This may, currently, seem counter-intuitive. Donald Trump, the global figure most associated with postliberalism, is alienating electorates across the West and Victor Orbán, the leading European postliberal, has just lost power.

Meanwhile in the UK, Nigel Farage’s insurgency, despite local election success, seems to have hit a ceiling just below 30%, and many mainstream politicians still refuse to accept Reform as a legitimate opponent.

Yet even as Keir Starmer, in his recent last-chance-saloon speech, cast Reform as “dark” and “dangerous”, he was also embracing several postliberal themes: celebrating immigration restriction, regretting the graduate-only route to status and reward, and nationalizing British Steel as an insurance policy in a post-free trade world.

The backdrop to politics for most of my adult life has been metropolitan openness — the market deregulation of the Right plus the moral deregulation of the Left. This combination is now disappearing in the rear-view mirror. Up ahead looms a new postliberal political landscape, one in which centrist liberals and national populists battle it out (with a noisy sub-plot from a green Left).

The neoliberal or hyperliberal era of metropolitan openness, starting in the Eighties, is best summed up in the saying that the Right won the economic argument but the Left won the social argument on equality and rights. There were some differences between center-left and center-right on the size of the state and levels of redistribution and immigration, but also a broad consensus on how to prosper.

Globalism in economics, and legalism in politics, meant a sacrifice of democratic control. But the new consensus brought many benefits. Most people became richer, and society became fairer, especially if you were a woman or a member of a minority group or a clever child from a lower-income family. The expansion of higher education produced a bigger and more permeable elite than in the post-war period. (The 1957 Cabinet was entirely male and public school-educated, and more than half Etonian). The decline of the industrial working class meant many dangerous jobs in heavy industries were replaced with knowledge economy jobs in comfortable offices.

There were also many losers from this consensus, especially outside the greater Southeast, and their number grew after the crash of 2007-8. This was not just about inequality, de-industrialization, and the loss of well-paid jobs for men of average or below average academic ability.

Suggested Reading

How to save liberalism

By Adrian Wooldridge

For three deeper trends, trends that have defined Western liberal modernity, also accelerated in these decades. One of them is the further loss of religion. Strong traces of Christian belief still animate public and private life, but mass secularization has removed a handrail of collective ritual and moral guidance.

The changing relationship between the sexes is another. Women’s financial autonomy and mass entry into paid work and public life represents the biggest increase in Western freedom since 1945. But, as Helen Andrews points out, the female domination of institutions such as education and the law is unprecedented, while many men have lost their provider role and found nothing satisfactory in its place. At the same time, fertility has fallen well below replacement rate.

There is a third big shift. Within the lifetime of today’s young adults, the ethnic majority in many Western countries will fall below half of the population. In Britain, the post-1997 liberalization of immigration means that, today, nearly 20% of the population is foreign-born. The white British core has shrunk from almost 90% in 2000 to around 70% today (lower in England). Just 53% of births in 2025 were to white British mothers. Britain is on track to become majority-minority in the 2060s.

The 2016 Brexit vote, and the Trump vote too, was a raucous and disorganized slap in the face to establishment. They were protests, not only by those who felt they had suffered the economic effects of hyperliberalism, but also those who experienced a sense of loss and disorientation from the big cultural shifts.

Democracy worked: imperfectly, of course. After the Brexit vote, a section of the political class tried to reverse the result. When the impasse was broken by Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory, Brexit was indeed done, but the two further promises, to reduce immigration and to start “leveling up” Britain — a direct response to the Brexit vote — were both dramatically broken.

Nonetheless, in 2026, we have shifted towards a new small-c conservative consensus, much of which even a Labour government is forced to adapt to. The loose coalition behind it comprises older, non-graduates from left-behind, “Somewhere” Britain, combined with the many people of all classes and regions who feel the Blair/Cameron settlement is no longer working economically or culturally.

After nearly 40 years of metropolitan openness, the backdrop is now provincial insecurity and this coalition’s new set of priorities: wanting national interest, and national citizen preference, more vigorously pursued; deep anxiety about free-riding, hence the need for tighter control of both immigration and spiraling public welfare; desire for more orderly neighborhoods; rejection of progressive excess; skepticism about both big business and state capacity, but a strong desire to see the latter repaired.

The new consensus is not just the result of reaching a tipping point in the number of losers. There has also been a loss of momentum in the previous settlement. The growth of the professional and managerial class (PMC), the social base of the metropolitan era consensus, has stalled. It now accounts for about 33% of all jobs (13% higher PMC, 20% lower PMC), but that number has increased only six percentage points since 1991, despite the production of ever more graduates with generalist academic qualifications and unrealizable expectations. And that is even before AI replaces so many professional jobs.

This has been accompanied by a loss of confidence in the system of government that has grown up since the Seventies, when what the academic Michael Moran called light-touch “club governance” was replaced with the “regulatory state”. There were good reasons for more accountability and greater legal regulation, but we have overshot and ended up with the bat tunnel-fish disco Britain in which nothing gets built.

After 20 years of stagnant growth, the political class, Left and Right, is being forced to think harder about the gridlock that results from liberalism’s reflex to disperse more power to courts and regulators.

The emerging cross-party consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above. It now includes: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgment that higher education has over-expanded and technical skills have been neglected; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many dropping out of the labor market (only four-in-10 households are net contributors); the need for a rethink on Net Zero, a regional rebalancing to the economy, an openness towards some degree of re-industrialization, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defense, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater pushback against the progressive activist war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarization, anomie and loss of meaning, especially among young people, a concern now focused on social media regulation.

This new consensus tilts more towards the Right bloc (Conservative/Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour/Greens/Liberal Democrats); that does not guarantee the Right will prevail. Minus the skepticism about Net Zero and welfarism, plenty of the above could align with the economics of Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism. Nevertheless, in the short term, internal Labour politics, with or without Starmer, is likely to require more old-school, statist, tax-the-rich Leftism (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive tax regime in the developed world).

