting to be unlocked, requiring only sufficient political vision, will and discipline to do so. In ridding ourselves of the Conservative Party, we may yet birth a vigorous and reformist British conservative movement. 

He had, after all, warned the Conservative Party that Liz Truss would cause an economic crisis. Which she duly did. He also had credit in the bank from his time as Chancellor, having found the money to keep everyone in work during the pandemic — with enough to buy us a cheap meal to boot. So when he stepped up after those years of chaos, there was a feeling of relief, at least among the governing caste of Britain: the class swot was now in charge. The rows with Europe were quickly put to bed. A deal was reached over Northern Ireland. Pledges were made. The boats would be stopped. 

But, then, the penny dropped. He was just as useless as the rest of them.

His polling today is brutal. Before he took over, the public was almost evenly split over whether he’d be a good prime minister or not. A year later, barely 11% agree — compared with the 50% who think he has been poor or, even, “terrible”. Sunak’s reputation for competence is in ruins as well. Very few people trust him on anything, whether that’s immigration, housing, the NHS, or even the economy. The Tory party’s troubles are deep, of course; they have not recovered since “Partygate”. And yet, they were only 10 points behind when Johnson resigned. After this plummeted to an extraordinary 25 points under Truss, it has miserably stabilised at between 15 and 20 points under Sunak. 

Why? Is he just not very good at politics? It’s certainly true that going to Manchester to cancel a train line to Manchester doesn’t suggest a particular proficiency in the fine art of winning people over. Is it that he inherited such a colossal economic mess that popularity is all but impossible? There is also an element of truth to that. But there is something more fundamental at play. This isn’t just Rishi Sunak’s fault. He is only the last leader of Britain’s worst-ever run of governments. We have never been as badly governed as we have over the the past 13 years.

This isn’t hyperbole; it’s cold evaluation. Whichever way you measure it, whether in terms of meeting its stated objectives or simply the outcomes for ordinary people, there has never been a period of party rule when so little was achieved. Ever.

Living standards have never before grown so weakly over such a sustained period of time. Debt has ballooned: up from around 65% of GDP in 2010 to 100% today. The deficit remains. The basic structure of the UK economy remains as broken as ever: dependent on the City and foreign direct investment to offset the fact that we continue to import far more than we export. Net migration has jumped from 300,000 to 600,000 to help keep our demographic Ponzi scheme from collapsing, while the care system has never been fixed. The proportion of people owning their own home has fallen; the proportion of your pay packet you must give away on rent has risen; taxes have risen to their highest on record.

More from this author

Rishi Sunak's pointless revolution

By Tom McTague

And yet, despite all that money pouring into the Treasury, services are stalling. NHS waiting times have risen across the board — a trend that started long before the pandemic. The target to be admitted, seen and discharged from A&E within four hours has not been met since 2014. Every single cancer waiting time is now being missed. The number of people waiting for medical treatment overall has risen from 2.6 million in 2010, to 7.75 million today. The police force, meanwhile, has dwindled, our army is smaller and the number of prison places available for violent criminals all but gone. The courts are in a mess. And the state of the Union has been permanently fractured: EU law applies in one part of the country but not another; a trade border is etched down the Irish Sea; power sharing in Belfast has collapsed, perhaps forever.

Has nothing improved since 2010? Well, crime has apparently continued to fall. Though that is a trend that has been in place since the Nineties. And Britain’s CO2 emissions are also declining; this, too, is part of a much longer trend. Cancer survival rates have improved, even though waiting times have risen (thanks, one suspects, to better drugs). Counterintuitively, inequality has fallen. Oh, and the Elizabeth Line has been built. Gay marriage is perhaps the one concrete achievement that is most mentioned when I cast around for lasting achievements of this period of Tory rule. But does anyone seriously think that wouldn’t have happened sooner or later? 

None of these factors changes the overall reality: things outside this Government’s control which were improving anyway have continued to improve; things which are within its grasp have got materially worse. 

We could, quite reasonably, trace the origins of our current parlous moment back to the great financial crisis of 2008, rather than David Cameron’s arrival in 2010. Certainly, 2008 either made Britain permanently poorer or revealed that we were never as rich as we imagined. However, Cameron’s entire promise in 2010 was that decline was not inevitable. “Our economy is overwhelmed by debt, our social fabric is frayed and our political system has betrayed the people,” Cameron declared in the Conservative Party’s 2010 manifesto. “But these problems can be overcome if we pull together and work together. If we remember that we are all in this together.” How emptily that now echoes.

Electing the Tories would “ensure macroeconomic stability”, he also claimed. This meant safeguarding Britain’s credit rating, eliminating the structural deficit in a single parliament, and keeping interest rates lower for longer. Let’s just say that didn’t work out very well. 

Other promises were made — and broken. “We will make Britain the most family-friendly country in Europe,” the manifesto declares. In 2022 we became the country with the most expensive childcare in the developed world but where every incentive created by the Government makes it harder for parents to look after their own children. Cameron even promised to “support and improve Sure Start” only for more than 1,400 to close since 2019. 

Going through the failures in the manifesto is like shooting fish in a barrel. The pledge to “deliver more affordable homes” and create “a property-owning democracy”; the promise to “extend early deportation of foreign national prisoners”; the complaint about criminals being released early from prison because “there aren’t enough places”; the idea that the Tories would or could “curtail the quango state”. How ludicrous it all now seems. The Climate Change Committee alone is one of the most influential quangos ever created, advising the Government on how to reach net zero by 2050 — the most revolutionary economic policy in decades.

Does Cameron feel shame? Embarrassment? Or does he just shrug and comfort himself with the thought that it was all going to plan until 2016? Perhaps, he’s right. Perhaps it is reasonable to differentiate between the era before the referendum and the era after. Brexit certainly left constitutional scars that will probably never be healed — the Northern Ireland protocol, for example. It also led to the chaos of competing mandates — popular and parliamentary — which took years to resolve. And it may well have exacerbated some of Britain’s other challenges. But, it can’t be blamed for Britain’s structural problems: its productivity slump, its regional divide, its surging NHS waiting lists. These are part of a continuous 13-year story.

No wonder Sunak is trying to present himself as the “change candidate”. He’s just doing what every leader of every badly led Conservative government has done for the past 13 years. Theresa May promised to make government work for ordinary people; Johnson promised to bring an end to austerity and Get Brexit Done; Liz Truss promised to re-inject growth; Sunak promised stability. Each said they could fix their predecessor’s failure. Yet each only worked to confirm the overall failure of the Tory project. 

In 2010, Cameron promised to lift the mood which he claimed had gripped the country. “There is no law that says we must accept decline,” he declared. “We have the energy, the ideas and the ambition to get Britain back on track.” It turns out he had the wrong energy, ideas and ambitions. David Cameron couldn’t see it, but he was a symptom of the problem too: our governing class isn’t fit for purpose. Thirteen years after Cameron, Rishi Sunak is trying to head into the next election with the same essential message that his predecessor tried back then. At heart, it’s a ludicrous pitch.

Given that Covid tends to affect men more than women, why would long Covid affect women more than men? And given that Covid complications are extremely rare in the young, why would teenage girls be disproportionately affected by long Covid? Finally, given that we can’t accuse a virus of transphobia, why would long Covid affect transgender people most?

The answer lies in the fact that long Covid is not a strictly physical phenomenon. A study of nearly two million people published in Nature found that people who reported three or more symptoms of long Covid included: 4.9% of people confirmed to have had Covid, and 4% of people with no evidence of having had Covid. So, reporting the symptoms of long Covid is only moderately associated with a prior Covid infection. In fact, long Covid correlates about as much with mood disorders as with Covid itself. One study found that people prone to anxiety and depression before Covid infection were 45% more likely to develop long Covid after infection, and the Nature study found that having anxiety and depression before getting Covid almost doubled the chances of reporting long Covid.

This would help explain why women and trans people are disproportionately reporting long Covid: these two demographics have particularly high rates of anxiety and depression.

But why exactly would mood disorders increase the likelihood of long Covid? Some experts have speculated that stress may affect the immune system’s response to Covid and lead to more serious infections. However, a Turkish study found no evidence that anxiety or depression alters the body’s immune response to the virus. A much likelier explanation could be that, since symptoms of mood disorders overlap with those of long Covid, people are mistaking psychological distress for the side-effects of viral infection.

This is part of a broader phenomenon. Young people are reporting despair and distress at an unprecedented rate, and this mental health crisis is a symptom of a malfunctioning society — a society that is making people sick, by teaching them to feel sick. The tendency for people to misdiagnose their despair as a medical disorder can be observed far beyond reports of long Covid. Consider the surge in cases of gender dysphoria. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of adolescents referred to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) increased by over 2000%. If the increase were simply due to decreasing stigma around being trans, it wouldn’t be mostly restricted to a single sex and age range, but it has been driven almost exclusively by young people and natal females.

Suggested reading

Mental illness doesn't make you special

By Freddie deBoer

The group that’s disproportionately reporting gender dysphoria — adolescent girls — appears to be the same demographic as the group deemed in the German study to be disproportionately at risk of long Covid. This is also the group, besides trans people, deemed most at risk of mood disorders. So, again, it seems many young people, particularly girls, are confusing general distress for another illness.

And it’s not just reports of gender dysphoria that have multiplied among young people. Increases have occurred for major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various eating disorders. It seems that young people, and their doctors, are viewing personal issues as medical disorders: we are living through a pathologisation pandemic.

Why are so many people confusing sadness for sickness? It’s human nature to look for single causes to complex problems. The physician’s habit of ascribing all a patient’s symptoms to just one diagnosis led to the formulation of Hickam’s dictum, which states: “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” Likewise, it’s tempting to look for a neat and simple reason for people blaming their troubles on a single disorder, but to do this would be to make the same mistake as them. Pathologisation can have as many causes as it damn well pleases.

One may be cyberchondria, the phenomenon whereby people anxiously google symptoms, and, due to confirmation bias, ignore those that don’t apply to them while focusing on those that do, until they become convinced they have the disorder they’re reading about. Another cause may be social contagion, whereby panic spreads through the power of suggestion. According to a UK study, adolescents who reported parents suffering from long Covid were almost twice as likely to report experiencing long Covid symptoms themselves, regardless of whether they’d actually had Covid.

It’s known that social contagions tend to affect girls more than boys, a disparity that could be exacerbated by girls tending to use social media more than boys. But the problem with social contagion as an explanation is that it’s a how, not a why; it offers a means without a motive.

Some have attempted to discern a motive. One is that girls are trying to escape unattainable ideals of femininity. As the arms race of plastic surgery and beauty filters ramps up, natural bodies seem ugly by comparison. This “selfie dysmorphia” may lead to anxiety and depression, as well as symptoms of gender dysphoria, as pubescent girls become desperate to defy the metamorphosis of their bodies into sexual objects. But this explanation doesn’t shed much light on the rise of conditions like long Covid, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, a deeper dive into the data does.

When we include politics in the mental health data, it becomes clear that this isn’t simply about gender. A 2020 Pew survey of over 10,000 people found that self-described liberals aged 18-29 were more likely than self-described conservatives of the same age to report suffering psychological problems over the last week. They were also more than twice as likely to say they’d ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Furthermore, those who were “very liberal” were more likely than those who were just “liberal” to report poor mental health. The group most likely to report poor mental health was white liberal females, an alarming 56% of whom reported having received a mental illness diagnosis.

Crucially, controlling for worldview narrowed the gender gap considerably: liberal men were more likely to report poor mental health than conservative women. It would seem, then, that the mental health epidemic among girls and young women is associated with their tendency to have a more Left-liberal mindset than boys and young men — a difference that’s becoming more pronounced over time.

But why would Leftism be associated with poorer mental health? An analysis of data from 86,138 adolescents found, in line with the Pew survey, that between 2005 and 2018 the self-reported mental health of liberals had deteriorated more than conservatives’, and that this deterioration was worst for girls. The researchers blamed this on “alienation within a growing conservative political climate”. However, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg debunked this explanation by pointing out that liberals’ mental health woes began while Obama was in power and as the Supreme Court voted to extend gay marriage rights — hardly a conservative political climate.

The real reasons may be deeper. One idea, more than any other, underpins the difference in outlook between liberals and conservatives. Central to Leftism is equality, backed by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasises the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasising the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as hapless puppets has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their problems are not their own fault, but rather the product of various systems beyond their control. These systems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly, they are medical. A common example is “trauma”, a psychiatric term that has become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused that even clinicians fear it has lost its meaning. Most people, however, are happy to have their personal failings blamed on medical issues, because it absolves them of responsibility. It’s not your fault you violently lashed out, you have trauma. It’s not your fault you lack energy, you have long Covid. It’s not your fault you hate the way you look, you have gender dysphoria.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

Pathologisation is also an effective way to manufacture sympathy. The co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, responded to accusations she’d used donation money to enrich friends and family by claiming that the accusations had given her post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis once reserved for rape survivors and war veterans.

Claims like Cullors’s are instinctively met with sympathy and even awe on the Left, where overeager attempts to destigmatise mental illness can end up glamorising it. On social media, young liberals now engage in “sadfishing”, a kind of digital Munchausen’s Syndrome, where people fabricate ailments for pity and clout; some, such as the TikToker “TicsAndRoses”, fake Tourette’s, while others fake multiple personalities. The power of mental health disorders to attract attention online has turned them into fashion accessories, cute quirks to help kids stand out from the crowd, or “part of my dating appeal”.

Unfortunately, these designer disorders are not just harmless labels; intentional pathologisation by influencers is causing unintentional pathologisation among viewers. Reports tell of adolescent girls suddenly developing “TikTok tics” after viewing videos of alleged Tourette’s sufferers. Others tell of adolescents presenting with multiple personalities after watching videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. As atomisation makes people more desperate for sympathy, and competition makes them more desperate for attention, it’s likely that sadfishing and its consequences will only worsen.

But as disturbing as all this is, victimhood culture is not the only force behind the pathologisation pandemic. It’s been abetted by a medical industry that has its own incentives for exaggerating the prevalence of mental disorders.

Medicalisation — the tendency for clinicians to recategorise ever more things as medical issues — occurs because clinicians are just as human as their patients, and are therefore just as influenced by culture and their own personal biases. The 1973 Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatrists who have been told that a healthy person is insane will begin to reinterpret that person’s ordinary behaviours, such as note-taking, as manifestations of their mental disorder. We saw this in the Tavistock scandal, where the staff of the infamous Gids clinic, conditioned by ideologues to look for gender dysphoria, became increasingly hasty to diagnose it.

Suggested reading

The media is spreading bad trans science

By Jesse Singal

The ability of clinicians to see precisely the symptoms they’re looking for is facilitated by concept creep, the tendency for the definitions of disorders to gradually expand to encompass more people. The rise in autism diagnoses, for instance, can be largely attributed to a diagnostic widening of the autism spectrum. Concept creep occurs largely due to the Shirky principle, which states: “Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.” The motive is often financial; the number of pregnancies deemed to require caesarean sections has increased because this method of delivering babies is more profitable. Likewise, if you’re simply sad then medical companies can’t monetise you, but if your distress is reclassified as, say, gender dysphoria, those companies can sell you puberty blockers or surgical procedures. By 2021, GIDS accounted for a quarter of the Tavistock trust’s income. In the States, the sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $1.9 billion and is projected to have a lucrative annual growth rate of 11.23%.

So, we have a medical industry that is both financially and ideologically motivated to overstate the prevalence of illness, and we have a victimhood culture that encourages people to view themselves as oppressed by things they can’t control. In the middle of this we have ordinary people tempted to blame their problems on medical issues for the sake of easy answers.

These three entities together form a mutually reinforcing system. The late philosopher Ian Hacking, in his book Rewriting the Soul, details how in the 20th century, the press, the public, and the medical industry operated in tandem to create new forms of madness out of mere gossip. Prior to 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder), but after one case was well-publicised by the media, people began using the concept of multiple personalities to make sense of their own problems. In so doing, they began to conform, wittingly or otherwise, to the official symptoms of the disorder. When clinicians speculated that people may invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse, people began to do just that. Some even suddenly “remembered” being sexually abused, even though the concept of repressed memories has no basis in fact. Initially, patients reported having two or three personalities. Within a decade, the average number was 17.

