Back in the Spotlight

With the Prime Minister on holiday, focus has turned to the Centre-Right

Aug 07, 2026

Towering Columns

Joseph Eve argues in Conservative Home that Benjamin Disraeli’s legacy has been stolen by individuals whose own beliefs are closer to New Labour ideology.

Yet at some point in the early 2000s, the term was adopted by the proto-Blairist wing of our party, conveniently ignoring all other aspects of Disraelian thought. The baby of nationhood was thrown out with the economically progressive bathwater. The One was prioritised over the Nation as certain so-called ‘conservatives’ prioritised supranational courts, liberal migration policies and membership of the European Union over nationhood.
Disraeli’s Crystal Palace Speech of 1872, in which he set out his vision of Conservative principles, centred on the Constitution, the Empire and improving the condition of the people. The first two have largely been forgotten and, as such, the last has been used as a tool with which to completely undermine the first two. An open borders migration policy as a tool for increasing GDP is perhaps the best example of this.
For how you can set out to improve the condition of the people if you don’t know who those people are? A shared sense of national identity is a prerequisite for social improvement. A fact Andy Burnham may well be forced to reckon with when he demands the British taxpayer cough up even more money to pay for social care whilst continuing to put up illegal migrants in hotels and pledging to increase ‘foreign aid’.

In The Telegraph, Lawrence Newport highlights that deregulation and the construction of new infrastructure is essential to shield Britain from droughts.

This is not a problem that can be solved by efficiency alone: even if we fixed every current leak in the South East, we would still need new capacity equivalent to the daily consumption of more than five million households. Whatever the causes of rising demand, one fact is unavoidable: Britain needs far more water storage than it has today – and fast.
Though Westminster has recognised the need to act – the Government designated proposed reservoirs in East Anglia and Lincolnshire as “nationally significant” last year – it has failed to recognise the scale and urgency of the emergency.
Abingdon Reservoir, for example, was first proposed in the 1990s. Located in Oxfordshire, it would be Britain’s second-largest reservoir and help supply 15 million people with water. Alongside other projects such as East West Rail, the reservoir would support the Oxbridge growth corridor, adding almost £80bn to the UK economy by 2035.
In practice, this means new businesses starting, scaling and succeeding in Britain, not abroad, with manufacturers investing with confidence instead of worrying about water shortages and families enjoying the freedom to water their own garden in the height of summer without another hosepipe ban.

Writing for The Times, Kathleen Stock analyses an emerging identity surrounding disability on the rise in Britain - particularly with young women.

This week a video went viral of a young woman in a wheelchair at a train station, filming the laborious attempts of staff to get her chair up some stairs after the lift failed. Towards the end of the video, somewhat unexpectedly, she gets out of her chair and walks upstairs herself, saying she “had a bit of energy that day” so could do it. In another video, she films herself putting on roller skates before pushing off from her wheelchair and skating happily away, Lazarus-like.
Even severely debilitating physical conditions produce good days as well as bad. On some bad days, a person may need extra help. But when a disproportionate number of young women are insisting this applies, we need to find out what is going on. Why do Gen Z females, apparently unlike every generation before them, have strangely unstable bodies that intermittently require support?
When you dig into their explanations, a few officially medical-sounding words tend to recur: postural tachycardia, joint hypermobility, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. What these syndromes all share is a set of non-specific symptoms, versions of which are familiar to all of us: dizziness, a racing heart, exhaustion, brain fog, muscle pain.
And of course, many of these are also symptoms of anxiety, the defining emotion of teenage years. Saying this doesn’t indicate that the syndromes in question don’t exist, but only that it can be unclear whether you really have one.

In Conservative Home, Oliver Dean argues that rehabilitation has limits and some individuals should be barred from holding public office due to past actions.

Reforming oneself is only part of the solution here – the remainder rests on somebody else, and that somebody is the victim. Luciana Berger’s decision to call this out is telling. It shows a mindset that recognises an individual has gone through a rehabilitative programme, but simultaneously recognises that this is not enough for the specificity and severity of the crime carried out.
That, in my view, should be enough for Bonehill-Paine to be prevented from standing.
The situation has developed, however, and the Board of Deputies has asked the party to rescind the selection and to review its vetting. Of these two measures, the second is of far more interest.
Because it means that somebody within the party sat down, opened up his folder, looked over the record and ticked the box – believing that it presented no difficulty. I find the idea of reaching such a conclusion difficult to believe. Again, I reiterate that I am all for second chances. But there comes a point in which one cannot extend the generosity of yet another second chance. Bonehill-Paine – I believe -, despite what he has done since being released, crossed that point of no return, and I think that Kemi Badenoch should do the right thing and prevent him from standing.
This is, after all, the same Kemi Badenoch who questioned the former PM Keir Starmer over his decision to appoint known convicted fraudster Louise Haigh as Transport Secretary, and who has consistently bashed Andy Burnham for appointing her to his Cabinet too. If such criticisms are founded on the fact that Louise Haigh had a criminal conviction (which was spent by the time she entered government, might I add), then it seems indefensible for her to support Bonehill-Paine’s candidacy in Somerset.