But is the new consensus postliberal? There are many schools of postliberalism, each defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on postliberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly unformed as a distinct ideology by contrast with older rivals like socialism, conservatism or liberalism itself.

Yet there are family resemblances between most of the writers who claim the mantle. Liberalism, in most critiques, is seen as a bloodless ideology focusing too much on individual rights, constraints on power and value neutrality. Postliberal critics argue that it stifles democratic governance and dispatches the human needs for community, belonging and meaning to the private sphere.

The American version, associated with some people in the Trump court, is more militant and religious. Writers like Patrick Deneen regard liberalism as a form of nihilism that encourages our worst selves. The religious postliberals believe that the good society requires virtue to precede freedom and, implicitly, demand a return to faith, usually Catholicism. This is more pre-liberal than postliberal.

More mainstream postliberals prioritize the “common good”, but that begs the question of who defines it. Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour, the chief UK variant of postliberalism, is more a vibe — Left on economics, Right on culture — than a political philosophy or policy program. Glasman’s last book is subtitled The Politics of the Common Good but provides no clear answer to the question of how we can arrive at a consensus on it in societies with such diverse interests and values.

In today’s Britain, there is no significant appetite for the illiberalism and religious authoritarianism of US postliberalism, nor for Blue Labour’s hardcore socialist economics and the quaint idea that the working class longs to return to the factories.

Another dead end is nostalgia for an overwhelmingly white Britain. This nostalgia is now found on the ethnonationalist fringe of the postliberal universe among people who also toy with extreme forms of remigration.

Of course, English ethnicity should be allowed to breathe. Ethnicity simply means shared ancestry and the shared habits and history connected to that ancestry. The English ethnicity has always been a relatively open one, as befits a once sea-going people. If it can absorb millions of Irish people over two centuries, then it can certainly absorb people of different racial and religious backgrounds if they come in manageable numbers and assimilate into the national culture (people such as Rishi Sunak, who is stereotypically English in the modern, self-deprecating, patrician manner).

The re-emergence of English ethnicity as a normal identity, after centuries of being submerged in a broader British or Imperial identity, is to be welcomed, not feared. And postliberals are right to stress the enduring importance of both ethnic and broader national identities. In more fragmented societies, a critical mass of people sharing a strong fellow-citizen attachment, regardless of race or ethnicity, is essential to navigating future collective action problems.

In any case, no political party will get elected in modern Britain without accepting, at least in spirit, both of the post-war social revolutions: the welfare revolution of the Forties and Fifties and the equalities revolution of the Sixties and Seventies.

It is also true, on the conservative side of the ledger, that a big reason for the appeal of postliberal ideas is widespread regret at the loss of community and national solidarity, and the related reductions in trust and volunteering. People regret, too, the loss of stable family life: nearly half of British children are not living with both their biological parents at the age of 16. The epidemic of mental fragility and the collapse of birth rates speaks to a malaise — it is tempting to label it a spiritual one — that liberalism, by design, has no answer to.

But modern electorates are both liberal and conservative in complex combinations. The weakening of community and family often happens because people place their own individual freedom and desires first. People want community but many of them want wealth, freedom and mobility more. We might regret losing the sense of a single national conversation when there were only three television channels, but few of us want to give up the choice of entertainment we now enjoy. Most of us have been happy, in Yuval Noah Harari’s phrase, to “give up meaning in exchange for power” — or, he might have said, for comfort.

People don’t want to abandon liberalism; they want a better version stripped of its excesses and silences, economic and cultural. Focusing on liberalism itself as the problem — rather than the recent marriage of economic neoliberalism and progressivism — opens the door to reactionary postliberals who think everything went wrong with Luther or Locke.

We don’t need a revolution: we need a course correction, as Adrian Pabst and other moderate postliberal voices have argued, a politics that speaks to the priorities of the Somewheres at least as much as the Anywheres, without jettisoning pluralism and the essentials of historic liberalism.

Adrian Wooldridge makes a similar point in his book Centrists of the World Unite! He frames his argument as a reinvention of liberalism, but it’s one that overlaps with the kind of postliberalism advocated here: a decidedly un-centrist challenge to the bourgeois-bohemian economic and moral deregulation of the past 40 years.

One way of thinking about postliberalism as a course correction is seeing it as an attempt to reinvigorate some of the background factors that helped liberalism to work better in earlier decades. Liberalism, say postliberals, is parasitic on other forces to thrive: freedom and value neutrality work best in a context of individual restraint, shared norms and demographic stability.

Post-1945 liberalism in the West certainly benefited from factors that are now either absent or weakened: a growing population; rapidly rising incomes; the moral constraints provided by residual religious belief and deference to experts and leaders; stable family life; a single, national media-led, public conversation; large ethnic majorities with a pre-political solidarity (reinforced by the last war) creating a strong “imagined community” and common norms across social classes.

Today, by contrast, we live in low-growth, aging societies, with an archipelago of competing value and interest groups consuming individualized media, with weakened families and national attachments, and with faith in politics badly dented. Liberalism is under strain and needs a helping hand from postliberal priorities, even if the term itself remains too obscure for mainstream debate.

My own version of that helping hand, which I categorize as belonging to the Left-conservative school of postliberalism — a synthesis of moderate social democracy and moderate cultural conservatism — has three main elements.

1. Small-c conservative common sense.

• Acceptance of the moral equality of all humans, but rejection of the moral universalism and post-nationalism of the Left.
• Restoring authority to elected politicians.
• An immigration pause, plus the understanding that a society with a shrinking ethnic core needs an attractive, broad-based national identity more than ever.
• A belief in personal responsibility and reciprocity, entailing a shift to a more contributory welfare state.
• Recognition that money alone is not the answer to poverty and social dysfunction; family structure and upbringing matter too.
• More support for stable families, marriage and higher fertility by minimizing the motherhood penalty, but also by making it easier for one parent to remain at home when children are pre-school.