Thus, patient reports influenced clinicians’ diagnoses, but clinicians’ diagnoses also influenced patient reports. Diagnostic criteria became prescriptive as well as descriptive; they told patients how they were supposed to feel and act. Hacking called this cycle of mutual reinforcement a “looping effect”, and it proved so powerful that it turned a couple of isolated cases into an epidemic. A similar looping effect, facilitated by a hyperconnected world, seems to be driving the rise in reports of mental illness today.

Suggested reading

Who decides if you're mentally ill?

By Hannah Baer

This is a problem because imagined sickness can cause real sickness. This occurs in two ways. The first is direct: in rural India, folklore tells that being bitten by a pregnant dog can make one pregnant with the dog’s puppies, and this urban myth has created a new illness: puppy pregnancy syndrome. Victims become so convinced they’re pregnant with puppies that they suffer panic attacks and even manifest symptoms of pregnancy, from persistent nausea to the sensation of puppies crawling in their bellies.

But the second way fake sickness becomes real is far more common and insidious.

Remember how Leftism de-emphasises human agency in the name of equality? Research shows conservatives tend to have an internal locus of control, which means they believe that their decisions, as opposed to external forces, control their destiny. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an external locus, which means they believe their lives are determined by forces beyond their control.

The American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge used national survey data of adolescents to map their locus of control. Their findings were based on the proportion of respondents who agreed with statements such as: “People like me don’t have a chance at a successful life” and “Whenever I try to get ahead, something stops me”. They concluded that, since the Nineties, the locus of control for all teenagers has become more external, but the shift has been greater for liberals, and greatest for liberal girls. Further, when the self-worth of teenagers was mapped, using responses to statements such as “I feel my life is not very useful”, the data showed a universal decline in self-worth since 2012. Again, the decline was stronger for liberals, and strongest for liberal girls.

People with an internal locus of control, believing they control their destiny, tend to be happier and have healthier habits, like good diets and frequent exercise, while people with an external locus of control, believing they’re at the mercy of fate, have higher rates of anxiety and depression and are more likely to abuse drugs and neglect their health. When you believe you have no control, you don’t.

And thus, as society has liberalised, and medicalised, young people have lost both self-belief and resilience. Many have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, and pathologise it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologisation and more distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalisation; society is teaching kids to develop real dysfunctions.

This is the greatest danger of the pathologisation pandemic: belief in one’s sickness is self-fulfilling. It’s a disease not of any bodily organ but of hope itself, and it harms its victim by crippling their immunity to everything else.

If there’s a vaccine for the pathologisation pandemic, then the best candidate is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This is a form of talk-based treatment based on the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Contrary to modernity, it teaches that our feelings are not always valid, but often deluded and self-destructive. The aim is to reframe harmful thoughts into alternatives that are more accurate, agentic, and soluble. So, instead of “The world sucks”, one could think “I feel like the world sucks right now”. Where pathologisation places problems outside your control, CBT places them within your control. Where pathologisation bundles many small issues into one giant insurmountable problem, CBT breaks down giant problems into small manageable pieces.

Suggested reading

Can depression be cured?

By Ann Manov

No form of psychotherapy has been as rigorously tested as CBT, and its effectiveness in restoring agency and reigniting hope is documented by decades of research. Some studies suggest CBT is gradually losing effectiveness, but this is mostly because CBT, like everything else in the social sciences, has been corrupted by amateurisation and the desire to be “inclusive” and inoffensive. The newest forms of CBT, such as “Transgender-Affirmative CBT”, are the opposite of classic CBT because they seek not to cultivate strength but to validate feelings.

More than ever, a return is needed to the original, Stoicism-based form of CBT, which has helped everyone from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who governed Rome during a time of war and plague, to Vietnam POW James Stockdale, who used it to withstand torture at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton”. The ultimate cure to rampant pathologisation is to prepare the young to do battle against their greatest foe — their own minds — and to teach them a time-tested truth, bequeathed to us by history’s survivors: you are more than the things that happen to you. And you have as much control over your life as you believe you do.

Many of the misfortunes that befall you will not be your fault, but if you seek explanations for your suffering in things beyond your control, you risk falling prey to a culture and industry that are motivated to keep you feeling ill. Look within for the causes and, most times, you’ll find the cures. Modern society will tell you otherwise, of course, but it’s within your power to defy it, for you are not a helpless leaf in the wind but a mind that holds a world, which, depending on how you think, could be a Hell in Heaven, or a Heaven in Hell.

Then his neighbour in the first-class carriage leaned over and tapped him on the knee. “You are Baldwin, aren’t you?” the man said. “You were at Harrow in ’84.”

The Prime Minister nodded. The man sat back, satisfied. Then, a minute or so later, the man leaned forward and tapped him on the knee again. “Tell me,” he said affably, “what are you doing now?”

Even if that story isn’t true — and if it is, it could only have come from one person — it tells you something about the modest man who first became Prime Minister on 22 May 1923, exactly 100 years ago.

In many ways, Stanley Baldwin dominated the first half of the 20th century. He was Prime Minister three times in the Twenties and Thirties, for a total of more than seven years, and co-ran the country alongside Ramsay MacDonald for four more. He was the first mass-media premier, with a grasp of radio unmatched by his contemporaries, and appealed to a new, genuinely democratic electorate, including women as well as men. He stood for democracy in the age of the dictators, and steered his country through the General Strike, the Depression and the Abdication. And he weathered the storms of office to step down in 1937 at a moment of his own choosing, admired and respected even by his opponents.

That Baldwin is barely remembered today, then, could hardly be more unjust. His reputation took a crippling blow when he was traduced as one of the so-called Guilty Men, savaged in a thoroughly mendacious short book for his supposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. Even now some writers, foolishly parroting the clichés of the past, accuse him of sending Britain defenceless into the Second World War, even though Baldwin actually commissioned almost 100 new RAF squadrons in the teeth of fierce opposition from a near-pacifist Labour Party. And when he appears on television or in films, it is only as a dithering foil for the dynamic Churchill, never as the brilliantly canny operator who effectively invented modern Conservatism.

Yet whenever people lament the passing of an age of decent, serious, public-spirited politicians, they could be talking about Stanley Baldwin. In almost every respect, he was a walking rebuke to his modern-day successors. And what’s more, he was a far more interesting character than almost all of our current MPs put together.

Born in 1867, the son of a paternalistic Worcestershire industrialist, he did indeed go to Harrow, where he got into trouble for writing his own pornography — this was, of course, an age before teenagers were spoon-fed — and sending it to his cousin at Eton. This cast a serious blight over his schooldays, and young Stan hoped to make a fresh start at Cambridge.

But then — disaster! His old headmaster, who despised him, was appointed as Master of Trinity, Stan’s college. More misery. In the end, he graduated with a Third in history, having made virtually no impression on his contemporaries at all.

More from this author

Vietnam still haunts America

By Dominic Sandbrook

When he got back home to Worcestershire, his father Alfred — a stern and serious man — said grimly: “I hope you won’t get a Third in life.” Fortunately, he didn’t. Quite the opposite.

Baldwin didn’t inherit his father’s Bewdley constituency until he was nearly 41, having spent the intervening years working for the family iron-making firm. No doubt today he’d be mocked as a nepo baby. But like his father, Stanley was a deeply dutiful man, who prayed on his knees every night and took his Anglican faith enormously seriously.

Perhaps the best illustration of his sense of national responsibility was his letter to The Times on 24 June 1919. Baldwin, who was now Financial Secretary to the Treasury, noted that the country had run up colossal debts to pay for the Great War. This, he said, gave “the wealthy classes … an opportunity of service which can never recur … Let them impose upon themselves, each as he is able, a voluntary levy.”

For his part, he announced that he was giving up 20% of his fortune — a donation worth about £33 million today — to pay off the debt and relieve poor taxpayers of the burden. A nice gesture — but there was a twist. Baldwin didn’t sign his name: indeed, he made the editor of The Times promise not to tell anybody who had written the letter, because he didn’t want the attention. If you want to make your head ache, just try to imagine Matt Hancock doing that.

Even at that stage, nobody would have tipped Baldwin as a future PM. Compared with the man of the hour, the charismatic, flamboyant, monstrously priapic David Lloyd George, he seemed utterly ordinary. But Baldwin’s ordinariness — or his appearance of ordinariness, which isn’t the same thing at all — was his superpower. At the crucial meeting at the Carlton Club in October 1922, when the Tories decided to ditch Lloyd George and break up the wartime coalition, it was Baldwin’s voice that carried the day.

In private, Baldwin thought “the Goat”, with his taste for flogging peerages and interfering with other people’s wives, a “corrupter of public life”. And so, calmly, devastatingly, he plunged in the knife. Lloyd George, he told his colleagues, had once been called a “dynamic force”. But, said Baldwin, “a dynamic force is a very terrible thing; it may crush you”.

Suggested reading

Boris Johnson is no clown

By Terry Eagleton

That was the end of Lloyd George — and the making of Baldwin. Less than a year later, after an election had smashed the Liberals and brought the Tories a crushing majority, George V invited him to become Prime Minister. Once again our hero stepped over the bleeding body of a flashier, louder rival — this time Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, the most arrogant man on the planet. Curzon thought Baldwin a man “of the utmost insignificance”. When the King told him that he was picking Baldwin anyway, he burst into tears.

So, armed with his religious faith, his boringness and his Cambridge Third, Baldwin ascended to the highest office in the land. In reality, of course, he wasn’t boring at all. Time magazine called him “a perfect John Bull in physical and mental makeup”; but as any lecturer in beauty therapy will tell you, makeup takes work.

Baldwin’s background was in industry, but he was brilliant at playing the country yeoman. In his most famous speech, a paean to romantic nostalgia, he evoked “the sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill”.

All this was pure fantasy. The sounds of Baldwin’s England were record players, radios, motorbikes and vacuum cleaners. They were motor cars chugging through suburban estates, builders hammering away at Tudorbethan semis. But as he realised, if only unconsciously, middle-class suburban modernity came with a deep longing for what had been lost.

Baldwin offered his voters stability, rootedness, a sense of tradition. Watch one of his YouTube clips — my favourite is this tremendously endearing speech at a retirement home for elderly actors — and it’s hard not to feel immediately reassured. He seems the very embodiment of old England. But of course the whole thing is a performance — and given the medium, a very modern one.

Suggested reading

What Harry Flashman teaches us about empire

By Aris Roussinos

To some of his better-remembered contemporaries, Baldwin’s success was utterly baffling. Churchill, when playing chess, would gesture at his opponent’s pawns with the words: “Bring out your Baldwins.” Orwell said that he was “simply a hole in the air”. They were both wrong. Voters in the Twenties and Thirties understandably shrank from the reckless, belligerent adventurism that had sacrificed so many lives at Gallipoli. Most voters were more like Bilbo Baggins, the very personification of Baldwin’s England, who made his first appearance during the great man’s final months in office. “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”

As for being a hole in the air, that too was all part of the performance. Baldwin’s appeals to unflashy common sense were a brilliant way of presenting the Conservatives as the sensible, unthreatening, alternative to Labour’s supposed crypto-Bolshevism. And in reality, he was a much more nervous, restless figure than people realised. Colleagues watching him on the front bench noticed how he would twitch and fidget with nerves, exhibiting tics you can still detect on YouTube today. His oddest quirk was his habit of picking up books, lifting them to his face and sniffing them, which has never been properly explained. Some strange Harrovian fetish?

A century on, then, Baldwin ought to be much better known. To academic historians like his biographer Stuart Ball, his accomplishments are obvious. In an age of seething political turbulence, he turned the Tories into the dominant party of government, enlisting working-class and middle-class voters beneath the banners of common sense. His affable, consensual style meant Britain entered the late Thirties as a relatively contented, cohesive country — especially when compared with future allies such as France and the United States, let alone Germany and Italy. There will always be questions about the pace of rearmament. But Baldwin’s contribution to victory was arguably deeper and more important. Thanks to him, Britain entered the war united — perhaps the greatest asset of all.

Suggested reading

Do national conservatives trust the people?

By Tom McTague

Today people love to judge our predecessors according to our own moral and cultural standards – and here Baldwin also comes out remarkably well. His eldest son Oliver, traumatised by his experiences in the trenches, became a Left-wing Labour MP, opposed to everything his father believed in. Stanley confessed to his daughter that he “nearly died” when he first saw Oliver glaring at him from the Opposition benches. But he was not a man to hold a grudge; father and son were reconciled eventually, and their letters make for deeply moving reading.

And there’s something more. Oliver wasn’t just a socialist; he was gay. Some Conservative MPs would have had a stroke at the very thought, and Stanley’s cousin Rudyard Kipling was so appalled by such “beastliness” that he severed all relations with his nephew. But Baldwin remained the ever-loving father. Whatever his personal convictions, he accepted his son’s partner, John Boyle, as part of the family, and would often drive over to visit them at their Oxfordshire farmhouse. If he ever murmured the slightest syllable of criticism, there’s no sign of it.

So perhaps the last word should go to Oliver, whose memoir of his father’s final days in December 1947 is reprinted in Philip Williamson’s wonderful collection of Baldwin’s letters. “He died as he would have wished,” Oliver wrote, “peacefully in bed. No bed-clothes were ruffled, no attempt made to ring a bell or turn on a light.”

That was entirely in character, and perhaps that’s why he’s barely remembered today. But Stanley Baldwin deserves better. He wasn’t just a great politician. He was a great man.

The good news is they want us to have lots and lots of sex. The bad news is they also want us to be heterosexual, married to the person we’re having sex with and avoiding contraception while we do it. Working motherhood, free childcare, and quickie divorces are out. Babies and the “normative family held together by marriage” are in.

For some liberal conservatives, it apparently all came as a bit of a shock. Meanwhile, for those looking for any excuse to call the Conservative Party “fascist”, it was a field day. Once the stuff on reproduction was judiciously combined with material from migrant-averse Tory speakers such as Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the whole package started to look to many like a cover version of Viktor Orbán’s greatest hits — including to Orbán’s own political director. Not that this would have necessarily dismayed the speakers in question.

As I watched the conference unfold, I started to think that having a name that starts with “National” and ends with “ism” might be the least of National Conservatism’s image problems. When I first read about the event, I vaguely imagined that it would be a mostly cerebral affair, conducted behind closed doors — a thrashing out of disputed intellectual territory, with the aim of forming a shared, reinvigorated vision for the direction of conservatism, currently languishing in near-terminal decline. I didn’t realise it would be done in the full glare of the media and the voting public.

I didn’t anticipate there would be a film of MP Danny Kruger coming across like a slightly sinister vicar, lecturing the British public about what many naively assume are private romantic relationships (“Marriage is not all about you … It’s not just a private arrangement, it’s a public act by which you undertake to live for someone else, for their sake, and the sake of your children, and the sake of wider society!”). I didn’t think they would let Miriam Cates say, out loud and in full view of The Guardian’s deputy political editor, that “cultural Marxism… is systematically destroying our children’s souls”. In short, I didn’t expect them to go full Back to Basics, having barely arrived on the scene. I thought they might take a bit of a run-up first.

Some of the consequent hostile reaction is just opportunist histrionics from enemies seeking political advantage. There’s nothing fascist, or even particularly Right-wing, about policies attempting to stabilise families for the good of children’s welfare, or to redress declining birth rates with an eye to protecting future pensions and the welfare state. It’s perfectly fine to consider how present socioeconomic models, often focused upon treating the sexes equally, badly serve some distinctive needs of mothers and their children. And it’s appropriate to worry about the way in which personal development curricula in schools have been outsourced to companies thronging with sexual libertarians, self-identifying as moral saints. Indeed, if Keir Starmer doesn’t also think critically about these things, he will be missing a vote-winning trick.

Still, like many a gimlet-eyed revolutionary before them, there is a sense that these ideologues are skipping to the end too fast. Immersed in a bubble of like-minded think tanks, podcasts, and blogposts, it is easy to think that certain background assumptions go without saying. But strategically at least, there’s a need to take those you want to persuade on a journey — to meet them where they are, as opposed to where you think they should be.