Writing for The Telegraph, Ian Acheson makes the case that forecasts for future prisoner numbers may be incorrect, throwing early release plans into doubt.

Once the state starts releasing offenders early because it has run out of room, it is no longer in control of the punishment it has imposed. Public trust withers further. Vigilantism takes on a sinister allure.
The problem stems from a small coterie of activist prison reform outfits that permanently have Labour’s ear on emptying prisons while the public want the precise opposite. And the policy solutions they proffer are based on assumptions that might well be false.
The Government’s defenders will say the prison population simply has to be managed, and that some form of early release is unavoidable. But that assumes that the Ministry of Justice’s prison space forecasting is accurate. These estimates are no more reliable than other government projections.
The case for mass early release on Starmer’s watch was built on these often faulty figures. Forecasts are not immutable truths; they are assumptions on paper, vulnerable to shifts in sentencing, remand, offending patterns and events, dear boy. They have routinely overestimated population growth.

Jacob Phillips writes for The Critic arguing that Jason Arday’s appointment and subsequent removal from Cambridge reflects a declining meritocracy.

One reason why Arday’s defenders seem to have sidestepped actually disproving the allegations, is that they share a set of commitments which amount to a different worldview, rather than a difference of opinion. A commitment to to race “equity” rather than “equality” — to achieving balanced outcomes even if it requires differing standards — is formally embedded in 101 universities that have signed the Race Equality Charter (REC) orchestrated by Advance HE, a charitable professional membership scheme which is ubiquitous (and unchallengedly so) in the HE sector. There are 86 REC award holders, including most universities in Britain, who are awarded bronze, silver or gold on the basis of demonstrating their commitment to racial equity.
The unassailable presupposition for such a scheme is that old chestnut that everything is racist, racism is everywhere, and it no longer means evidenced examples of discrimination or hatred but is rather a systemic and pervasive atmosphere from which no-one can escape. The REC is “underpinned by 5 Principles”, the first of which is that “Racism is an everyday facet of UK society and racial inequalities manifest themselves in everyday situations, processes and behaviours”. In light of this, you might ask, how could concerns be raised about Arday without those concerns manifesting racism?
Advance HE tells us that the “work to drive out racism in all its forms from our sector is imperative and incumbent on all of us”, whether it is “deliberate or unconscious”. This is interesting, given that a key element of any submission for a REC award will involve training in an ideological spaghetti plate of dubious notions like “unconscious bias” which would seem to forestall the awkwardly legal fact, pointed out by the Committee for Academic Freedom, that “latest OfS guidance on freedom of speech states that it is illegal for universities” to (as put by the OfS) “require training or induction that imposes a requirement to endorse any controversial viewpoint or value judgement”.

Wonky Thinking

Bright Blue’s Working it Out recommends extending stronger employment support and financial protections to the self-employed, including ensuring they have better access to support when illness prevents them from working. The report contends that the current system too often writes people off, and recommends reducing barriers to employment while maintaining a strong safety net for those who cannot work.

The report unearths the key characteristics of the self-employed and benefits and disadvantages of self-employment in the UK. It finds that the self-employed, the number of which has been rising for decades, receive less income protections and enhancements than employees — but which are overwhelmingly paid for by employers in the case of employees — while paying substantially less in tax than employees on the same earnings.
The report argues that the current system taxes identical work at very different rates. An employee earning £39,000 sees £7,214 taken in National Insurance across employee and employer contributions. A self-employed person with £39,000 in profits pays £1,586. The gap costs the Exchequer £10.05 billion a year. Under Bright Blue’s proposal, employers’ National Insurance, currently 15% on earnings above £5,000, would be scrapped entirely, and employees’ Class 1 rates would be cut to match the lower Class 4 rates paid by the self-employed. Income Tax would rise to compensate. This would be done gradually. The self-employed would pay more tax overall but employees would pay no more tax and, under a model that achieves fiscal neutrality rather than revenue raising, employees would actually pay less tax overall.
This reform follows the direction set by the 2010 Mirrlees Review and by Tax Reforms for Growth (2025), which was signed by the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, the IPPR and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation among others. The US, Canada and Germany already tax employment and self-employment equally.
The report is based on original nationally representative polling of 1,000 self-employed UK adults, two focus groups, cluster analysis of the polling data, an invite-only expert seminar and a series of bilateral consultations.

Podcast of the Week

Jack Rankin MP and Michael Murphy discuss the current circumstances and future of the Conservative Party, with Rankin arguing that his becoming a Conservative Member of Parliament in 2024 can be likened to ‘buying low and selling high’.