2. Market-friendly, national social democracy.

• A national preference in public procurement.
• Tougher paternalistic regulation of industries with power to poison bodies (food) and minds (tech).
• Less exposure to the market in some key public utilities but more exposure in areas where competition is weak.
• Transition to Dutch-style social insurance model for health and social care.
• An end to current Net Zero plans; ensure the lowest possible energy costs for businesses and households.
• Limited use of subsidies and tariffs to prioritize national industry, reshoring and innovation, and national control over critical infrastructure/utilities.
• Incentivization of a more patriotic business elite, and clearer distinction in the tax system between the productive and unproductive rich.
• Reduction in the tax/regulatory burden on small businesses.
• Promoting higher levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship, especially among young people.

3. A regional settlement for the crisis of demoralization in Somewhere Britain.

• Tackle extreme regional divides by promoting public investment and growth companies in left-behind areas, plus investing in local institutions: sports clubs, youth clubs, pubs.
• Reverse the over-production of people with generalist academic qualifications and under-production of skilled workers and technicians.
• Create more outlets for public-spiritedness. In a more dangerous world, with a more erratic climate, we need an expanded military reserve plus a civic and environmental taskforce. We also need an easy-to-use online national volunteering platform.

This is not a radical manifesto, but it cuts across still-powerful liberal assumptions in key areas: the reluctance to accept discomfort at rapid ethnic change as legitimate; the economism of so much social policy that focuses only on higher welfare payments; the persistent belief that more graduates is good for the economy and society; the reluctance to rethink rights legislation even when it thwarts democratic common sense.

There are policies here borrowed from Right and Left, but the Right bloc would be most comfortable with it. To turn the cultural dominance of the Right bloc into political power requires, as well as an electoral accommodation between Reform and the Conservatives, two things that it currently lacks: an ability to reach out to centrist voters and a coherent political economy.

Both of these failings are especially, perhaps unavoidably, true of the insurgent Reform. As Farage tacks to the center, with Restore Britain nibbling at his Right flank, he may be able to reduce his unpopularity at the local tennis club. A balanced political economy that can combine some of the productive, deregulatory spirit of the Thatcher years while also protecting, and reforming, the social state and reviving the left-behind parts of the country, remains a work in progress.

Liberalism, as Wooldridge points out, has had several course corrections in its history. The course correction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, via the New Liberals in Britain and Teddy Roosevelt in the US, jettisoned laissez-faire and the sanctity of private property.

Suggested Reading

The Hungarian revolution isn’t what it seems

By Aris Roussinos

Today’s course correction requires nothing more from liberalism than accepting a new balance between the dispersal of power and the need for an effective democracy. As even the raffishly liberal Financial Times writer, Janan Ganesh, has recognized, liberal democracy needs to be a bit less liberal and a bit more democratic.

Historic liberalism is a sensibility as much as an idea or institution. It is built on reasonableness, open-mindedness, good-faith argument, and a willingness not to see opponents as enemies.

This sensibility can no longer be taken for granted, and some variants of postliberalism have contributed to that. But this is a problem that afflicts all political traditions, exacerbated by identity politics on the Left and ethnonationalism on the Right.

Tribalism is on the rise not just because of social media algorithms, but because it’s harder to find compromises when politics is more about culture, values and emotions than about size of the state and levels of redistribution.

It is therefore all the more important that The Rest is Politics centrists learn to accept this new, more cultural terrain of politics and the legitimacy of “decent populist” parties like Reform that eschew racism and ethnonationalism. Rather than demonizing opponents as bigots or elitists, we need a new generation of politicians, on both the liberal and populist sides, who can speak across the Anywhere/Somewhere divide.

After the relative calm of the second half of the 20th century, huge challenges are now piling up. And the ability of politicians to manage them is made more difficult by an increasingly divided and demanding electorate. This explains Britain’s high turnover of prime ministers. If some strands of postliberalism are part of the problem, then the movement’s broader intuitions are a necessary part of the solution.

***

A longer version of this essay can be found at David Goodhart’s Substack, A Goodhart is Hard to Find.

The Covid-19 crisis is one reason for this exodus, but only one. Although a majority of doctors surveyed reported that the Government’s handling of the pandemic had made them more likely to leave the NHS, a much more significant factor was the lack of a real-terms pay rise. And indeed, at the beginning of this year, just before the pandemic took hold, an article in the BMJ warned of the threat of “Drexit (Doctor-Exit)”, described as:

“… the exponentially growing trend for doctors to walk away from their jobs in the NHS, either to new healthcare systems overseas such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand or perhaps worse, into new professions altogether, leaving behind their well-trained medical brains. This exodus has been gaining momentum for several years with the workforce now at breaking point.”

I’m a medical school drop-out. I applied for reasons that were, in retrospect, a bit silly; I liked both arts and science subjects, and thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that a medical degree could neatly combine the two. Also, I really did want to “help people” — pat, I know, but true.

I got in, I disliked it, I failed my first-year exams and, rather than resitting them, I decided to leave. The experience has left me with a very patchy knowledge of the human body (for instance I know a surprising amount about the anatomy of the thorax, and next to nothing about the anatomy of the head). But it hasn’t left me with any feelings of wistfulness — because I don’t know a single junior doctor who is happy in the job.

At the end of last year, I met up with four old friends from medical school, some of whom I hadn’t seen since I left. All of these women are highly capable graduates of UCL, one of the best and oldest medical schools in the world. But only one of them intends to remain in NHS clinical practice. One is leaving to do private cosmetic work, one is going into hospital management, and another is leaving the profession altogether. I also know several doctors who have emigrated to South Africa or Australia, enticed by a higher salary and a lower cost of living.