And though Cates, Kruger and friends prosecute their arguments in the name of “ordinary British people”, many OBPs are much more liberal than they are. After all, Britain has been a highly liberalised society for decades. Unlike those neoliberal thinkers who conceptualise the individual as metaphysically unencumbered and entirely self-made, post-liberals are supposed to understand the powerful effects of socialisation on personality and preference. Cumulative exposure to the policies of Thatcher, Blair, and Cameron has left its formative mark. We’re intensely relaxed about most things, often to the point of inertia. Equally, whereas Cates and Kruger are both devout Christians, most OBPs lack any religious faith to help underpin the communitarian values being argued for.

This means that, in order to win people over to their cause, post-liberals are going to have to be extra savvy. It would help if, along the way, they didn’t provide soundbites that are easily trolled. For instance, it is very unlikely that Cates expected her use of the phrase “cultural Marxism” would be construed as antisemitic — but even so, it sounded conspiratorial, reminiscent of a caricatural McCarthyite talking about reds under the bed. In fact, there’s nothing Marxist about the identity politics embedded in so many of our national institutions and organisations. Some of its principal disseminators are HR professionals, for god’s sake.

The nearest thing to a justification for the claim would involve a reference to the neo-Marxist idea of a “long march through the institutions”, and the goal of infiltrating existing organisations to build alternative anti-capitalist cultures, or “counterinstitutions”, as Herbert Marcuse put it. But if this is what counts as culturally Marxist then, ironically, the National Conservative conference itself qualifies as such — set up by its founder Yoram Hazony to counter the dominant neoliberal, free-marketeer culture within Conservatism.

More from this author

Prince Harry is haunted by his ghostwriter

By Kathleen Stock

There’s another thing post-liberals have in common with Marxists, too. Each wants to fundamentally restructure society in far-reaching ways. Post-liberals will likely frame this as going “back” to a better time; Marxists would present it as moving “forward”. Temporal metaphors aside, however, each holds that existing social arrangements are ripe for dismantling. And like Marxists, some post-liberals seem blithe to the potential costs of their revolutionary policies for those whose lives don’t fit their preferred vision of the future.

Most obviously, this issue affects those who are not in so-called “normative families”. There are 3 million lone parent families in the UK currently, while millions more are the offspring of single mothers. And 1.5 million people in England and Wales are not heterosexual, while some lesbians and gay men are also parents. In valorising the traditional nuclear family, post-liberals need to avoid stigmatising those who aren’t in one — particularly if they want to avoid social division, as most say that they do.

It is not that wielding social stigma as a weapon is never useful. When a newly destructive social trend first heaves into view, stigmatising it by means of ridicule or outrage can be an effective defence. But there’s a difference between stigmatising what has yet to take hold, and what is already here. In the second case, there’s an increased responsibility to tread carefully. There’s also a difference between stigmatising a discrete activity unattached to any particular identity group, and stigmatising a behaviour which tends to define an entire group in the public mind. There’s a difference between criticising smartphones for kids and criticising single motherhood, for instance.

Perhaps it will be objected that the post-liberals are not stigmatising anyone at all — they are merely describing existing social patterns, documenting harms, and arguing for better alternatives, with evidence. I agree that they are doing that; but I still think this response would be naïve. For most, it is a short walk from “marriage is a public act for the sake of your children and wider society” to “society should think less of you for being an unmarried parent”. Anyone trying to motivate the masses into a comfortingly principled Fifties mindset also needs to remember what used to happen to single mothers and gay people in the Fifties.

This doesn’t mean that the solution is to helplessly accede to existing progressive cultural forces, which at times looks like they are unconsciously focused on converting everybody in the UK to lesbian single motherhood, including the blokes. Rather, it means reconciling the desire to radically reshape the social fabric with recognising the value and dignity of those groups caught in cultural crossfire. It also involves noticing that in any free society, there will always be such people; and that the further towards the margins they are placed, culturally speaking, the more they will become vulnerable and isolated.

In short, post-liberals need to find a sincerely sympathetic narrative that stops those nearer the edges of their preferred social fabric from becoming outcasts. Fidel Castro once observed that a revolution is a struggle between the future and the past. If they really have to go back in time in order to stabilise a world flying apart under liberalism, then let the new revolutionaries take some liberal tolerance with them as they go.

British reactions to Thatcher’s death raised all sorts of questions. A Korean journalist told me that he had spent all afternoon trying to find someone who would admit to having voted for her, and came to wonder how she had won three elections. Meanwhile, the burning of effigies in mining towns seemed to me uncomfortably reminiscent of the head shavings inflicted on French women accused of “collaboration” with the Vichy government: misogynistic violence by men seeking to allay the humiliation of their own defeat. “Ding Dong the Witch is dead” was sent to the top of the British music charts: this, too, seemed simultaneously sexist and naïve. Britain was not a fairy-tale village that would live happily ever after if freed from a spell cast by one woman.

The focus on Thatcher as an individual in 2013 contrasted with the Left’s criticism of Thatcherism as a system through much of the Eighties. The term “Thatcherism” was first used, in a systematic way, by Stuart Hall in Marxism Today, in an article published in January 1979, before she had even been elected. It referred to “Thatcherism” nine times and only once to “Mrs Thatcher”. Hall, married to the eminent feminist historian Catherine, understood how personal attacks on Thatcher slid into sexist sneers. But his austerely impersonal approach was also representative of the Left’s at the time, which emphasised structures. Whereas I sometimes wonder whether my younger colleagues today are aware of anything that is not reported in the Guardian, Hall’s generation of Left-wing intellectuals were assiduous readers of the Financial Times, and always on the look-out for a “crisis of capitalism”.

Early Left-wing writers on Thatcherism were rarely sentimental about what it replaced. They had disapproved of the Heath government of the early Seventies — particularly because of its attempt to implement legislation that would have restricted trade union power. Equally, they often recognised that Thatcherism was part of broader wave of political rethinking that sometimes encompassed the leadership of both major political parties. The Labour government of Jim Callaghan, from 1976 to 1979, had been marked by both a degree of social conservatism (not for nothing was Callaghan a parliamentary representative of the Police Federation) and by a move to a more free-market kind of economics. Peter Jay — Economics Editor of The Times — was the leading British advocate of monetarism. He influenced people in both the Labour and Conservative Party, but he was himself a member of the former, and Callaghan’s son-in-law.

Now, sixth formers are ritualistically trained to write about the end of the post-war consensus; but they are rarely taught one simple fact: in the early Eighties, the fiercest attacks on consensus came from the Left. It was Labour who fought the 1983 election on a manifesto that would, among other things, have meant British withdrawal from Nato and the European Economic Community. Some on the Left had even felt a grudging admiration for the radicalism of the first Thatcher government. They shared its distaste for condescension that some citizens experienced when they dealt with powerful agencies of the state. Like Thatcher, they disliked the complacency that they associated with established politicians of both parties.

Suggested reading

The Tories need to get over Thatcher

By Robert Saunders

Everything changed after Labour’s crushing defeat in 1983. The challenge of Thatcherism demanded that the Labour Party ease its way back to the centre ground. The Tories, too, saw that there was not much point in ostentatious radicalism, once the major victories of the early Thatcher period had been won — particularly after the National Union of Mineworkers had been broken in 1985. They were now presiding over a new consensus, in which weaker trade unions and the sale of council houses were widely accepted. Privatisation, a word that they had barely dared use as late as 1979, was commonplace. Thatcherism had triumphed.

But Thatcher’s personal style — her flamboyant awkwardness and her obvious distaste for her political enemies — did not suit the new mood. She was never comfortable with consensus, even when the consensus in question was one that she had helped create. The personal myth of Margaret Thatcher began to diverge from Thatcherism. Earlier in the Eighties, for all her strident tone, Thatcher had been a politician, intuitively conscious that she needed to compromise and sometimes even retreat if she was to survive and achieve some measure of what she wanted. Later in the decade, she was increasingly prone to present herself as a kind of British de Gaulle — a national saviour who was above politics.

The emphasis on Thatcher as a person created problems because, as the writers behind Marxism Today had rightly sensed, Thatcherism had not really been about Thatcher. Her government had contained able and powerful ministers who pushed through different aspects of its policy. Indeed, Thatcherism was built on a kind of coalition that involved compromises and alliances between different kinds of people with different priorities. Keith Joseph was the most prominent political thinker behind the whole thing but useless at practical politics. Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker were indifferent about — in Walker’s case hostile to — some of the economic theory that underlay Thatcherism, but both men delivered spectacular practical results.

More from this author

Conservatives rely on inequality

By Richard Vinen

Not surprisingly, Thatcher’s emphasis on her own personal significance and her alienation from the mundane compromises of domestic politics annoyed her colleagues. (It was an alienation that was increased by the fact that she came to think of herself more and more as an international stateswoman rather than a British politician.) It helped precipitate her eviction from the leadership of her party and thus from Downing Street. Thatcher’s fall was, though, a revolution within Thatcherism rather than a revolution against Thatcherism. The economic policies of the Thatcher government continued. Indeed, in policy terms, Major was more Thatcherite than Thatcher: he privatised the railways — something that she had hesitated to do — and closed the last British coal mines.

Thatcher’s fall further divided the cult of Thatcher as an individual — let’s call this “Thatcherianism” — from the policies of Thatcherism. Thatcher had been on the Conservative front bench for most of her political career. Now for the first time she was freed from the constraints of practical politics. She became more extreme and was deeply bitter towards party leaders, especially Major, whom she believed had betrayed her. The myth of her martyrdom was cultivated by a small number of loyalists who had followed her into political exile, as well as by younger people who came into parliament too late to have direct experience of what the Thatcher governments had actually done.

“Thatcherianism” began to acquire its own political identity, separate from Thatcherism. It revived the social conservatism that had been part of Thatcherism in 1979 but had largely disappeared from the policies of the Thatcher government by 1989. Most important, it pushed a ferocious hostility to the European Union — particularly after Thatcher presented herself as the standard bearer of opposition to the Maastricht treaty in the early Nineties. This was quite a break with the past: it had been Labour that spoke of leaving the European Community in 1983. Thatcherites had welcomed West-European unity as a means of resisting Communism and promoting free markets. Thatcher was always emotionally ill-at ease with Europe but, during most of her years as prime minister, she was also realistic enough to know that emotion is a bad guide to politics. As late as 1988, she would regarded leaving the European Union as bat-shit crazy.

Suggested reading

Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher

By Aris Roussinos

In an odd way, the rise of a personalised “Thatcherianism” cult played into John Major’s hands in the early Nineties. The intemperate, ungracious nature of attacks by Thatcher and her remaining allies occluded the extent to which the Major government was really continuing her economic policies. It also contributed to the sense that Major was a moderate and consensual figure — and this, in turn, helped make policies that might once have seen as highly controversial seem like a new kind of common sense. Tory frontbenchers in the Nineties managed to imply that they had moved on from the savage conflicts of the Eighties and that it would be unreasonable to hold them responsible for the policies of the Thatcher governments — governments in which many of them had served as senior ministers.

Of course, the success of Thatcherism extended beyond the Conservative Party. The truth is that large parts of the British establishment — civil servants, Labour politicians and even the occasional trade unionist, such as Frank Chapple — regarded much of what the Thatcher government did, notably breaking the miners, as necessary. There was also a more general shift in public opinion and behaviour. Dozens of small-scale actions — buying shares in privatised companies, voting for demutualisation of buildings societies (or taking the bonuses even when we voted against) — made most of the British middle class complicit in one way or another. Indeed, it is extraordinary how the free-market pervades everyday life in modern Britain. I am writing these words in Delhi. When I first came here, in 1984, the notion of haggling over money when, for example, one took a ride in an auto-rickshaw, still seemed odd. Now we are, in effect, haggling over money every time we book an Uber online.

Andrew Gamble was the single most important person to write on Thatcherism for Marxism Today. When he kindly came to speak to my students about this part of his career, he remarked on the brief commercial success of the magazine after it was stocked by W.H. Smith. The students asked whether this meant he got paid more. He grinned ruefully and said that he — and, so far as he knew, the other contributors — never even thought to ask about payment. Things have changed. A friend of mine gave a television interview after Thatcher’s death. A child of the Eighties herself and with a keen entrepreneurial instinct, she was much impressed that the leading public intellectual with whom she shared the studio negotiated ruthlessly about his appearance fee. Finally, the cameras went on and the interviewer asked what Thatcher had done to the country. The leading public intellectual paused to compose his features into an appropriately solemn expression and said: “I am afraid that she made us all much more selfish.”

Goldsmith founded The Ecologist in the early Seventies to challenge the myth of Progress, which was then at its bombastic and all-conquering peak. It was the age of big dams and DDT and space programmes, and Teddy was having none of it. Inspired by his studies and experience of indigenous communities, he was contemptuous of the “development” pushed by Western governments, NGOs and transnational corporations, which to his mind was colonisation disguised as charity. He believed that modernity was destroying both culture and nature, and that we should return to the models of the past, an argument which he laid out most convincingly in his magnum opus, The Way.

But Teddy was not an easy man to work with. He was chaotic and disorganised, he delighted in controversy, and he had what I regarded back then, in my youthful arrogance, as a ridiculous resistance to actually making himself understood. He would never use a simple word when he could invent a more complicated one, and if you ever dared to use the word “accessible” in his presence, he would go red in the face under his whitening beard.

These days, under my own whitening beard, I find that I’m almost entirely on his side, but back then I thought that greater accessibility was precisely what his work, and that of the wider green movement, desperately needed. This was before anyone in the media had heard of climate change or “sustainability”. Greta Thunberg was only a glint in her father’s eye. But I wanted to save the whole world all by myself, and I knew that the first step towards doing that was to tell the whole world precisely what was wrong with it, in easy language and with big pictures attached.

More from this author

The truth about eco-fascism

By Paul Kingsnorth

So when Teddy told me one day, with some relish, that he was writing a book called Against Progress, I found myself spitting nails. What was the silly old sod doing that for? Did he want to alienate everybody? Didn’t he realise that this was the equivalent of insulting somebody’s religion in public? Why couldn’t he at least try to reach the mainstream with his important arguments? People needed to hear them urgently, so that we could change course! Couldn’t he at least, if only in the cause of saving the planet, try to be more… accessible?

Teddy never wrote that book, but I’ve purloined the title and used it here in his honour, and in acknowledgement of my wrongness. In the quarter of a century since then, the green argument has been made so “accessible” that it has been entirely absorbed and redirected by the system it set out to challenge, something that Teddy could probably see coming even if I couldn’t. Now, in the age of vat-grown eco-food, industrialised hilltops, killer robots and emerging machine intelligence, it’s become as clear as day that Teddy was right. Standing Against Progress is no fringe luxury, or eccentric tic: it is a first principle for anyone who is paying attention.

The work of what we have come to call Progress is the work of homogenising the world. I capitalise the word because Progress is an ideology — even a metaphysics — and if we want to understand it we need to grasp its foundational assumptions. We are trained from birth to see the living world and its people as a matrix of interchangeable parts, all of them potentially for sale. Our bodies, our nations, our forests, our heritage: Progress will not stop until everything is measured, commercialised, commodified, altered at the genetic level, put up for sale, forced into “equitable” relationships with everything else, or otherwise flattened and sold.

More from this author

The Anti-Christ now rules us all

By Paul Kingsnorth

The religion of Progress is leading us into the flames, as Teddy saw so many decades back. Those of us who feel this way need to have the confidence to say to: to denounce the religion of the age, to dissect it, to make claims against it. Those of us who seek to resist the emerging Total System, or simply to give it the slip, need an alternative worldview: something to stand for, and stand upon. Not an ideology, mind, and certainly not a blueprint for utopia. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. No, what we need is something more old-fashioned: a stance. Even a politics. But what should it look like?

In a way, it seems like a superfluous question. After all, modernity has been the age of revolutions, and we have ideologies coming out of our ears. The last century has been an inferno of competing ideals on Left and Right and elsewhere, all offering a better world. But none of them, in my opinion, has challenged what Mary Harrington has usefully called “Progress Theology” at its root. They have just taken different paths towards it.