More from this author

Why defunding the police will hurt women most

By Louise Perry

And why on earth wouldn’t they? As I know all too well, the desire to “help people” may be genuine, but it doesn’t always last. Medical students are selected for the three magic traits that together produce a highly desirable worker: high intelligence, industriousness, and good communication skills. With these talents, almost all could go and work in the city and earn lots of money if they wanted to. Or they could choose a lower paid role that offers a comfortable work-life balance.

Medicine can offer plenty of money and some flexibility (a part-time GP still has a pretty sweet deal), but first you have to spend five or six years studying, followed by many more years training, and with your choice of job and location severely constrained. A friend of mine was desperate for a foundation years placement within striking distance of her mum, so that she could call on her for childcare during long overnight shifts. But she was at the mercy of an NHS bureaucracy that obstructed this eminently reasonable request every step of the way. No wonder young doctors are so angry.

Pay is a large part of the problem. Post-austerity, doctors’ salaries dropped by 8% between 2010 and 2015. New graduates now leave medical school, flushed with pride at their achievement, only to be greeted by a basic salary of £28k, well below the sum needed to buy a home in the most expensive parts of the country.

But there is also that far more slippery and sensitive issue of status. Although the public do still consistently put doctors and nurses at the top of the list of most trusted professionals, the long term shift from a paternalistic to an egalitarian model of doctor-patient relationship has come with costs. Medical students are warned of the risks of acting in the bad old style: striding imperiously down a ward and giving orders with no regard for the patient’s preferences. But in the bad new style, patients consult “Dr. Google” before arrival, take no heed of a clinician’s expertise, and dismissively use her first name.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt even suggested that the NHS should do away with “stuffy titles” because he believed that a hierarchical team structure led to more mistakes. Of course, Hunt also imposed punitive contract changes that triggered a general strike among junior doctors, the first such industrial action in 40 years. Bad pay, bad conditions and not even a “stuffy title” to provide some self-respect — no wonder the medics I know still refer to Jeremy Hunt in Cockney rhyming slang.

How much of this drop in status is to do with the fact that, for the first time in history, medical school graduates are majority female? Germaine Greer wrote in 1999 that “[p]restige and power have seeped out of professions as women joined them. Teaching is already rock-bottom; medicine is sliding fast”. A 2009 study of US census data from 1950 to 2000 backed up Greer’s claim, demonstrating that as professions become female-dominated, pay and prestige both drop.

As a rule, I am suspicious of any explanation for a complex social phenomenon that leans too heavily on individual malice. I know full well that the gender pay gap is overwhelmingly not the result of sexist recruiters, but rather of biology: put crudely, women have babies, and babies don’t get along well with full-time jobs. But the usual explanations for the pay gap still don’t quite explain why so-called “occupational feminisation” seems to be the kiss of death when it comes to professional prestige. Maybe there really is something about women qua women that inspires a lack of respect in patients, bosses and politicians.

And things could yet get worse. The automation revolution is expected to have a dumbbell-shaped effect on the economy, with very low skilled and very high skilled jobs first in line to be replaced by artificial intelligence. So truck drivers, fruit pickers, and factory workers will lose their jobs, but so will lawyers, accountants, and — yes, possibly — doctors.

Suggested reading

Up the workers: how Covid reset society's values

By Jenny McCartney

Funnily enough, I’ve heard on the grapevine that a medic I was friends with at UCL has now left clinical practice and is working for a tech company trying to develop robot doctors (she never did like patients much). The broader project is going well: AI can already outperform radiographers at some tasks, and recently a computer-controlled robot successfully performed intestinal surgery on a pig. Right now, “Dr. Google” is just an annoyance for doctors; soon, though, it could be coming for their jobs.

Although not entirely. David Goodhart’s new book offers a useful way of thinking about the coming impact of automation, with the blow likely to fall hardest on what Goodhart calls “head” (professional) and “hand” (manual) jobs, leaving “heart” (care) jobs mostly unscathed. Medicine is, to some extent, a combination of all three, since the role requires a combination of brains, dexterity, and bedside manner. But it has traditionally been classed more within the “head” category which, as Goodhart argues, currently enjoys a dysfunctionally high level of income and prestige.

“Heart” jobs will survive automation because they involve the kind of human touch and warmth that machines cannot easily imitate. The heart component of the doctor’s role is therefore likely to survive, even if a patient can step into a full-body scanner for diagnosis, take a pill perfectly tailored to their genetic profile, and undergo surgery carried out by a robot controlled by a surgeon on the other side of the world, or even no human surgeon at all.

Suggested reading

Let's be honest, the NHS is awful

By Henry Jeffreys

Even with access to the most sophisticated AI, doctors will never be entirely redundant, since patients will still need someone to hold their hand and direct them towards the waiting machines. But think: if doctors have lost all of the high status “head” roles and are left only with the “heart”, is anyone really going to continue using their “stuffy titles”? Their prestige, already diminished, could hardly survive such a development. Doctors could find themselves sunk to the status level of nurses, another majority-female profession who are loved, trusted, but also regularly disrespected (not least, I’m sorry to say, by doctors).

Doctors don’t want sentimentalism. The ones I know didn’t mind the “clap for carers”, but they didn’t like it much either, since the gesture did nothing to change their working conditions. While they still can, many will reject bad pay and falling status by voting with their feet, as two-thirds apparently intend to. But with the rise of automation, their options may become more limited. This historically stable and lucrative profession is in trouble, and a sincere desire to “help people” might not be enough to save it.

But then I stopped to imagine what lockdown must be like if you live in a flatshare.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the London parks first to close, citing visitors’ disregard of social distancing, are in areas popular with young sharers: Victoria Park in Hackney, and Brockwell Park in South-East London. (Brockwell Park has since reopened.) After all, it’s one thing to obey social distancing rules if you have a house, a partner you get on with, even a garden. But what must it be like for those young aspiring members of the London ‘metropolitan elite’ jammed cheek by jowl into dingy flatshares most of which don’t even have a sitting room?

This demographic has grown steadily in recent decades. Half of Britain’s school-leavers today go to university. On campus, they absorb the liberal worldview of the urban knowledge-worker class, even as the salaries associated with a ‘metropolitan elite’ lifestyle ascend ever further out of reach. (Even before coronavirus, the median graduate starting salary had not increased in five years, and the average has fallen since 2011.)

Suggested reading

Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

The result, I argued last November, is a socially-liberal, economically aspirational graduate precariat, clinging to the big-city dream while scraping a hand-to-mouth existence in cramped, expensive shared housing. David, a youth campaigner in his twenties who moved to London after university to help found a new charity, describes life on the bottom rungs of the capital’s graduate rat-race as a split between a professional life full of excitement, and a domestic one where comfort, security and even intimacy were hard to come by:

“It was all flashy and big and exciting, and I felt like one of the destined few, right at the centre of things. I was meeting all these charity chief execs and building this amazing network. But at the same time I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa, and commuting an hour each way across London on crowded Tube carriages. It was this weird split between a slick professional outside appearance, then this miserable life at home.”

Millions of young graduates tolerate a similar state of affairs, in the expectation that in due course things will improve. There’ll be a flat they only share with a partner, a better salary, maybe even the distant dream of buying a home.

Now, these millions have had the exciting, slick, public-facing side of their lives abruptly cancelled by lockdown, and are stuck instead with the no-frills private one. Crowded, overpriced houseshares. Flatmates they may not especially like. Nothing much to do. No wonder the first warm weekend of spring tempted some to bend the lockdown rules with a spot of sunbathing in the park.

Though they may be on the bottom rung, these millions still identify culturally with the ‘Anywhere’ sociocultural group, as David Goodhart framed it — the ‘open’, highly educated, mobile and cosmopolitan group which contrasts so starkly with the more ‘closed’, place-bound, conservative and lower-class ‘Somewheres’ found in the provinces.

It’s a worldview with history. In 2006, Tony Blair framed the new politics as ‘Open’ versus ‘Closed’ — with openness, obviously, as the future. In his view, politicians should drive openness while reassuring the wary ‘closed’ plebs that this path as not just beneficial but historically inevitable. The moral weighting of the binary is clear. Who wants to be seen as closed, inflexible or narrow-minded?

Studies also suggest that ‘open’ personality types are more likely to gravitate to cities, as my colleague Ed West points out in his recent book. So London is bound to lean more liberal, more rule-bending – and, in a world that valorises ‘open’ traits, more sure of its own worth than the more culturally ‘closed’ provinces. More smug, in a word.

Suggested reading

Jesus was a ‘somewhere’. Paul was an 'anywhere'

By David Goodhart

Meanwhile, it has been argued that a ‘closed’ suspicion of strangers had evolutionary utility for much of human history, as it helped to limit the spread of pathogens to which a community might have no immunity. But now we’ve vanquished all the highly infectious diseases that might be spread by human hypermobility, haven’t we? So the shires’ worldview is vestigial, like the appendix, and we can and should all embrace a new, counter-evolutionary openness and enjoy the fruits of the resulting globalisation.

Except. A few weeks into the pandemic, it should be clear to even the most dedicated advocate of openness that there are some upsides to having a nation-state government with control of its currency and borders, and domestic capacity in key areas such as food production, medicine and precision engineering. (Ideally more than Britain has at present.) Even the Financial Times has suggested that some economic orthodoxies of recent decades might be due a rethink.

I would like to resist the temptation to be smug on behalf of the ‘closed’, rule-following provinces so long dismissed as obsolete. Rather, I want to invite today’s young urban flat-sharers to question the view I still secretly held as I loaded the removal van on my way to the shires, that leaving the capital is an admission of failure.

For as I watch my daughter run through the lawn sprinkler, and imagine lockdown in the poky London flat we left behind, I have no regrets at all. And I wonder if maybe, just maybe, we could help heal the sociocultural split in our country not by trying to persuade Somewheres to be more like Anywheres but by asking instead what more ‘open’ and ‘closed’ approaches to life could bring to one another.

“There are all these un-priced bits of working in London”, David told me. “The crowds, the smell, the pressure and lack of a personal life. I just decided that’s not what I want.” So he packed up his Anywhere skills and experience, and moved Somewhere. “I’ve been in Poole now for three years,” he says, “and my quality of life is so much better even though my salary has dropped by two-thirds.”

Along with having time for healthy eating, exercise and getting married, David told me how great it felt to bring valuable skills from the capital, with which he could make a real positive impact. In the last decade, I’ve seen something similar take place in my own small town, as other London escapees have settled here. Many have started businesses, formed clubs or otherwise thrown themselves into community life, bringing energy, skills and fresh insights to the community. “The biggest problem we have,” David says “isn’t the concentration of wealth but the concentration of talent.”

Before coronavirus blew everything up, public policy was just beginning to tackle the question of the gulf between dynamic cities and ‘left behind’ provinces. Boris Johnson’s December 2019 election campaign talked repeatedly of ‘levelling up’, a framing that suggests that with a bit of subsidy and jollying-along, the Somewheres can all be induced to be more Anywhere and then everything will be alright.

Suggested reading

Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

But that does nothing to challenge our centrifugal economy, in which urban hubs act as pyramid schemes, with a gravitational force both economic and cultural that pulls in everyone with an iota of energy and ambition. Once dragged to the hubs, people must then scramble over one another in a race for the top of the pile. Talking of ‘levelling up’ just creates more pyramids.

Instead, we need to give greater weight to the benefits of provincial life — fresh air, friendly relations with your neighbours, a slower pace of life, room to settle and raise a family — not just for retirees, but also the young. Even the ‘closed’ mindset, it turns out, has some benefits when you need longstanding neighbours willing to look out for you during a crisis. “Everyone knows that coastal towns are the most under-developed parts of the UK,” David says. “I see think tanks wondering about how to improve them. But the most obvious solution is: move there.”