Various strands of socialism and communism, for example, have been pursued for nearly two centuries in the cause of abolishing or taming the monster of global capitalism. Some were beneficent, some were tyrannical, but none challenged the core values of Progress: all were centralised, statist, in love with technology’s promise and had their own idealist, rationalised notions of how humanity should remake Eden. Anarchism has lurked perpetually on the sidelines, but it’s barely been able to organise a meeting, let alone a revolution. The greens have been absorbed by the technosphere. Meanwhile fascism, National Socialism and their various cousins on the hard Right are infested with power-worship, a love of straight lines and marching columns, and an explicit call to impose the will of the strong on the unwilling bodies of the weak.

Suggested reading

Can gratitude save humanity?

By Matthew B Crawford

Perhaps conservatism, then, could fit the bill? In theory, at least, it is the tradition which comes closest to offering a politics rooted in human reality. It promotes the value of tradition, centres home and family, values religious faith and refuses both the centralised state and abstract ideals of utopian justice. It embraces a society based on a notion of virtue, which itself is drawn from the cosmic realm.

But conservatism has failed as well. This is partly because it was always only, in Roger Scruton’s words, “a hesitation within liberalism”. Conservatism is a modern confection, a product of the post-1789 shift in Western consciousness (the “ism” is the giveaway). It evolved to slow the revolution, rather than turn it around — for how could it be turned around? Conservatism’s failure, in that sense, was baked in from the start, and by now, across most of the modern world, there is simply nothing left to conserve.

This in turn is partly due to conservatism’s other flaw: its love affair with private property and the sovereign individual. Both of these things can be necessary bulwarks against the top-down collectivism of the Left, but taken to extremes they lead to a top-down collectivism of another kind: oligarchic capitalism. That “conservatives” have been the foremost defenders of this monstrosity, as it strips the world of all the things which they claim to hold dear, is the greatest hole beneath their waterline. It is the reason why the political factions which bear the name are now little more than business cabals, throwing out anti-woke red meat to the proles here and there to disguise the fact that all they really want to conserve is their money.

More from this author

How the Left fell for capitalism

By Paul Kingsnorth

Yet if we look back further in history, there is a political descriptor that might, just might, apply to what I have been trying to write about here; something that we could perhaps pin to our lapels as we resist Progress Theology. I came across it in an obscure, 40-year-old history book, and a lightbulb went off somewhere in my skull. This, I thought, despite my instinctive loathing of labels and categories, might just be one that I could see myself claiming. Allow me to introduce you to the reactionary radicals.

Craig Calhoun’s drily-titled book, The Origins of Class Struggle, was published in 1982, and despite the title it is not a Marxist tome. In fact, it was written specifically to take aim at the popularity of Marx-inflected history, of the kind exemplified in E. P. Thompson’s famous work The Making of the English Working Class. Calhoun was politely critical of Thompson for imposing an anachronistic Marxist framework on the historical “struggles” of workers in the early stages of the industrial revolution, and particularly for labelling as “working class” people who did not fit into that category. For Calhoun, Marx’s binary portrait of a “proletariat” set against a “bourgeoisie” may have had some utility when studying the factory system of the late nineteenth century, but it didn’t apply to those artisans, farmers, small businessmen and families who resisted the rise of that system in the first place.

Those people — most famously the machine-breaking Luddites — were in Calhoun’s telling more radical than the later “proletariat” would turn out to be (despite Marx’s urging). While the industrial working class were fighting for their rights within the established factory system, the earlier rebels were striving to prevent that system’s arrival. Calhoun had a name for these people: “reactionary radicals”.

More from this author

The West is homeless

By Paul Kingsnorth

In my work over the years, I have told the stories of some of their contemporary equivalents: Brazil’s landless worker’s movement, Mexico’s Zapatistas, West Papua’s tribal freedom movement, England’s anti-privatisation campaigners. But it was only when I read Calhoun’s book that I realised what I had been doing: tracing the thread of reactionary radicalism as it continued to resist the spread of Progress around the world. Calhoun’s framing explained my own work — and my own politics — to me in two simple words, and at the same time gave me an explanation as to why that work had sometimes been mischaracterised or misunderstood. Reactionary radicalism does not fit easily into any Left-Right paradigm. It is a politics from an older world.

Calhoun’s book is the story of the doomed resistance of the pre-industrial people of England to the destruction of their economies and associated ways of life. Accustomed as we are now to “work” and “home” and “consumption” and “production”, it can be hard for us to understand that for most people in pre-modern times, these amounted to the same thing. For an artisan weaver in early modern England, for example, home was where the family lived and worked, where children were born and reared and trained, where trade was carried out, where food was grown and eaten. Today all of this has been broken apart into small segments — turning the home into a dormitory, its adult inhabitants into both “workers” and “consumers” elsewhere, its children into pupils at a distant school, its parlour into a show-room for TV, tablet and gaming console, its kitchen into a store-room for shop-bought, processed “food”. What brought this about? The industrial revolution and the rise of the factory system. In a word: capitalism.

But those who resisted this process, emphasises Calhoun, did not do so for the kind of ideologically-driven reasons that a class-conscious Marxist might. What the reactionary radicals were defending above all, says Calhoun, was the “moral economy” — the polar opposite of the “free market” that was being built on the bones of old England. The free market commodified everything, from products to people, and sought to make that commodification global. The booming British empire was a scaling-up of what was already happening in England. Empire, in this sense, was never a story of “the British” imposing their ways onto “the colonies”. It was a story of factory lords, big landowners and a newly-empowered capitalist class destroying the moral economies of communities from Lancashire to the Punjab, and forcing all of their peoples into the new capitalist “workplace” — where most of us remain to this day.

Suggested reading

The Tories have betrayed the Caravan Dream

By Mary Harrington

Reactionary radicalism, then as now, is a defence of a pre-industrial, human-scale system, built around community bonds, empowered people, local economics. The attack on that system may come via gunboats or trade agreements, redcoats or giant superstores, enclosure acts or digital currencies, but it will always suck wealth out of place-based communities and funnel it to distant stockholders, just as it will suck the power away from local people and funnel it to national or international bodies. It will always replace people with technology, and it will always make consumers of us all.

The way that reactionary radicals, in the early years of the industrial revolution, attempted to defend the moral economy was not with the thoughtless thuggery that the propaganda of the victors would later suggest, but by a reasoned series of demands. The Luddites, for example, opposed new machinery in a way that was “thoughtful, not absolute”. They also, Calhoun, points out, “campaigned for the right of craft control over trade, the right to a decent livelihood, for local autonomy… Machinery was at issue because it specifically interfered with these values.” Technology, thought the Luddites, should be applied in a way which reinforced the moral economy rather than destroyed it.

Is it possible to cleave to a reactionary radicalism today? Or is it too late? For the reality is that the reactionary radicals of pre-industrial England comprehensively lost. The moral economy was destroyed, and we live in its commercialised ruins. Not only did they lose, but the ideologies of the modern age, both Right and Left, have an interest in burying their memories. The Marx-inflected Left wants no truck with workers who resisted capitalism in order to defend traditional ways of life, because those traditional ways stink of “reaction” and what Marx himself called “the idiocy of rural life”. Meanwhile, because modern conservatism has attached itself limpet-like to capitalism, its advocates today can often be found defending the very matrix of global trade, empire and unaccountable corporate power that laid waste to the last remaining “conservative” cultures in England.

Suggested reading

Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

As ever, the modern ideologies fail us. And yet, reactionary radicalism is still to be found, if we look in the right places. It is especially prevalent outside the West, in places where traditional moral economies are still at least partially intact. Every time you hear of a village in China or India resisting a giant dam, or tribal people fighting eviction from their ancestral lands, or communities resisting vast mines, you are hearing from reactionary radicals.

But what of those of us in the “developed” world, where Progress has triumphed? Well, if the moral economy has been destroyed where we live, we are just going to have to start rebuilding it. I spent years of my life investigating experiments in doing so; my ageing but perhaps-still-useful book Real England contains plenty of examples. Perhaps we live in the place our ancestors lived, or perhaps we moved to our place from another last month: either way, we are part of the place’s life now. We can help turn it into a moral economy — a foundation from which to resist the values of Progress — or we can capitulate to those values. We start small: everything starts small, and the best things remain that way. All we have is our limited power; still, it has its own impact.

Reactionary radicalism operates at the human scale, and not at the scale on which ideology operates. Ideology is the enemy of particularity, which is why every modern revolution has ended up turning on its own people. From the mass murder of peasants in the Vendee by French revolutionaries to the Bolshevik slaughter of workers in Kronstadt, ideology is always the enemy of genuine, rooted communities. Real culture — human-scale culture — is messy. It cannot be labelled. The moral economy rarely makes rational sense. But it makes human sense. And that is what matters.

The Tory Tribune of the Plebs is there to talk “common sense”; to say those things which connect with a section of the electorate most politicians would like to ignore. Teddy Taylor was one. An MP first in Glasgow and then Southend, he would use his prominence in parliament to call for the return of the birch. Geoffrey Dickens was another, a former boxer who campaigned to ban teddy bears and suggested homosexuality be criminalised to stop the spread of Aids. Both also, naturally, tried to bring back hanging. Theirs is a blokey, nuance-free politics, whereby villains get what they deserve, the sick filth is banned, and honest people live in peace. Lee Anderson has established himself as their heir.

Anderson is never short of things to say. He calls himself “30p Lee” for his pronouncements on how easy it should be for poorer households to live on a budget. He’s hawkish on crime and immigration, and an advanced fighter in every aspect of the culture war — even boycotting England for “taking the knee”. Perhaps inevitably, an interview emerged last week where he endorsed the death penalty. Since his election in 2019, the MP for Ashfield has established himself as the most well-known of the Red Wall MPs. Across social media, he is loathed by his opponents as well as the more liberal, cosmopolitan wing of the Conservatives. He probably doesn’t care that much, buoyed by the supporters who seem to adore him. Some call him the most controversial man in parliament, others a genuine voice of the people. Either way, he’s made his mark.

Anderson, like Taylor, Dickens and others before him, is pugnacious and uncaring for niceties. Unlike them, however, he has been able to harness social media to boost his profile even further. Whereas the firebrands of the Seventies and Eighties had to wait for a journalist to call them, Anderson has shown he can make himself the party’s main character in just a tweet. Twitter has boosted his profile and advanced his political career — crowned last week by his promotion to Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. Not bad, for someone who was a Labour councillor until 2018.

More from this author

Sunak's enemies lie in wait

By John Oxley

There is, of course, a a cynical edge to all this. Once, MPs commanded attention on the streets and in the broadsheets, either as a fighter in their constituency or an intellectual, policy-minded-grandee. Today, however, it’s all in the retweets and social media. The most well-known MPs, certainly beyond the front benches, have a carefully curated online presence. Dehenna Davison TikToks herself into being the “cool” Tory MP. Stella Creasy lip-syncs on Instagram after voting to ban protests around abortion clinics. Anderson’s a social media star in the same vein — curating a larger-than-life version of himself to stand out among his colleagues. It’s not that he doesn’t believe what he says, but he chooses to express it in the most performative way possible.

This does have its uses: Anderson occupies a useful niche, both for himself and the party. Tory MPs generally sit to the Left of their voters on most social issues, including crime. Many of the party’s rank and file support the death penalty. Around a third of voters do too, with that number increasing with more specific questions, such as when it comes to terrorists or murderous paedophiles. It’s a faction the Tories are never actually going to yield to, but that they want to keep inside the political tent. These are older, poorer voters — exactly the demographics the Tories are increasingly reliant on. Figures such as Anderson give them some red meat without really changing anything.

But is this useful to the party in the long term? On current predictions, Anderson will struggle to save his seat at the next election. It probably won’t even be close, and he may well slump to third behind the local Ashfield Independents. The picture is so bleak for the Tories, his defeat will be just a footnote as more famous faces fall and far bigger majorities are overturned. A reversion to the meanness of hang’em and flog’em policies won’t do much to stem this.

Suggested reading

Where are the Young England radicals?

By Tom McTague

Serving him up as antidote to Sunak’s gloss is far from guaranteed to work either. As much as the party wants to appeal to an authoritarian base, its electoral coalition is much broader than many assume, and it’s hard to embrace it without pushing others out the other side. Many Tory voters see the death penalty as abhorrent and are largely conciliatory about immigration and poverty. About a quarter of Conservative voters oppose the Rwanda scheme, for example, while about half think it is “difficult” for the poor to raise their incomes.

Rather than win them over, Anderson’s approach could alienate these voters, especially in his more outlandish moments. He was previously suspended from Labour when his action to block Travellers from a field led to a charge of fly-tipping, and his parliamentary comments on Gypsies have also drawn strong criticism. Elsewhere, Private Eye has reported on his links to those who flirt with the far-Right, and his tussles with journalists are far from edifying. The praise he garners from “common-sense” Tories will be matched by dislike from The Sensibles. In the southeast, where the Tories are struggling to hold on to the professional classes, Anderson is unlikely to shore up anything.

More from this author

Westminster isn't that corrupt

By John Oxley

Even in the Red Wall, it’s wrong to assume that everyone is a budding “30p Lee”. These areas were originally defined as being demographically Tory when it came to wealth and age profiles but alienated from the party culturally, largely because of Thatcherism. They are more varied in their outlook than most would admit. You might be able to pick up a street house for £70,000, but many of Lee’s voters will sit in comfortable detached houses with mid-six-figure asking prices. They’ve probably paid them off and are receiving generous pensions. The Tory success in these northern seats is linked to Brexit, but is driven by many of their traditional political factors.

Yet even if the Tories are wiped out, the party will always have its Andersons — just as Labour will always be a home for the hard Left. Where else are they to go? But this is where the Conservatives should take care. When the Conservatives have been successful, it’s been because they have been able to knit together the shy Tories, the quiet Tories and the wet Tories, along with the broad-chested, pugilistic tribune archetype. Taylor and Dickens, after all, were always on the outside of the party establishment, more tolerated than loved. As Labour learnt with Corbyn, giving too much prominence to the outliers alienates far more voters than it brings in — and, after their inevitable electoral failure, they tend to leave chaos in their wake.

It was only a matter of time before the American media delivered a story of a millennial forced to choose between pure posting and real politics. And with the past two decades as our guide, their decision was inevitable: they would choose the post. Emperor Nero was alleged to have fiddled while Rome burned, but a millennial poster would today logged onto Twitter, “shitposting” his way through the cancellation of everything prior generations might have held dear.

On 19 January, the Chicago Reader revealed that 36-year-old Pericles “Perry” Abbasi — a campaign attorney, who was running for office in Chicago’s 25th police district with the backing of the Fraternal Order of Police — had a history of posting bizarre and unseemly content on social media. In a leaked screenshot from a group chat, he had written that “the horrible black diet” was the reason for “13/50”, referencing a common internet meme about Black Americans’ percentage of the population (13%) and supposed share of violent crime they commit (50%).

Abbasi denied these accusations of bigotry. He claimed he didn’t remember everything he was alleged to have written (without necessarily denying his authorship, either), while also offering a second more general defence of his behaviour: this was the internet, he argued, and if he thought of something funny, he’d immediately post it. If this meant writing a tweet about how a relationship with a 36-year-old woman led him to conclude that child porn sentencing is far too long, then so be it. If it meant “making up insane things to stir shit up”, then it meant just that. Abbasi admitted he couldn’t even remember what he posted 48 hours ago; it was all just a blur of posting, retweets, engagement, and likes. He has posted nearly 104,000 times over the past four years, averaging roughly 70 tweets per day (one can also assume he retweeted hundreds of replies each day). In a sense, Abbasi was telling the truth: he was lost in the sauce, living from post to post.

Many of Abbasi’s clients were less than impressed by this. The original report in the Chicago Reader was quickly amended to insert various statements from political figures whose campaigns had him, each stating his comments were unacceptable. But Abbasi doubled down, posting a series of tweets about how being cancelled “was a choice”, that he was an “alpha male” and thus above apologising for things out of principle, and that Osama Bin Laden himself taught us that people will always prefer a “strong horse” to a “weak horse.” Then, he received a “like” on one of his tweets from Elon Musk and declared that the era of his cancellation had ended.