In The Matrix, the hero Neo discovers that the life he thought he was living is an illusion created by intelligent machines, to pacify humans who are being farmed as living batteries. Today, with the illusion of a glittering urban future abruptly switched off by lockdown, millions of young graduates may feel rather like Neo: opening their eyes to discover themselves stacked in battery pods and not, in fact, about to take over the world after all.

These millions might consider whether it is time to vote with their feet. After all, theirs is the talent and energy. Theirs is the future. Lockdown will come to an end one day. When it does, we’ll have a chance to re-evaluate how we do pretty much everything. Perhaps it’s time for young graduates to bin the polluted, hypercompetitive metropolis, and the over-reliance on ‘open’ values, and make a difference instead in the clean air, affordable housing and friendly communities of Britain’s towns.

Watching it again this week, I was amazed by how it also echoes our contemporary political concerns. Over half a century before David Goodhart pointed out the contrasting ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’, The Magnificent Seven dramatised precisely this tension in its depiction of the anywhere gunfighters and the somewhere farmers. The Magnificent Seven strikes me as the post-liberal film par excellence.

If you haven’t seen it, you really should stop reading and go do so immediately. And for those with sketchy memories, here is a quick recap. Bandits, led by the wonderfully slippery Eli Wallach, descend from the Mexican hills to terrorise a village of very ordinary (and rather boring) arable farmers. Unable to defend themselves, the village leadership decides to recruit a number of hired guns to do so on their behalf. So off they go to the local town, without much in the way of money to offer their would-be defenders. And there they meet Chris – played by Brenner. Chris recruits six more misfits, all of them drifters, all of them super cool, none of them able to stay in one place.

Spoiler alert: the alliance of farmer and gunfighter is successful in seeing off the bandits — at the cost, though, of several lives. And the action scenes are terrific. But philosophically, it is this contrast between gunfighter and farmer that I have long found fascinating. And the crucial difference between them is one of mobility.

Suggested reading

John Clare, poet of the Somewheres

By Mary Harrington

In Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari locates the agricultural revolution to a period roughly some 10,000 years ago when humankind, having survived as a hunter and forager for over two million years, began to domesticate various plants and animals, thus to have a better control over its food supply. Harari calls this revolution “history’s biggest fraud” because he believes that what actually happened here is that plants, like wheat, domesticated human beings rather than the other way round, crops turning people into its willing slaves. Humans ended up doing back-breaking work in the fields so that crops like wheat could spread themselves over every corner of the planet.

Of course, the cultivation of crops enabled human beings to produce far more calories per unit of territory than foraging ever could. And this enabled the human population to expand exponentially, thus putting even more pressure on the food supply, thus necessitating an even greater emphasis on agriculture. Alongside this deepening spiral there were other unintended consequences as well. As Harari puts it: “Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.” In other words, the premise of story of The Magnificent Seven is as old as human settlement itself.

The agricultural revolution produced a class of human beings who were, for the first time, rooted — their crops, quite literally — to a particular geographical spot. The metaphor of rootedness is one that had been picked up by the post-liberal moment as key to understanding our current predicament. Sir Roger Scruton told me before he died that Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots was one of the foremost influences upon his philosophy of place. And the lament at feeling “deracinated” — uprooted — is a familiar complaint in contemporary discourse.

But with rootedness comes vulnerability. For to grow crops is to be tied to one place. There is no running away, no moving on when the going gets tough. One’s very survival is staked to a particular geographical patch of land. And staying put, in the face of bandits like Calvera (played by Wallach) requires courage.

Suggested reading

Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

Back in the late 1990’s, I was teaching philosophy at Oxford, and I would often encourage my students to watch The Magnificent Seven. So many of them were brilliant at pulling down the philosophical positions of other people without ever proposing a position of their own. I used to call this “gunfighter cool”. They would arrive into a subject, shoot things down and blow things up, then move on. Like the gunfighters, they took no responsibility for anything.

But if you want to impress me, I used to say, try defending territory. Say what it is you stand for, and not just what you are against. And then wait for the bandits that will come over the hill for you. That is intellectual bravery, I would say. Defending territory is the only way to develop ideas, to make them grow.

This story of the vulnerable heroism of the farmer was one that I would draw upon quite heavily later in my life, during and after my troubled time at St Paul’s Cathedral. A few months after I resigned following Occupy, I gave a lecture at the BBC Free Thinking festival in Gateshead. I called it ‘The Magnificent Seven and the Crisis of Commitment’,  and in it I began to develop the idea that the bravery of the farmer, that of being staked to a place, was also a kind of spiritual bravery. There is a sort of “here I stand I can do no other” quality about the spirituality of the farmer. Someone one might even call “belief” – which is to say, something I don’t always know how to defend, but which I know to be the source of deep nourishment nonetheless.

Suggested reading

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

In more recent years, I have come to see my favourite cowboy western as an extended metaphor for the contrast between liberals and communitarians. The gunfighters are all classic liberal individualists. They prize self-reliance, mobility, they hate being tied down, without loyalty to country or town. Their fantasy is of the unencumbered life.

Three years before The Magnificent Seven was released, Jack Kerouac published On the Road, that seminal text of the beat generation that one critic of the described as “a portrait of a disjointed segment of society acting out of its own neurotic necessity”. On the Road was a stunning achievement, the critic argued, “but it is a road, as far as the characters were concerned, that leads nowhere”. The Seven’s gunfighters are cut from the same cloth. They too are drifters, with nothing to pattern their existence other than their immediate desires.

At the film’s end, the youngest of the gunfighters falls for a beautiful woman in the village. He is faced with a choice: follow the two remaining gunfighter heroes to a life of effortless cool, living out of cheap hotel rooms and under the stars, going from bar to bar and fight to fight; or give it all up for decidedly uncool, settled domesticity. Gunfighters make terrible fathers, of course. Because children — like crops — require those who planted the seed to stay put. The gunfighter chooses the girl, symbolically takes off his gun belt, lets it fall to the floor, and settles down to help her with the harvest.