At first glance, this appears to be a fairly mundane story. Political candidates and semi-public figures have their improprieties revealed in the press all the time, and careless millennial posters have been ruining their careers for years, as people who remember the case of publicist Justine Sacco know. The story of Pericles Abbasi, however, deserves a second look. It shows a crash between two different worlds, and reveals what happens when millennial online culture collides with reality.

More from this author

The feebleness of white nationalists

By Malcom Kyeyune

Abbasi’s field of work — being an attorney for political organisations and campaigns, where he had begun to make inroads with Right-leaning groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police despite earlier support for Black Lives Matter — is based on trust and professional reputation. But the Chicago Reader revelation put his other reputation at risk: his reputation in the online world of “posting”, where he was among the most prolific posters on social media — perhaps the most prolific, as far as sheer volume of content production is concerned. In this world, online micro-celebrities fight with each other tooth and claw for likes, attention, followers, and social position inside a myriad of private group chats and social circles on Twitter.

Abbasi thus faced not one but two risks of reputational loss. He could either jeopardise his standing as an attorney entrusted with major real estate transactions and real-world political campaigns, where he is implicitly trusted not to embarrass his employers in public — or his standing as a preeminent poster. Abbasi chose the latter, which begs the question: why exactly would anyone choose to protect his standing — his “clout” — online, over his real-world career, for which he devoted years of his life? It is impossible to imagine scandalous figures from decades past, a rogue’s gallery ranging from Ted Kennedy to Silvio Berlusconi, risking so much for so very little — for a handful of likes, shares, and retweets.

There is little proof that Abbasi was motivated by some sort of genuine racist belief. He has in the past shared strong views in support of civil rights and, in his pre-shitposting days, cautioned a more intimate circle of colleagues about heaping too much scorn on BLM protestors. If Abbasi ever entertained a racist thought, I suspect he would just have forgotten it 24 hours later; lost in the endless stream of posting and “doing a bit” as he played some sort of role or character online. Abbasi, for instance, is engaged to woman, has also devoted a good many tweets to jokes about logging onto Grindr, a gay hook-up app, for the purpose of “outing” cheating husbands or “something I’m doing for a Nathan Fielder type show I’m developing”. Clearly, his tweets have little grounding in reality.

All of this ties into a curious fact about the sort of online culture that Abbasi is a part of: it is openly, almost to the point of being parodic, a form of “youth culture”, where the rules do not matter and where the norms of ordinary adult society are scorned. But time is a cruel thing: what might seem irreverent or radical at the age of 20 takes on a whole other sheen at 35. When Trump famously descended that escalator and inaugurated his campaign, an entire online “alt-Right” or “dissident Right” subculture clung to him like limpets, constantly stressing the “vitalist” and “youth” pretensions of his movement.

But that was eight years ago. During that time, many former members of these subcultures found partners and started families, leading them to naturally drift away as they assumed the responsibilities of the adult world. But others such as Abbasi remain there, stuck like Peter Pan in a permanent, virtual Neverland.

Suggested reading

Why pick-up artists joined the Online Right

By Oliver Bateman

The Abbasi story is interesting, then, because here was someone who had punched his ticket out of this overproduced netherworld of millennial losers: he had a good career, good education, good skills, and a good client base for law practice. He cultivated political patrons; he is preparing to get married. Yet there he is, posting under his own name at a prodigious rate others in his generation wouldn’t attempt to match unless masked by anonymity; posting his life away.

Historians and cultural theorists have argued that civilisations have collective “death drives” — fuelled by an oppressive atmosphere of decline and decay — and here is a new variation, the “posting drive”. Abbasi, who is continuing to run for office in Chicago now that he has secured the coveted endorsement of some New York-based “dissident podcasters”, is willing to go down with the ship, so irony-poisoned from years of hard posting that the pain of drowning will be nothing short of sweet relief from his need to respond to likes and notifications.

He is not the first such millennial to go out this way, nor will he be the last — as many in his entire generational cohort, along with the ageing, weakening American empire that subsidises its narcissistic waste, seem likely to follow suit in due course. There are alternatives to running a nation-state to failure, such as serious involvement in real politics, but are those as fun as Elon Musk liking your tweets? I think not.

***

An earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Pericles Abbasi retweeted a photoshopped image of himself over police officer Derek Chauvin. This was incorrect: Abbasi tweeted a photo of himself next to another of George Floyd.

Indeed, it would be trivially easy to trace the shifting faultlines of broader political currents through the prism of food. Witness the sudden shift within America’s food culture, as a previous generations’ celebration of the diverse culinary options provided by mass immigration has morphed into stern lectures from diaspora commentators on the vaguely-defined evils of white people appropriating “ethnic” cuisine. In Britain, equally, a slim volume could easily be written on the political import uncomfortably burdened on fish and chips or chicken tikka masala by devotees of mass migration; a cultural theorist could likewise tease apart the “Proper” label now applied to a distinct category of foodstuff — proper pies, proper burgers, proper chips — as a marker of a specific type of middle-class yearning for proletarian authenticity, while maintaining socially acceptable levels of consumption standards. Like the fetishised fry-ups of London caffs in prosperous areas targeting themselves at tracksuit-wearing millennial creatives, the Proper Burger is the self-consciously gentrified football terrace of our national cuisine, a cultural marker of a precisely measurable socioeconomic bracket.

When this dynamic is considered, Britain’s strange relationship with food, and with its own national cuisine, becomes worthy of analysis. Though much mocked by online Americans, presumably inured to the Lovecraftian horrors of their own food culture, British cuisine at its best is hearty, simple fare, showcasing the natural bounty of these islands, our waters rich with fish and seafood (much of it exported abroad to more appreciative consumers), our rain-soaked pastures the nursemaid of the free-range meat and rich dairy goods Britain has excelled in for millennia. At its best, British food displays the worth of good ingredients cooked well — and at its worst, of poor ingredients cooked badly.

Yet the much-vaunted culinary renaissance in British food from the Nineties on, despite the buoyant effect of an endless stream of glossy cookbooks on the publishing industry, does not seem to have had an appreciable effect on the food most of us eat from day to day. Which British office worker does not recognise the moment of weary, grudging submission to the lunchtime meal deal, the limp and soggy sandwich which fuels the nation’s economy? If Britain has a national dish, it is more likely to be the Ballardian misery of the provincial train station panini, simultaneously scorching hot and half-raw, than it is a steaming steak and ale pie, its crust crisp with suet, or a plate of sizzling lamb’s liver fried in butter with farmhouse bacon.

There is, as there is with every aspect of British life, a strong class dynamic to British food. The most fervent appreciators of the frugal peasant dishes of the past, the nation’s only consumers of stewed beef shin or lamb sweetbreads, are more likely to be upper-middle class, middle-aged executives, who by lunching at St John or the Quality Chop House celebrate the forgotten folkways of their own country, than the call centre workers or shop assistants who have replaced our rural and industrial proletariat. Yet who in Britain is immune to the sudden craving for comfort satiable only by a serving of rich cauliflower cheese or of dark and savoury cottage pie, or has not felt the hobbit-like “Why shouldn’t I?” satisfaction of choosing the fry up at a hotel breakfast over the continental pastry selection?

Into this rich and only partly-understood realm of symbolic meaning arrive two new books, English Food: a Social History by Diane Purkiss, and Phaidon’s glossily-produced The British Cookbook by Ben Mervis. Where Purkiss’s book, an oddly fitting successor to her excellent book on the English Civil War, is a dense and often strangely freeform collection of essays on Britain’s historic relationship with food, rich both with keen observations and dubious or baffling assertions, Mervis’s conventional cookbook is a solid if unexciting introduction to (and at times a strangely defensive apologia for) our national cuisine, aimed at what is presumed to be a sceptical international audience, interspersing stirring photographs with plainly-served prose.

Each book, in its own way, recapitulates the conventional story of Britain’s culinary history, one which reflects that of the nation as a whole, the very origin story of our unique political forms. Once, in the dim and idealised agrarian past, Britain possessed a flourishing peasant food culture, analogous to though distinct from the more celebrated peasant cuisines of our European neighbours. With land enclosure, and the eradication of a free peasant class, came industrialisation and the culinary impoverishment of the new urban proletariat, reduced to a diet of bread, potatoes and dripping. That great font of A-Level history essays, the mid-19th century political battleground of the Corn Laws, symbolises the transference of Britain’s political power from a quasi-feudal landholding class to the globalising, mercantile aspirations of their liberal supplanters, finally severing the popular connection to the land.

Suggested reading

Why the Left eat junk

By Mary Harrington

But this is the very same political struggle that echoes today in the battle between farming and conservation groups for revitalised domestic food production, and the firm preference of our impeccably liberal, notionally conservative ruling party for reliance on cheap imports, as if Britain still controls the global seaways. Like 19th-century liberals fulminating against the Victorian nanny state clamping down on adulterated milk and flour, our free-market thinktanks campaign today for the right of the poor to gorge themselves on bad food. When it comes to food, neither our liberals nor our conservatives have changed very much in the past 200 years, even if the political labels attached to them have almost entirely switched sides.

In the same mid-19th-century period, Ireland’s potato famine, by doing away with the poorest half of the country’s population, enabled the consolidation of a more affluent Catholic dairy-farming class, the bedrock of the modern Irish nationalism which initiated the crumbling of both the Union and the empire. And just as Drake’s introduction of the humble potato eventually redrew the map of Britain, the Empire’s steady pinkening of the world’s surface reshaped British tastes, creating a market for the spices of the subcontinent, the bland white bread flour of the Canadian prairies and the cheap frozen lamb of New Zealand. Then came the war: the food rationing celebrated as an improvement in the diets of the labouring masses also accelerated the drift towards the industrialisation of food and farming, and the extinguishing of Britain’s native farmhouse cheesemaking, orcharding and fishing traditions in pursuit of bland but secure food supplies.

The immediate post-war era saw a reaction in the form of Elizabeth David’s turning towards the bright tastes and fresh produce of the Mediterranean — the origin story of both the Nineties celebrity chef and the frozen supermarket pizza — followed by the counterreaction in the form of Jane Grigson’s classic 1974 English Food. It was the initial skirmish of the ongoing revolt of middle-class tastemakers from David’s continental affectations towards the native culinary heritage of these islands, a fraught and unfinished process analogous to the rest of our contentious relationship with Europe. There, written on a plate, lies our island story: the processes which led to Britain’s past global preeminence also eradicated the foundations of our native food culture, far more so than anywhere else in Europe. As Grigson lamented back in 1974: “we are always running after some new thing… so busy running after the latest dish, that the good things we’ve known for centuries are forgotten as quickly as the boring ones.” A perfect distillation of political conservatism, Grigson’s analysis reminds us that the history of Britain’s food is a perfectly workable metaphor for the rest of the country’s woes.

Viewed in such vein, both books are readable as not-quite-conscious expressions of the cultural moment, and there is an intriguing undertow of cultural, if not political conservatism in Purkiss’s book which contrasts with Mervis’s generic progressivism, which already seems strangely dated. An American, Mervis takes time to earnestly inform his readers in his short introductory essay that “neither the end of slavery nor the end of imperialism meant the end of white supremacy within the new British Commonwealth”, which, glancing down the list of Commonwealth countries, is presumably to be taken less as a meaningful statement than as the customary obeisance with which all American writers must perform to their new religion. Because “Britain has so few truly ‘native’ vegetables… this topic inevitably leads us back to the immigrants and invaders, who, over thousands of years” … but you get the picture, as Mervis strikes his devastating cultural blow against the red-faced root vegetable extremists.

Suggested reading

Italy will win the food wars

By Kenneth R. Rosen

A generation after Robin Cook, Mervis is excited to christen chicken tikka masala Britain’s national dish — perhaps more excited than anyone in Britain, bored of the bland stalwart of the budget supermarket ready meal or luridly-coloured provincial takeaway, could possibly be. As Purkiss sniffs with the frozen hauteur of the foodie, this “mongrel dish”, initially produced, so the story goes, from tinned American tomato soup to satisfy a drunk Glaswegian diner, is “barely middle class, and middle-class Britons, including those of Indian origin, tend to shake it off in favour of something more ‘authentic’”. Perhaps the cultural resonances attached to British food are as hard to appreciate from outside as is the cuisine itself? But political fashions change just as quickly as culinary ones: perhaps Mervis’s recipe for the now unfashionably-named Chicken Kiev will be updated in later editions.

A professor of 17th-century English literature at Oxford, Purkiss places British food in a finer-detailed cultural context than is available to Mervis in his brief essays, giving discursive potted histories of the Enclosure Acts, the rise and fall of the Atlantic fishing industry, the role of tinned food in the British empire, Celtic mythology and a bewildering assortment of other topics. Not all the arguments are convincing, though the book is highly entertaining: her extended diatribe on the myth of Elizabeth David, her work recast as a product of literary modernism rather than food writing, a “Lawrentian myth of escape, redemption and sensual awakening”. is captivating, concluding that “turning our faces away from England sounds profoundly unhelpful, as does encouraging whole worlds of fantasy”, for “she saved English food, but she did it by killing the Englishness of it”. Economically Left-wing — railing against the enclosure of common land and celebrating failed agrarian uprisings while noting that today’s coffee, like sugar before it, “is a cash crop grown in the developing world for consumption in richer countries” — Purkiss is comfortable introducing strongly conservative opinions. No doubt unwittingly, she echoes today’s Twitter reactionaries in observing  that “the people who knocked down Euston Station and devastated the inner cities have wrecked food creation, avid as they were to have modernity and not much else”, while extolling a conservative “radical homemaker” food culture “desperate to recover a skill set and a mindset lost by their parents.”

Likewise, the post-war transferral of women from the kitchen to the workforce may have been experienced as liberation, but it was a disaster for Britain’s food culture, Purkiss observes: “one of those unfortunate moments when it turns out that feminism itself looks very like a dance to the music of business.” Perhaps the worst result, for Purkiss, is the removal of cooking from the realm of the domestic kitchen to the laboratory experiments of the male celebrity chef, the exploding seaweed gels or frozen custard mists of a Blumenthal or Adrià an expression of our estrangement from a living food culture rather than of a culinary renaissance. Unexpectedly post-liberal at times, Purkiss’s book justifies her case that “food and its decline into convenience has become the biggest and most generally agreed sign that society isn’t working and cannot continue to work in the way it currently does”.

Is there some kind of political salvation to be found in the Lancashire hotpot or toad-in-the-hole? Probably not. Yet I have often thought that, should you wish to initiate from scratch a metapolitical British nationalist project, distinct from the globalised aspirations of the Westminster class, you could do worse than take Waitrose as a model. Nationalism was always, historically, a pursuit of the affluent bourgeoisie, and even if its political content (aside from a devotion to the royal family rare among major brands) remains largely sublimated, Waitrose’s cultural production — its lovingly produced weekly newspapers and monthly magazines showcasing small-scale food producers toiling away in a timeless British countryside, its strangely feudal relationship with the Duchy of Cornwall — already echoes, in sublimated form, much of the aesthetic content and instinctive cultural meaning of classical nationalism.

The revival of Britain’s under-appreciated cuisine, halting though it may be, mocked and loved in equal measure, similarly echoes the broader angst of a nation in decline, and deep political meanings will continue to be expressed, unwittingly or not, in our conflicted relationship with our national cuisine. For Mervis, keen to emphasise Britain’s openness to the world and the bright multicultural future he sees for the nation’s food culture, change and the thrill of the new is all good and to be pursued. For Purkiss, echoing Grigson, the historical continuities of British cooking are paramount, and the sense of loss wrought by change is greater: we have lost far more than we have gained by modernity, and there is no clear path for restoration. The story of British food, full of wasted potential and opportunity, uncertain of its future direction, simultaneously seduced by new horizons and lost pastoral idylls, is the story of Britain itself.

The Truss premiership crowned perhaps the most chaotic year in Conservative history: a year of three Prime Ministers, four Chancellors of the Exchequer, three Home Secretaries, four Health Secretaries and five Education Secretaries. Ministers cascaded through government like some dystopian vision of the Twelve Days of Christmas. That some of them were the same people, winking in and out of office like a faulty dash light, added to the sense of drawing-room farce. It was the year of Partygate, Pinchergate and Tractorporn, in which one prime minister was “ambushed by a cake” and another mugged by the financial markets; a year in which, as a Victorian Home Secretary lamented, “the crisis of one day is obliterated by the catastrophe of the next”.

Like a former government advisor, furtively editing his Wikipedia page, it would be understandable if Conservatives preferred simply to erase 2022 from the historical record. Yet if the Conservative Party is to dig itself out of the hole in which it is currently floundering, it needs a better understanding of the mistakes that landed it there. In particular, it needs to recognise that the Truss debacle was not some aberration from the party’s recent history, but the culmination of its most destructive tendencies.

Truss did not fall into No. 10 from a spaceship, like some twin-set Mr Bean. She won the leadership because she best expressed what Conservatism has become. The attributes that broke her premiership were also those that carried her into power, making her the favoured candidate of the party membership, the Right-wing think-tanks that supplied so much of her programme, and what the political scientist Tim Bale calls “the party in the press”: the network of sympathetic newspapers that works to maintain the party in office. Sold as the heir to Margaret Thatcher, Truss was to prove more Tin Lizzie than Iron Lady; but her ill-fated premiership was more a symptom of her party’s problems than their cause.

Truss was cheered into office by the party’s most loyal newspapers, which trashed her critics, lauded her tax cuts and only turned on her when it became obvious she could not survive. Headlines proclaimed “In Liz We Trust”. “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Woman”; and “Liz Puts Her Foot on the Gas”. The reaction to the mini-budget was equally effusive. “At Last”, gushed the Daily Mail, “a True Tory Budget”. A Daily Telegraph front page called it “the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver”. For the Express, part of Truss’s allure was “her long involvement with centre-right think tanks”. Responding to the mini-budget, a representative of the Centre for Policy Studies told the IEA podcast that it as “exactly what we would have hoped for”. The Taxpayers’ Alliance called it “the most taxpayer-friendly budget in recent memory”.

Newspapers and think-tanks could provide the mood music, but only MPs and party members could put Truss in No. 10. Her comments on the campaign trail may have alarmed the commentariat — whether dismissing the First Minister of Scotland as an “attention-seeker” to be “ignored”, or refusing to say whether the President of France was “a friend or foe” — but they drew cheers from the party audiences to whom they were delivered. As an aide to the Truss campaign told her biographers, “we went straight for the membership and gave them what they wanted to hear”.

Add in the endorsement of figures such as Daniel Hannan, David Frost, Sajid Javid and Ben Wallace, or the money that cascaded in from party donors, and the Truss premiership begins to look less like the personal failure of a flawed individual, and more like a systemic disaster for which the party bears collective responsibility. The Conservative Party turned to Liz Truss, not in some temporary spasm of irrationality, but because she embraced the ideas and courted the institutions that had become dominant in its make-up. The forces that destroyed her premiership were those that secured it for her in the first place.

More from this author

The Tories need to get over Thatcher

By Robert Saunders

Take, for example, Truss’s enthusiasm for “moving fast and breaking things”. Not so long ago, a politician who boasted of being the “disruptor in chief” — who told a journalist that “I embrace the chaos. I’m a thrill-seeker” — might have been thought an unlikely candidate for a “Conservative” party. Her contempt for “orthodoxy” might have puzzled a party that prized tradition, while her conviction that sheer willpower could bulldoze all difficulties would have sat uneasily with a Burkean sense of human fallibility, girding its suspicion of grand visions for change.

Yet these were exactly the attributes that had enthused Truss’s supporters. For her cheerleaders in the media, the case for Truss was precisely that “she gets the need for radical change“; that she was an enthusiast for “elbowing to one side the Treasury’s fiscal conservatism“; that she persistently “knocked aside her critics” and was “ready to take on all opponents”. For the Daily Mail, it was Truss’s “boosterism” that “puts her in the driving seat”. Ignoring civil servants, economists and forecasters came naturally to a party that, in Michael Gove’s famous words, had decided years earlier that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Why consult the Office for Budget Responsibility, when it had been dismissed by Conservative columnists as “a waste of money” and a “vehicle for establishment groupthink”?

A party that had spent years urging its supporters to “believe in Brexit”; that decried warning voices as “doomsters” and “gloomsters”, guilty of “talking down Britain”; and that blamed setbacks on “saboteurs” and “enemies of the people”, could not have been surprised at a leader who embraced boosterish economics, ignored warning voices and blamed setbacks on a mythical “anti-growth coalition”. Having burned out Remainers and moderates under Johnson, the party could hardly complain when Sunak supporters were informed that “their careers are over. If you’re on the stage you’re in a grave”.

The danger for the Conservative Party is that it turns to one of two comforting myths to explain the Truss debacle. One loads the blame entirely onto Truss, insisting that “the notes were right. It’s just that they were in the wrong order”. The same think-tanks who had hailed Truss’s rise to power now likened her to a “hubristic, or crazy, or incompetent” chef, who had bungled their “perfect and delicious” “recipe“. A second myth blames a “Remainer coup”, driven by the “anti-growth coalition” and “the Remainer elite”; a “very British coup” propelled by a “pushback against democracy”.

The reality is more prosaic. Truss was the product, not the source, of her party’s problems. She embodied a Conservatism that embraced creative destruction, that was dismissive of caution and contemptuous of institutions, that prized ideology over experience and regarded opposing voices as heresies to be burned out; a Conservatism that had ceded power to irresponsible think-tanks, contrarian newspaper columnists and a dwindling party membership that nobody has elected. Truss’s crime was to carry that Molotov Cocktail into government, holding it aloft like a torch; but it was others who mixed the ingredients and lit the fuse. The paradox is that this combustible mix was so often described as “real” or “true” Conservatism; yet that aspiration may offer the beginnings of a road to recovery.

If the Conservative Party is to rebuild itself, it might find inspiration in its own best traditions. It might recognise that institutions are fragile and easily damaged: that the problem with “moving fast and breaking things” is that things of value get broken. It might revive its sense of human fallibility, requiring grand ideological visions to be tested carefully against evidence and experience. It might recognise, as Margaret Thatcher did, that caution is not the enemy of change, but a crucial component of its success.

Suggested reading

Will conservatism survive 2023?

By John Oxley

That will require it to reconsider its taste for disruption, and to wean itself off the influence of what Truss herself famously called “vested interests dressed up as think-tanks”. Like the Labour Party, it may also need to rethink the case for treating the choice of prime minister as a subscriber benefit for its dwindling pool of members. Temperamentally, Sunak seems less inclined to play the “disruptor”; whether he can defy the forces in his party that crave such a role remains to be seen.

In her final speech as Prime Minister, Truss offered a mangled quotation from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that they are difficult”. It was a bizarre choice for a politician who had just crashed the public finances and destroyed her own premiership, as a result — in her own words — of going “too far and too fast“. If the Conservative Party is to take Seneca as its inspiration, it might be wiser to look to his reflections on Epicurus, who remarked that “A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation”. This, Seneca concluded, was a “very good” maxim. “For a person who is not aware that he is doing anything wrong has no desire to be put right. You have to catch yourself doing it before you can reform”.

Like the Tories, the GOP go into 2023 electorally bruised. Their embrace of populism has not proved popular enough to sustain victory, but instead left them sullied by association with men who largely co-opted them for vehicles of their own ambition. Neither party seems capable of sating their supporters’ desires on key issues, such as immigration, but have adopted rhetoric that scares off their more centrist supporters. Equally, they are finding their support in diminishing demographics — older, whiter, and less well-educated than the rest of the population.

Both parties also find themselves with an unclear message. Over the past decade, the Tories have struggled to find a defining narrative beyond wanting to win. They have tried austerity, Brexit, levelling up, tax cuts and austerity again, yet have still ended up with an economy devoid of growth and stagnating wages. They have waged a half-interested culture war but largely become socially progressive. Even on immigration, their professed conservatism has resolved into higher rates. They have chased focus groups and polls until they have come out of the rabbit hole believing in nothing.

The Republican Party has the same problem, but in an even more chaotic form. The neocon Christianity of the Bush years gave rise to the Tea Party which eventually spiralled into the Right-wing populism Trump harnessed. Now moving even more quickly, the American Right largely seems to be made up of an assortment of “own the libs at all costs” reactionaries. Still struggling to digest the impact of the TV-star president, ratings and attention are their driving force. There is little narrative to what they discuss, little thought — just knee-jerk responses to whatever the Democrats propose. Everything else seems more co-opted than born of conviction.

In 2023, the parties will have to find a way past this, a way to consolidate before the next electoral test. Instinctively, it feels it could be harder for the Tories. They are in government, dealing with the daily challenges that it throws up. With the economy in crisis, public services falling apart, and a war in Europe continuing, these will not be insignificant. After a dozen years in power, they are exhausted, emotionally, and intellectually, with many of their MPs already checked out. Those who remain are too focused on surviving to think of thriving. Party unity is shot, while internal bickering is rampant.

If the party is to succeed, perhaps even survive, beyond the next 18 months, the work has to begin now. The Conservatives need to find a compelling case for their own existence, beyond relying on the votes of older retirees. They need to find big answers to the practical issues the under-50s face, as well as a way to argue for conservative principles without sounding like an old man wailing at a cloud.

None of these issues is beyond the scope of conservatism. The only reason it should fall into decline is a lack of ardour and applied thinking. After all, young people should be more economically Right-wing than ever. Far more want a slice of prosperity than to tear it down. They bridle at stagnant wages and rising prices, but have embraced “side hustles”, investing and entrepreneurialism. In this sense, they are conservatives, even if they don’t know it. The Tories would do well to explain why.

On the climate, the Right can be the party of technological development and conservation, as opposed to the grim self-denial of the progressive degrowthers. A vision of nuclear power stations, replanted forests and efficient urban density is far more appealing than eating bugs and living in pods. It can bring with it an expansive view of the family, one that sees gay marriage as a win for tradition rather than a kick against it.

Suggested reading

Should Martin Lewis be Prime Minister?

By Chris Clarke

Meanwhile, faced with the rising tide of divisive identity politics, both the GOP and the Conservatives could articulate a positive view of integrated communities, seizing on some of the conservative instincts of minority groups. They could acknowledge concerns about immigration with policies that are discerning while still encouraging economic growth, and have at their heart integration rather than separation. The Right gets caught out when it sees its values on economics and culture as antagonistic, rather than seeing both entwined in a sense of national stewardship. This is where the foundations of continuity and renewal can be laid.

In essence, both the American and British Right are hamstrung by the different iterations of the same problem: the Tories and GOP are devoid of ideas, empty of vision, but adept at election campaigning. This has made them susceptible to demagogues such as Trump and Johnson, both of whom were only loosely conservative in their hearts. It has also left them exposed as electoral trends have shifted. Indeed, both parties now find themselves languishing among emerging electoral groups. Not only are the educated and ethnic minorities less likely to support them, but these are also a growing portion of the electorate. This means that a concentration in whiter, older, suburban and rural fringe votes is becoming more pronounced for both parties and becoming a less sure-fire route to success.

And yet, British and American conservatives are used to regeneration. They have enjoyed success across different eras and political landscapes, adapting as they go. The lack of ideological dogmatism on the Right lends itself to effective pivots, while a belief in the value of the individual often allows them to listen to voters better than ideologues. In the Fifties, both parties bounced back from defeats by embracing a tempered version of their opponent’s economic reforms, rather than rejecting them outright, while both Thatcher and Reagan managed to sell their vision for prosperity to the ordinary voters and elites alike.

But past performance is no guarantee of future success. Where the parties have fallen into the doldrums and been beset by scandals, they have found a reanimating purpose.  After the debacle of Nixon, the Republicans found Reagan. In the decline of the Seventies, the Tories found Thatcher. They corrected their fall not by repeating the same things more loudly, but by innovating on a platform they believed in and could sell to voters.

More from this author

Can the Tories survive a Right-wing insurgency?

By John Oxley

2023 will be the year where the Right decides if it can do this once more: by finding a narrative that engages with the modern world and appeals to a modern electorate; by finding ideas beyond those led by polling and focus groups; and by shedding the chaos and dishonesty of some of its recent incarnations. Without an injection of ideas, conservatism will flail and founder. The Right has sustained itself on “whatever gets us elected”, but has now driven itself into a corner built on voting blocs where the maths no longer works.

Conservatism revolves around duty, service, community, and prosperity. Its advocates succeeded in the past by finding 19th and 20th-century ways to apply them to 19th and 20^th-century problems. Macmillan and Thatcher did not spend their premierships talking about Empire Preference, nor did Eisenhower and Reagan simply ape the politics of the Gilded Age — they saw new challenges and attempted new ideas. If their successors are to avoid ceding the field to the Left, they must do the same.

The election year of 2024 could push Tories and Republicans out of power until the end of the decade. Their failure to generate a convincing case for survival could do the same. So, 2023 will be marked with a key test — whether either party can shed the shouty charlatans and hollow men and find some answers which connect with people. If not, it will be another year of wailing while the tectonic plates shift against them.

On the surface, Japan appears to have progressed a lot since then. The latest Japanese TV drama Modern Love (a sort of Japanese version of Love Actually) features a lesbian couple who are raising a child. Male homosexuality has featured on TV before and lesbianism is hinted at strongly in the ever-popular Takarazuka theatre (an all-female musical theatre troupe). But Modern Love is the first frank depiction of lesbianism on mainstream TV.

Japan is also starting to see the sort of identity-based skirmishes that are common in the West. Novelist Mieko Kawakami made headlines when she dared to interrogate prize-winning author Haruki Murakami over the depiction of female characters in his novels. During the pandemic, she also criticised the government’s Coronavirus task force for being all male.

The tide also seems to be turning in Japan’s leading universities. Once renowned for their conservatism, many seem to be adopting a Western-style “progressive” or “woke” agenda. Waseda University has introduced speech codes for staff when interacting with LGBTQI+ students, while the International Christian University spent a fortune last year building an unprecedented suite of gender-neutral toilets, and has added “other” to the list of gender options on class registers. Japan’s Women’s University is one of several all-female institutions considering the admission of transgender students.

Meanwhile, Japan’s universities are introducing more progressive content to their humanities courses. A spate of umbrella courses with blandly innocuous names, such as Sophia University’s “Sustainable Futures”, are geared to promoting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: modules focus on “gender”, “race”, “climate”, and “inclusivity”. As for recruitment, applicants for university positions are often informed that if a male and female candidate are regarded as being equally qualified, the female will be chosen.

But, as ever with Japan, appearances can be deceiving. Japan’s progressive wave is merely an illusion to appeal to the outside world. Despite superficial reforms, its university campuses are as placid as ever. Student activism is virtually unknown; teachers are still held in high esteem, and visiting speakers are treated well. I’ve seen a beauty contest advertised on campus, but never a demonstration. In a society where people recoil at the idea of revealing their innermost traumas in public, and where fierce employee loyalty is deeply ingrained, the MeToo movement never stood a chance. It didn’t grow much beyond the campaign of a single victim, the TV journalist Shiori Itō, and as with Black Lives Matter hardly featured on Japanese campuses at all.

A likelier explanation for these reforms is a desire to attract foreign staff and students to boost university incomes. The Japanese government has been trying to increase the numbers of overseas students in Japan since it initiated its Global University Project in 2014, which selected 37 universities to subsidise for 10 years. In 2015, the government set an ambitious target of 10 Japanese universities in the Times Education top 100 rankings, which it is yet to achieve. There is much talk of Japan needing “globalised citizens” to revitalise the economy. To achieve these goals, a more “progressive” posture had to be struck to counter perceptions of Japanese universities as staid and backward looking.

More from this author

How the Moonies took over Japan

By Philip Patrick

Ultimately, the difference between wokeness in the West and in Japan is this: in the West, much of the impetus in universities seems to be coming from the students — at least a loud and determined minority; while in Japan the process is top-down and aimed at generating revenue. It’s not real: no one is cancelled and there are no “safe spaces”. Japanese students, if they even notice reforms, are often simply baffled by it all.

Similarly with TV dramas, there is little evidence of any desire on the part of the audience for more “modern” storylines. The most popular shows are still strikingly old-fashioned: presenters are rough-looking middle-aged men in shiny suits, with perky, deferential female sidekicks. They are known as se desu ne (“yes that’s right”) girls and their role is to be attractive and laugh at men’s jokes. The same goes for the music industry. The 48 female members of pop group AKB48 are selected for cuteness, sweetness, and air of innocence. Like all TV talents, they are inevitably controlled by agencies run by men.