The US was not ready for this message back in 1960. And not for many decades after. Yet for me, it was people like the poet/farmer Wendell Berry that most fully exemplified resistance to the dominant culture of liberal individualism, with its emphasis on continual mobility and disparagement of place. And it is other farmers also — like James Rebanks writing beautifully in UnHerd yesterday — that remain the foremost exponents of this heroic loyalty to place, and from whom we in these lock-down times have so much to learn.

The final scene of the film sums up the message. As the final two gunfighters ride out of the village, the village elder warns them that the gunfighters are always destined to lose. They are “like the wind, blowing over the land and passing on”. The Yul Brynner character agrees. “The Old Man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We’ll always lose.”

They had mansions, private jets, servants, fame and influence. And they lost it all overnight. When the bus deposited them at the town during the first episode, in 2015, the Roses couldn’t imagine slumming it as denizens of a seedy, roadside motel, at the mercy of benevolent townsfolk they couldn’t tolerate.

But they did. Over the subsequent seasons — this week, the sixth and final season kicked off — the characters’ circumstances have changed their value system. While they might still be loathe to admit it, they like themselves, and their lives, better than before.

Schitt’s Creek was created by Eugene Levy and his son, Daniel, who came up with the idea after wondering what would happen if the Kardashians lost everything they ever valued. How would they find meaning? The answer, is that they find something new to value: not possessions, but relationships, connection, and honest communication. Without material wealth, they find richness in their own, unencumbered lives.

Suggested reading

Test article

By JD Vance

The story of the Rose family’s downfall is one of true character development. By season six, Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy), who made his fortune in video stores, co-owns the down-at-heel motel the Roses are forced to call home. His son, David (Daniel Levy), had been an art scenester who hadn’t known his family was footing the bill, and now runs a small apothecary stocking local goods. After a lifetime of barely-there, pansexual relationships, he’s about to marry a small-town guy with a big heart.

Alexis (Annie Murphy), his sister, was a pampered “it” girl with no talent. After slowing to the pace of small town life, she found the confidence to finish her education. The only hold out to the old life is the Rose family matriarch, Moira (Catherine O’Hara). A former soap star, she cannot relinquish the spotlight any more than she can her dozens of pampered wigs.

As bad as the Roses were to each other when they first arrived at the motel, they were worse to the townspeople: rude, dismissive, solipsistic, and unsympathetic. These childlike adults, used to having everyone do everything for them, were forced to work out how to do things on their own. It can be painful watching for coastal elites who can barely imagine themselves more than a few blocks from Starbucks.

In the real world, Trump was calling to small-town voters: Make America Great Again! In Schitt’s Creek, patronising metropolitans belittled the place, treating the inhabitants like stupid white trash who fall for every piece of fake news and led their country ignorantly into chaos by voting against their interests.

Suggested reading

Why do we fetishise the poverty memoir?

By Douglas Murray

But Shitt’s Creek reminds us that those in flyover country may have a view of life that allows for more real living than the preposterous demands of urban affluence. It might have only one coffee shop but it has countless communal projects. In cities, making eye contact with strangers is considered aggressive; in Schitt’s Creek, not doing so is reason for offence. The community didn’t judge the Roses or discriminate — it opened its arms, albeit cautiously. Nor were the locals drawn as caricatures. Warm and wise and knowing, they gave as good as they got.

Over five seasons we have watched the Roses grow from unhappy, entitled, neo-liberal brats who live their every desire, to a family that learns to enjoy making do. So many sitcoms’ stories feed off of characters’ static qualities. But the four main characters here have undergone changes on an almost cellular level over the course of their emotional journey.

There are, according to UnHerd contributor David Goodhart, two types of people in our modern world: the “Somewheres” find comfort in the place and customs they were raised with; “Anywheres” seek a global perspective, with no real connection to locality or primary culture. The Roses have made that journey from anywheres to somewheres. They become a family of low-wage earners, unable to travel, part of the communal fabric of the town. They arrive barely knowing each other; they grow to actually love each other. This family that had everything but each other, finally has the only thing it truly needs.

It has been heartwarming and unexpectedly moving to watch their  worldview shift incrementally, to follow them eeking out relevance in their new community and recalibrating their values. One by one, each has been tested. Each has been given, over the five seasons, the opportunity to abandon what they’ve built with their own blood, sweat and tears, and return to the pampered ease of their old lives.

Suggested reading

What hope for America's Deplorables?

By Justin Webb

In one episode, Alexis’s old friends offer to bring her back to polite society and give her a job at a parent’s PR firm, where she needn’t even work too hard. Alexis, who is struggling to get her own fledgling PR business off the ground, turns them down; how much better it feels to achieve on your own terms. Moira, the only character whose former life was lived fully in the spotlight of TV fame has found it hard to relinquish that old world. Will Season 6 allow her a redemption of sorts?

What the characters of Schitt’s Creek learn is a lesson for any of us who take our moral message and lifestyle guidelines from reality TV. We watch our idols primp and preen, our children want to grow up to be YouTubers, and we have no idea how to become grounded in the place we live, because we barely believe that it matters. We need to do what the Roses do. We need friends, family, something to lay your hands on and make grow, we need to understand that fulfilment lies in interdependence and relationships. Pursue people, love, real worth and real life, not clicks, likes, and all the empty trappings of wealth.

How much better to have a few people who you care about care about you than to have thousands of people know your name. If only we actually believed it.

Of those gathered, perhaps only a couple of us were enthusiastic proponents of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. Within the Church of England, there exists a split between the bishops and their congregations – bishops being overwhelmingly pro-Remain and regular churchgoers being slightly pro-Leave with occasional ones being significantly pro-Leave. I half imagined being rolled in a ball in the corner of the room with lots of men in purple dresses putting the boot in. But that didn’t happen. Instead, there was lots of tea and some regretful hand wringing. And, encouragingly, there were even some faint signs that church leaders were beginning to listen to their congregations.