As for Modern Love, could envy at the success of South Korea’s Squid Game and Parasite be having an influence on Japanese TV producers? Japan is an old hand at selling its culture overseas. The country is ranked fifth in the Global Soft Power Index, and its cultural influence in the UK is growing: Hideki Noda’s (‘Q’) — a drama blending kabuki with songs by Queen — played in London recently, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s performance of Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro has racked up nine nominations in the WhatsOnStage awards. Perhaps progressive posturing is part of an attempt to trigger a “cool Japan” wave in the West to rival the Korean wave known as hallyu?

Suggested reading

How we appeased China's Zero-Covid regime

By N.S. Lyons

To paraphrase Paul Valéry, in the modern world, everything changes but the avant-garde… and Japanese society. The corporate world remains unshakeably male, and calls to recognise same-sex marriage as constitutionally valid were thwarted in the courts in Osaka and Tokyo at the end of November. Japan languishes at 116 (out of 146) in the global gender equality rankings produced by the World Economic Forum in 2022.

It’s not clear how many Japanese people care. Long-term residents will recognise that, however dominant men seem to be, women wield considerable power in the domestic realm and beyond. A good example of this can be found in the inner workings of the formidable modern Buddhist group Soka Gakkai, whose political wing Komeito remains a coalition partner in government. Soka Gakkai is controlled, it is believed, by an all-female praesidium known as the married women’s association (the “Fujimbu”) which dictates the organisation’s policy.

Yet if progressive posturing is good for the Japanese economy, then so be it. Since the Meiji era (1868-1912), the Japanese have been renowned for refashioning foreign ideas into a distinct and efficient form. Japan’s police are based on the French gendarmerie, its schools on Germany’s gymnasiums, and its broadcasting service NHK on the BBC. The same goes for the arts: bonsai originated in China, as did the tea ceremony.

The phrase “go woke, go broke” might be a valuable warning in the West, but in Japan that message has been lost in translation. A full rejection of progressive Western values would be counterproductive: far better to appear to go along with it superficially, while changing nothing of consequence. Far better, and far more Japanese.

 ***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

If it has any future at all it is being formed at the Reasoned Student Summit in the City of London’s Dutch Hall. Reasoned is the YouTube soapbox of the Brexit campaigner and pundit Darren Grimes. Today, Grimes has managed to gather around a hundred young conservatives — about 19% of 18- to 24-year olds voted Tory at the last election — to network, and to listen to Nigel Farage, Steve Baker and Daniel Hannan. The outlines of a new conservatism — despairing and angry — can be glimpsed here.

Trembling in his tweed blazer, John is 23, and worried, like many on the Right’s youthful fringes, about central bank digital currencies.

Soon, he believes, the Bank of England will track your movements, monitor your spending, and push electronic tentacles into every aspect of your life. John tells me that such currencies will be “China’s social credit system on steroids”. He has the luxury of believing that this depressing moment in British politics is something bigger and scarier — a totalitarian dawn. “If we could go back in time, you know, we would do something about Hitler.” He thinks the same of the Bank of England.

John’s talking points are paranoid and his outlook is bleak. He is representative, not of the young Tories who hole up in the Carlton Club or hand out leaflets for Blue Beyond, but those who form conservative opinion online. They are not yet a movement, like the National Conservatives or the “New Right” in America, though in their frank apocalypticism, stridency, and saturnine sense of embattlement, they are heavily influenced by both.

They remain, in organisation and physical appearance, embryonic. There are trad aesthetes and High Tory Anglicans, young fogeys and BNP haircuts, Turning Point UK influencers, Scrutonians and boys who just love Peter Hitchens. Among this hundred students and recent graduates, there are dozens of ideological tribes. But whether they are suited or slobbish, at Russell Group universities or without a job, what unites them is a sense that Britain is declining. This anger is what flourishes when a generation believes it will be far worse off than its parents.

More from this author

Welcome to the Tory apocalypse

By Will Lloyd

Like Hitchens, the young men in this room think Britain has been abolished, and that the Conservative Party is not conservative at all. Ambient British culture — whether it is Ru Paul’s Drag Race or footballers taking the knee — bristles with personalities and causes that unsettle them. They see “wokeness” as a virus, infecting every aspect of British culture.

This is why they love Nigel Farage. In 2016, he proved to them that conservatives — real conservatives — could beat the Left-wing establishment. They are anxious teenagers; Farage is their feckless uncle. As soon as he takes the stage he enters freewheeling bombardier mode. The theme of his speech, pockmarked with jokes, is Brexit: A Revolution Betrayed. “Theresa May”, he says, rolling his eyes, well her deal was the “closest thing to treachery I have ever seen. Maybe the Tower of London shouldn’t be a museum exhibit. Don’t quote me on that for God’s sake. I’m in enough trouble as it is…”

Farage is in trouble with all the right people. His enemies, listed at length — the Today programme, ESG, corporation tax, Jeremy Hunt, Tory wets, Westminster generally and the House of Lords specifically — are their enemies too. He describes listening to Radio 4 as “agony”. This is conservatism as hay-fever. Irritant Lefty spores are everywhere; they make you ill, angry, prickly.

More from this author

How Farage had the last laugh

By Will Lloyd

He tells his story about Brexit. He wanted Britain to become “a genuine global trading power again”. Now, after six years of political bloodletting, we have returned to 2010. Globalists in the treasury, Osbornomics in the ascendant, austerity back on the menu. “The great unwashed” and “the silent majority” are ignored once more. “We are back to where we were before the referendum”. The ancien régime has fluttered back in, deathless as a vampire. To whoops, Farage promises a “third coming” — a return to frontline politics — if the state of the nation keeps deteriorating. One better than Jesus.

Their love for him cannot be understated. “Nige, big, big fan” is the way they frame their questions to him. Yet Farage, beyond his Brexit boosterism, is so unmistakably Eighties. His agenda, where it rises above being a disgruntled mood, is not theirs. A global free trading power? At least half of the audience is protectionist, restrictionist, anti-globalist. Farage calls on them to be “happy warriors”, but they are pessimists. Do they want more unreconstructed libertarianism?

I doubt it. They are not like Farage: Thatcher’s children — they are his children. They like Farage’s positions on British identity and borders, not markets. They hoot their affection at Farage, not for what he says about free trade but for the way he says it. Farage gave them 2016, and that year was their political awakening. They would follow him into the deepest ditch if that was what he asked of them. His insurgent energy is undiminished, his pugnacity undiluted, his rhetoric undaunted in the face of all those enemies. More than any Tory in parliament, and though they do not agree with everything he says, Farage inspires this generation of conservatives.

More from this author

The last days of Jeremy Corbyn

By Will Lloyd

When an actual MP arrives — Steve Baker — the contrast with Farage is sharply apparent. A third of the audience goes outside to vape. His role during the Brexit years made Baker a liberal hate figure — recently called a “cunt” by Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru Murthy. But in this room he is not Right-wing enough. He is accused of promoting, to loud and prolonged applause, “Marxist Identitarian politics” through school reading programmes in his constituency. “I don’t know why you’re applauding that,” Baker says, forlornly.

Baker’s crime is to be involved with the 2022 group of senior black conservatives. They are Tories who are trying to devise ways of shedding the perception among black people in Britain that conservative politics is “toxic”. Baker told the group at Conference this year that “footballers taking the knee isn’t a neo-Marxist act, it’s a statement of solidarity”.

Today, Baker attempts to extract the better sides of these young men from their blatant nihilism. “We have to think about our moral centres… some of the things I’ve heard today are dangerous.” It doesn’t work. The young conservatives are not interested in being nice.

Suggested article

Who would be a young Tory?

By James Sean Dickson

When I find him after his speech, Baker is close to despair. Youth politics, whether on the Left, or the Right, is wreathed in gloom. He understands that young people in Britain have the rawest deal. But Farage, who captivates them, only offers “easy answers… a populist shadow of libertarianism”. Baker broods about the room’s “radical aggression” on migration. (There are calls for the borders to be shut down completely from the crowd.) The young, unjustly treated, are “turning to radical ideologies”. Baker worries about them. He is right, but has no idea what to do. Baker cannot see that these young men are as much his responsibility as Farage’s. He is just as complicit in their radicalism. They are the Brexit generation, coming of age.

This generational divide that Baker senses and Farage seems unaware of, becomes ever more apparent. The speakers are less furious than the spoken to. The crowd are unimpressed with another Brexiteer, Dan Hannan. The libertarian boilerplate of his speech, a Trussian paean to enterprise culture and tax cuts, is shredded in the Q&A. “I come from a more tribal school of thought,” says one of the boys. To him, identity matters more than economics. “If everything is more globalist, then everything will move to London, and my community in East Bradford will become even more of a dump.”

Hannan has no convincing counter-argument. He just looks depressed. Like every successful revolutionary, Hannan was discovering that the people are not what he thought they would be once he had unlocked them from their cage.

Outside, the boys are smoking and giggling. “We need our own Nick Fuentes,” says one. British conservatives, he says with vehemence, whether they write for the Telegraph or are on the staff at CCHQ, are “spergs”. Like most of the summit, he looks to the American Right for a model. They are more splenetic, more successful, more based. The idea that Baker had been going on about — that it takes strength to be gentle and kind to strangers — is ludicrous to him. There is none of that “bullshit” in America.

These young Tories are stripping the American Right for parts. They believe that until the British Right comes out fighting, it will keep losing the culture. Hard-line positions on migration and identity must be found. Cultural enemies must be identified, then ridiculed. For them, politics is about figuring out who hates who, then sharpening those hatreds into flints. “Once the States are taken back,” one lad says, once Donald Trump wins again, “it will influence conservatives here. Then the Tories will stop being so shit.”

Suggested article

How the Tories were radicalised

By Richard Bourke

Not all of these young conservatives will end up in politics. I suspect the one who stood up and asked, gesturing to the sub-Brideshead outfits sitting around him, “How do we make ourselves cool?”, won’t stay the course. But others here want to be journalists, or pundits like Darren Grimes, or to enter the Conservative Party. They want to shape it from within. Soon enough their foetal moods and ironic tweets will be coherent policies, newspaper editorials, and viral clickbait videos.

Do not expect them to sculpt a future of fair dealing, pragmatism, patience, moderation or high intelligence. Expect the restless opposite of these virtues. A generation in the image of Nigel Farage, not Jeremy Hunt. A recent poll found that 61% of 18- to 34-year-olds supported “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections” taking control of the UK. If the 2020s really are set to be the first decade of an “Age of Scarcity”, then expect a conservative politics harsher than whatever today’s cabinet ministers can come up with.

The macabre populist shadows Steve Baker fears will become solid one day. Only a fool would try to predict what happens then.

Such a widely-held belief, put forward by Musk’s opponents and fans alike, illuminates the nature of the platform. It has become the precise opposite of its original stated intention, as a decentralised platform for the instantaneous dissemination of information. Instead, Twitter is a centralised platform for the creation and enforcement of ideological narratives. The fear of liberals, and the hope of some conservatives, is that under Musk’s ownership Twitter will cease to be a central pillar of “the Cathedral”, the ideological apparatus by which the liberal order maintains its hold on effective power despite the growing opposition of voting publics.

For Right-wingers, who see Twitter functioning as a mechanism to enforce the dogmas of liberal ideology, the hope is to seize the Cathedral; Conservatives, by contrast, hope to open it up to debate, using Twitter as a pulpit through which the congregation will select the best ideology on rational grounds. Both beliefs are based on a fundamental misapprehension of what Twitter is, and how it has achieved the cultural prominence it has. And both groups, as well as society as a whole, would be better served if the entire edifice was levelled to the ground.

Twitter’s rise to prominence was a product of a specific set of material circumstances, the unintended effect of the demolition of legacy media platforms by Facebook, which destroyed the advertising revenue on which their journalism depended. During the 2010s, media companies reoriented themselves towards “the pivot to video”, producing short-form audiovisual content designed to be shared on Facebook. When Facebook suddenly changed its algorithms to deboost such content, fortunes were lost and the rising stars of the new media landscape, like VICE and Buzzfeed, came close to collapse. The resulting jobless diaspora of online journalists swiftly congregated on one platform: Twitter.

Twitter is at heart nothing more or less than a tool by which commentators measure their social capital, a social credit system for insecure writers. The most dangerous creature on Twitter is, after all, the aspirant blue check, whose desperate clamour for attention drives so much of the platform’s pathologies. From the moment he wakes up until the moment he goes to sleep, the journalist’s day is bookended, and punctuated by the platform: he scrolls through Twitter on his journey into the office; then, sitting at his desk, the first thing he does is open his laptop to scan Twitter. Stories, interviewees, heroes and villains are all identified on Twitter. Often contractually obliged to promote their work on Twitter, it becomes reality to the journalist, especially the opinion columnist, whose requirement to produce copy frequently outruns their capacity to formulate considered opinions.

Likewise, the value of a news story is almost entirely based on whether or not people are discussing it on Twitter. Its baneful effects are visible everywhere: the precipitous decline of Channel 4 News as a platform for serious journalism began, in the mid-2010s, as it reoriented its focus towards producing shareable video content for Twitter, aiming particularly at middle-aged liberals outraged by Trump and Brexit, the demographic to which its editors belong. For the online BBC journalist, Twitter is used as a means to circumvent impartiality rules, using often the obscurest of Twitter accounts to voice sentiments they are banned from expressing themselves: when a BBC article tells you that something has “sparked online debate”, prepare for a lecture on the Twitter fixation of the day, in which the quoted account merely ventriloquises the barely-hidden political believes of the journalist sharing it.

Suggested reading

Do we need Caesar Elon Musk?

By Mary Harrington

All journalism is now a Twitter performance: the journalist writes primarily for Twitter, and not his readership, their published work functioning as an esoteric text demonstrating allegiance to an in-group and hostility to an out-group: the readership, and the company paying for it are mere spectators to the essential work of Twitter performance. It is for this reason that journalists have become so reviled: their role has become so oriented to the production of discourse rather than the description of reality that the gulf between them and their readers widens ever more: Twitter and journalism are both locked in a fatal embrace.

Because of its outsized role in the journalistic imagination, Twitter has come to consume politics, just as it has journalism. When the MP David Amess was murdered by a jihadist, the government turned it into a narrative about Twitter trolls: not only because it was easier for them to talk about — they would, horror of horrors, have been criticised on Twitter for talking about the actual problem — but because it is the only thing they care about. If they have tweeted their disapproval of something it is within their power to fix, like Conservative MPs moaning about the migrant crisis, politicians feel satisfied their work has been done: the point is no longer to change the world, only to create discourse about it. 

Conservatives, who feel shut out of Twitter’s system of reward and approbation, have found themselves particularly entranced by the platform’s spell. They frequently declare that Twitter is not the real world, but the truth is worse, that the real world has become entirely suborned to Twitter. Similarly, it is easier for the police to demonstrate their political allegiances on Twitter than to prevent crimes; if every British Police force deleted its Twitter account, it would instantly be held in much higher regard by the public. But then no-one’s reputation is enhanced by Twitter: reading the thoughts of historians, barristers or public health professionals on the platform is a genuinely nihilistic experience. All have had their repute levelled by the platform which erodes every institution it touches.

Suggested reading

Don't punish Kanye West

By Hadley Freeman

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan warned back in the Sixties, “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village”. Anyone who has actually lived in a small, traditionally-structured village, and not merely fantasised about the premodern world on Twitter, will be aware of the claustrophobic intensity of such a state of being, the life monitored and circumscribed by village gossip and obscure feuds. As McLuhan remarked, “unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence”, forced on us by “the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another’s lives”. The spasms of moral panic that pulse around the world from their origin in America’s neurotic taste-making class are a result of the world’s opinion-makers being locked together in the Twitter panopticon. 

In viewing the Twitter blue check as a coveted badge of status, both Musk and his anxious critics are entirely mistaken. The best analysis tends to come from anonymous accounts, freed from the combination of fear and need for approbation which consumes the blue check: if Twitter were an entirely anonymous platform, it might be a better functioning clearing-house for information and informed commentary. Rather than the presence of bots being Twitter’s original sin, as Musk has claimed, its greatest flaw is that it has turned Twitter’s “power users” into effective bots themselves, their every utterance shaped by the need to navigate Twitter’s treacherous rocks and shallows. 

Suggested reading

You are already in the metaverse

By Jon Askonas

Instead, the true mark of success as a commentator is freedom from needing to be on Twitter at all: who knows what Cormac McCarthy, say, thinks about Trump, or Black Lives Matter, or trans toilets? Whatever his opinion, he would sink in our estimation even if we agreed with him. This is why the Twitter presence, let alone addiction, of the super-rich is viewed with simultaneous bewilderment and disgust by the platform’s most committed users, toiling away in the take fields.. Why would anyone be here if they didn’t need to? How much weaker and more pathetic does Putin seem for the growing fixation on American culture war issues that manifests in his speeches? Rather than being outside the system of America’s cultural power, he has revealed himself as trapped here with the rest of us. Who can doubt that if a nuclear exchange began, we would find out on Twitter — the shared countdown, the snarky memes — or that many would spend their final minutes composing the perfect final tweet, the one last dunk on their enemies or expression of tribal allegiance?

If Musk, as is likely, destroys Twitter as it currently exists he will be doing the world a great service. By wrecking the current function it performs for commentators, he will free journalism and politics from its concentration in a single online madhouse, and in doing so, no doubt entirely unwittingly, help decentralise the spread of information. Like Legion in the New Testament, Twitter’s constellation of unhappy, clamouring souls must be driven off a cliff. When he learns, as he perhaps already has, that the platform will never be profitable, he should smash his new train set. The greatest power that will accrue to him, and the greatest gift he can offer civilisation, is not reforming Twitter through tweaks here and there but by loading its servers into a Space X rocket and firing them into the heart of the sun, forcing us all, finally, to log off.

Outside Downing Street yesterday, it took Liz Truss just a few minutes to call time on her condensed premiership. But the Conservative Party’s spasm of anger had already erupted. On Wednesday, decades of brewing feuds, petty grievances and polite disagreements exploded into a contraction of chaos. In a few short hours, the Government saw the Home Secretary depart office, scuffles erupt in the lobby, and confusion reign over whether the Chief Whip had resigned or not. Tory MPs began to openly lament the state of the party. Within 24 hours the Prime Minister would fall, the shortest tenure in British history.

It was a dramatic spectacle for the Lobby to feed on and a day and a half of despair for Liz Truss. It was not, however, an unheralded implosion, but rather the culmination of shifting party dynamics over the last few decades. Cameron’s attempt at detoxification, the gamble of the referendum, and the squabbles over Brexit each played a role in pushing to this moment — as did a thousand snubs, slights and overpromotions. This mess took only a few hours to unfold, but it was years in the making.

The Conservative Party has always been an uneasy alliance of unlikely figures. Driven more by the desire to govern than ideology, the party attracts confused and conflicting views and rebrands the resulting contradictions as a “broad church”. Passing electoral trends add new layers onto this, embedding fault lines. The party rubs along reasonably well by focusing on its one shared goal: winning elections. When the possibility of this diminishes, as with a precipitous dip in the polls, the fault lines start to crack. In a land of first-past-the-post, the Right’s broad coalition works. Until it doesn’t.

The current party is perhaps more riven by these divisions than ever in its history. They have been compounded by recent political divisions and the polarisation which occurred within the House and the public at large. With a weak prime minister and the prospect of electoral oblivion, the scene was set for a quake.

Suggested reading

Is Truss the worst PM in history?

By Dominic Sandbrook

It is tempting to see the split in the Tory party as binary — a matter of Wet vs Dry, of economic liberalism versus a more mid-century paternalism. Yet very few in the party neatly fit this spectrum. In fact, the various Westminster tribes are often a bizarre and competing mix of each. The Thatcherites would usually happily throw state money at their pet projects and would rarely abandon their staunchest supporters to the whims of the market. There’s no real movement in the party to expose farmers to cheaper imports from abroad, for example, and there are many who would free every market but the movement of people.

In the same vein, the Left of the party did little to reject austerity and now pushes for its return, at least where it didn’t impinge on their voters. Benefits and schools seem easier for them to cut than pensions and bin collections. For most, the real north star is whatever motivates the voters and principles often come second to vibe.

Part of the reason for the party’s multi-decade battles over Europe is that it was the only issue that forced them into a binary choice. There was no real nuance when it came to Remain or Leave: it was a simple question with a single answer. This challenged the ability to be all things to all men and forced them to nail their colours to the mast. It also served to cut every faction in two.

Brexit applied a new lens to every internal debate. Leave MPs who pushed for protectionism and an anti-immigration stance suddenly became Dries, while the One Nation tag seemed to stick to Cameroons who had no issues with austerity but largely voted Remain. Moreover, this dividing line became baked into the party machine. While some MPs, most notably Truss, wore their affiliation lightly and skipped from one side to the other, the rest decided to dig in. It no longer mattered if you were a Singapore-on-Thames libertarian or a faith-and-flag protectionist, you shared an enemy. Outside of parliament, too, the members generally saw their new identity and took to it as partisans.

Suggested reading

Why Truss's gamble failed

By Aris Roussinos

The conduct of the parliamentary party and respective governments in the aftermath of the referendum made this worse. Theresa May’s ministry failed to either placate or nullify the hard-line Brexiteers, giving them enough space to undermine her attempts to reach a settlement with the EU. Repeated cabinet resignations, rebellions, and plots to oust her aggravated those who supported Remain, while her compromises with the EU angered the ERG and allies.

Seeing the difficulties May had fallen into, Johnson had a direct plan of confrontation with his internal opponents. In an early act of his premiership, he withdrew the whip from those who defied him on Brexit. These were Remainers, but there was also an implicit threat to those on the Right, which ultimately got his deal across the line. From then on, he rewarded loyalty with promotions and treason with political exile — there was no room for conciliation or meritocracy. This, naturally, angered his internal opponents, but he held one trump card, his popularity with the electorate. When that wobbled, there was no shortage of volunteers to act against him.

Whoever became leader after him was due to inherit a soured atmosphere. That Truss edged through with only a third of MPs supporting her did not bode well. In appointing a Cabinet of loyalists, she exacerbated this anger and put a huge wager on things going well. It didn’t. When her mini-budget imploded, and took Tory poll ratings to new lows, her authority sank. The one thing that brought Tories together and kept them civil, winning elections, was gone.

This set the scene for a rapid unravelling. When your polling goes that low, there is a swathe of people who know they have nothing to lose. Their seat will be gone whether they have the whip or not. Equally, all sides think that tacking their way is the solution, and ambitious seniors see it as their chance to audition for the top seat. The clouds gather, and every issue becomes a lightning rod.

When the party is at peace, the nebulous nature of factions makes it easier to manage. People can be nudged into line because they aren’t that wedded to one ideological strain. When it is in free-fall, it makes everyone a potential enemy. That’s why the government picking an argument over fracking was such a terrible idea. The enviro-wets might be already against you, but so too are the MPs who don’t want hydraulic drilling under their constituency. There aren’t enough diehard growthers who will put ugly scenes in their backyard into second place, and seeing you are weak gives other malcontents an opportunity.

In these times you need iron parliamentary discipline, and with a weak leader that is almost impossible to maintain. You end up daring people to defy you, and, on finding they do, you end up in the confusion of whipping and unwhipping a vote. This is embarrassing and intolerable for the people you ask to do it, so you end up losing them too.

More from this author

Liz Truss won't unchain Britannia

By John Oxley

At a Cabinet level too, things become impossible to manage. With the arrival of Hunt, the people who were excluded under Boris found their way back to the table. This brought on both a personal and political fight against those they see as the under-talented beneficiaries of largesse. Suella Braverman was the standard bearer — unashamedly populist on immigration (an issue that socially liberal Tories feel relaxed on, economic liberals are enthusiastically in favour of, but others are firmly against), and widely regarded by the “sensibles” as swivel-eyed. An errant email gave the chance to boot her out, but it was fractious politics that motivated taking it.

Truss had become despised by almost everyone, for betraying her Cameroon origins to embrace a hard Brexit, and then acquiescing to a quiet coup from the other side. She tried and she failed with her own mandate, and then became unable to maintain authority after she abandoned it. In doing so she reaped the outcome of the divisions and slights that had bubbled under the surface for decades. A deft politician with a gift for deal-making and communication might have steered through these waters. Liz Truss was not that person. She flipped and flopped on her main policies, but failed to offer the one thing every Tory craves most: the prospect of continuing in government.

Now, there is no clear pretender, because the other factions are so riven and built on shaky ground. It is hard to see someone who can unite the parliamentary party, let alone the membership. In a week we will see who emerges, then question whether they can make the most of it or not. Each of the major names is tainted by some association or another, each unwelcome in certain corners of the party and with their own personal challenges. There will be seven days of deal-making, but they will inherit the burden of a party happy to fight itself.

The only question now is whether the ugly infighting continues in public. Some relationships blow up once and come to a swift and dignified end, others paper over the cracks and rumble on a while longer. But the worst become toxic in their daily antagonisms. The Tories may try to pull themselves together, to have a quiet Christmas for the sake of the nation, but with authority and cohesion broken, it is unclear how this will happen, even now Truss has gone.

Then contrast with Parliament. In a political environment where wolfish libertinism still howls, we respect this teetotaller, this dignified religious conservative. In a party of culture warriors, we are calmed by his refusal to join the fracas for easy Telegraph headlines. And in a Commons jammed with fumbling innumerates, we are gratefully relieved that a true numbers guy holds the national purse.

Solely by standing near them in photographs, Sunak makes his boss and his colleagues look, to varying degrees, stupid, crass, cadaverous, and morally dubious. Is all this calculated? Perhaps at first these contrasts were an accident of juxtaposition. Now they look like the willed creation of many hands.

A decade before today’s budget, Sunak was just another bored, wealthy, socially ambitious banker, most notable for marrying very well to a woman who is richer than the Queen. Today he is the most popular politician in the country. The press amplifies these common feelings. From Left to Right Sunak is imaginatively described as “genial”, “genial”, “genial”, and “nice”. In Lord Ashcroft’s sunny, flaccid Sunak biography, our protagonist is a schoolboy who never received detentions, a hedge fund partner who never screwed anyone over (or even made a bad bet), and a politician without enemies. How is that possible?

Sunak benefits from the hatred the press feels for Boris Johnson. Journalists direct their ire at the personality most gratingly reminiscent of their own, not the financier who thinks in excel spreadsheets, rather than headlines. The median pundit does not really know too much about spreadsheets, or what to do with Sunak, so they call him “genial” instead. As a result, the Chancellor is the recipient of puff pieces rather than asperities. Even the London Review of Books ends up defending him from clumsy Labour Party attacks, on racial grounds.

But Sunak also lacks obvious wounds for journalists to poke around in. Great wealth smoothed out any neuroticisms he had. They have nothing to claw at — for what is “genial” if not a synonym for boring? He is clam-tight, physically and mentally compact; he gives so little away. The only genuine insecurity would seem to be his height (a pocketable 5’ 7”); hence the suits carefully tailored to elongate and broaden him, and the choreographed posts on his Instagram where he stands tall, and the persistent rumours that Team Rishi genially emails social media users to delete comments that draw attention to any of this. What are his views on crime? On prisons? On education? We don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t either. In interviews he ducks behind bromides (“Being a parent is… hard”; Being in an office as a young banker was “really beneficial to me”) and references to popular culture. When the inevitable leadership question is raised he goes all chummy, all village fête, and says Oh Golly, Oh Gosh! Rhetoric that makes Johnson’s 2013 blather of balls and scrums sound comparatively Churchillian.

More from this author

Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

Race, potentially so explosive, is not really part of the conversation around the Chancellor. But the ghostly embarrassments, triumphs, and crimes of the Empire in both the subcontinent and Africa are bound up in his family story. Generations of dislocation and exile — with all their potential traumas — are repackaged, in Ashcroft’s book at least, into a saga of strivers and self-starters who walked in the Raj so Rishi could run in Westminster.

One early foray into politics, leading a Policy Exchange unit researching ethnic minority attitudes, was technically about race. The resulting report was thoughtful enough, though it reveals the ambition of an apparatchik more interested in the present and the future than the past. If Sunak’s research had a message for Conservatives, it was to emphasise a civic British identity that ethnic minority groups already felt comfortable with. (The party had been doing this since at least 1983.) In 2015, he laughed off the antique chit-chat of Wensleydale farmers who fretted about his “tan” when he was parachuted into William Hague’s old constituency of Richmond, North Yorks. The overall impression is of a man who has given approximately ten seconds of thought to questions of personal identity. And this in an era when identity is the inexhaustible social, political, and personal question among the over-educated. Sunak, comfortably warming his hands above the culture war inferno, will seem like a relief from it when he becomes Prime Minister.

More from this author

Twilight of the centrist dads

By Will Lloyd

If Sunak were born ten years later, he may have been more agitated by these questions. As an elder millennial (b.1980), he moved into industry when ideological agonies appeared to belong to the past. Goldman, followed by Stanford, followed by hedge funds. In the noughties, Sunak was another footsoldier of the Davos consensus. Why weep over Frantz Fanon in the library when there is money to be made? Why be outraged and indignant when you can be charming and suave? That was the way the brightest and the best of Sunak’s generation saw things, as they rolled into financial services en masse, pre-Crash.

Aspiration, not victimhood, is what Sunak claims to have learned from his family. It was his grandmother who sold her wedding jewellery to come to Britain in the Sixties. It was by the tills in his mother’s pharmacy that he learned about National Insurance and VAT. It was his parents who economised enough to send him to storied Winchester College. There, in 1997 — the apotheosis of social democratic rebelliousness in modern Britain — Sunak was a teenage Tory lamenting Tony Blair’s landslide in the pages of the school magazine. And what irritated the young Sunak more than anything else about New Labour were its plans to enter the United Kingdom into an “eventual European Superstate.” Not only a teenage Tory; a committed teenage Eurosceptic too. Was there a smaller minority of feeling in 1997? It’s unlikely.

Here is the ideological core of Sunak. He was, is, and always will be a “people must look after themselves first” Thatcherite. A believer in common sense, not theory. Hard work, achievement, tax cuts. William Hague might describe him as a “modern non-ideological conservative”, but the modern party speaks the language of intervention; many of its new voters are suspicious of globalisation and the City. So Sunak is old fashioned. It was Nigel Lawson who he consulted first when he became Chancellor. And it is a portrait of Nigel Lawson that hangs behind Sunak’s desk in No.11.

More from this author

The man who lost Afghanistan

By Will Lloyd

Here is the great irony of the Chancellor’s career to date. The Thatcherite who spewed £192bn on the public during the pandemic. He has the calculator-gambler soul of an axe man, and ends up with a public image close to Marcus Rashford’s. Scrooge is mistaken for Father Christmas. All the imagery — there is Rishi for the nerds, a Rishi for the boozers, a Rishi for the horny journalists, and a Rishi for the bumpkins — has been adroitly manipulated by his advisor and social media guru ‘Cass’ Horowitz. The Chancellor wouldn’t hurt a fly — unless it were relying on Universal Credit.

His horizon appears gorgeously cloudless. The joint No. 10-Treasury economic unit set up by Dominic Cummings to shackle the Chancellor in 2020 is now entirely at his command. His team expands all the time. The genuine Eurosceptic never bloodied his hands during the Theresa May years. He winked at lockdown sceptic MPs, flattering them without ever giving them public backing. Sunak has won several battles now without fighting. “Ascendancy” is the word used to describe No.11’s relationship with the Johnson team. It is easy to imagine him saying one day, as George Osborne did to friends after Cameron became leader in 2005, “I can’t believe how easily we have taken over the party.”

Today’s budget will disguise his instincts. His Thatcherism would go further, quicker, were he ever in charge. Tory donors would be delighted by it. Her Manchester liberalism was pliable, part-entertainment. His looks creedal, and well-practised from his years in business. Public opinion spurned her. It salutes Rishi. He is The Man Who Invented Furlough, The Eat Out to Help Out Bloke. £192bn disarms complaints present and future.