The most interesting thing that I took away from the day, listening especially to German Christians, was how the EU became, for them, a sort of project of atonement for the consequences of German nationalism – that the shame of Nazism led them to reject any starry-eyed or romantic conception of the nation and to replace it by what Professor Heinrich Bedford-Strohm from the University of Bamberg called a “nationalism of rules”.

Suggested reading

Jesus was a ‘somewhere’. Paul was an 'anywhere'

By Giles Fraser

In other words, that a particular people might be united not by the dangerous emotionalism of flag waving but by a decidedly unemotional common bureaucracy that could be rolled out to embrace different nations, united under a set of administrative rules and procedures. One German academic there spoke of the need for the UK to be “integrated into the European cultural synthesis”. I shuddered and thought of the Borg in Star Trek, a hive mind where all cultural distinctiveness will be assimilated. Forget subsidiarity. “Resistance is futile,” say the Borg.

As Brits, our reaction to the Second World War was inevitably entirely different from that of the Germans. We didn’t experience the humiliation of our nationalism, but quite the opposite: its overwhelming endorsement. For it was precisely through the sort of communal solidarity and fellow feeling that nationalism provides that we summoned the strength to stand against Nazism and help defeat it.

The massive outpouring of feeling and relief at the end of the war, the “never surrender” attitude, the solidarity forged by the Blitz, those familiar images of thousands of demobilised soldiers waving the union flag in Piccadilly, all that and more is why it is inevitable that the Germans and the British are going to have entirely different approaches to the moral valence of the nation state.

In the course of our discussion at Lambeth Palace, the former Chairman of HSBC bank, and ordained member of the Church of England, Lord Stephen Green, raised the issue of nationalism by speaking of his unease at the worlds of the hymn, “I vow to thee my country”, and in particular:

“The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.”

For Lord Green, such words suggest an uncritical estimation of the nation state, and one that is dangerously allied with a sense that we are better than other people. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed some unease with the words of that hymn.

Lord Green, of course, ran a bank whose advertising has consistently presented itself as the world’s bank. One of his bank’s recent ads stars Richard Ayoade as a ‘Global Citizen’ speaking about his love of Columbian or Costa Rican coffee, that we enjoy with a Danish. We drive German and Japanese cars, he says. We watch American movies on Korean tablets, or football heroes are Brazilian or Belgium, and so on. Ayoade places a small jigsaw piece of Britain into a map of the world, “We are not an island. We are part of something far, far bigger.” The end card reads: “Together we thrive.”

Further listening

Test article

By Giles Fraser

The socialist in me believes that large international banks such as HSBC deploy the soft and apparently inclusive language of globalisation as PR for the triumph of international capitalism. And that it is capitalism that has done more to set the agenda for the internationalism of the post-war period than the trans-national rules-based order to which Professor Bedford-Strohm was referring. There are those who argue that only a international rules based order such as the EU is big enough to set limits on the detrimental effects of global capitalism. Others see it as complicit and enabling.

It struck me as odd that the national church should have so little so say that was positive about the very idea of the nation state. The Bishop of Burnley complained that too many clergy squirm uncomfortably through Remembrance Day services. He’s right: despite the Queen being the head of the Church of England, some look as though they are crossing their fingers behind their backs when they sing the National Anthem.

At the meeting, David Goodhart expressed some frustration with Church leaders:

“The trouble with this bit of the Church is that they have turned themselves into a subaltern ideological sub-set of the Anywhere liberal class – the educated, mobile, secular, cognitive class, with its bias toward the rational, the open, the autonomous, the individual – a quick witted, goal oriented, solution focused worldview.”

These are the clients to whom HSBC has pitched its ad. For Goodhart, however, the whole point of a family, a church and a nation is that they accept people uncritically – and not on the basis of how clever they are, how mobile, how rich or how solution focused. This is indeed the love that asks no question. You belong to the group and are valued by it simply because you are a member of it. The family, the church and the nation are spaces where all are welcomed and esteemed irrespective of class, talent or ethnicity. This is the moral case for the nation state.

The final verse of “I vow to thee my Country” sets the nation state in the context of a wider vision of God’s inclusive love:

“And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace”

The job of the church is not to be a faintly Left-wing lobbying group for a slightly more redistributive tax policy or a more European focused Brexit deal. The job of the church is to point to this “other country”, God’s kingdom, and to set family, church and nation under its domain. The churches of the European Union, indeed the Churches of the world, should be united here, in communion – and not by a placeless bureaucracy of rules. It was rather telling that when the Archbishop celebrated communion at lunchtime that not all of those present were able to receive. It is a bit rich for the church to lecture the country on unity when it cannot achieve it itself.

The Remain/Leave division is not the same as this. One contributor, Ben Ryan from the Theos think tank, described it as being something more akin to the divide between head and soul. The head speaks about power and economic strength, the soul seeks belonging and communal solidarity or what we used to call love. Love is specific, never abstract or general. Christ expressed his love for the world by coming into the world in a specific place and to a specific people. The incarnation of that ‘other country’ was shockingly particular.

Further listening

Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

At its best, and when not trying to be bit-players in policy debates, the church does indeed do precisely this. The parish system roots the church in the specifics of time and space. It refuses the abstract political and concentrates on real lives lived by real people – and political, yes, when urgent themes of injustice grow out of that specificity.

But church leaders and bishops, having been promoted out of the parishes, onward and upward, and into the job of church management, can sometimes put their faith too much in that bureaucracy of rules and love-as-management. Those in the pews are longing for something different.

The historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari has characterised modernity as that point in world history where human beings swap meaning for power – where they swap (the meaning of) the soul for (the power of) the head. Brexit may be a reaction against this Faustian exchange. And the church should take advantage.