Back to Reality

Party conference season is over

Towering Columns

For The Spectator, Stephen Daisley attacks the efforts of the Green Party to ‘Lebanonise’ the country into divided ethnic groups.

The Green party’s open declaration of war on Britain’s Jews is not really about the Green party or Britain’s Jews for that matter. The party is just a vessel for a form of politics and Jews are a perennial scapegoat for that politics. The Greens have adopted a resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism – a ploy originally devised by the propagandists of the Soviet Union – while rejecting an amendment that said Jewish party members should not be targeted for attending synagogue, the vast majority of synagogues naturally being Zionist in orientation.

The effect, and perhaps even the purpose, of the motion is to establish an institutional home for the Islamist-leftist alliance which can be traced back to the Salman Rushdie affair. It grew exponentially thanks to a series of factors, beginning with 9/11 and taking in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, mass immigration, illegal immigration, the British state’s hostility to integration, and finally Gaza’s murder and rape spree inside Israel on 7 October 2023. Also relevant is the British government’s policy of appeasement towards Islamists at home and abroad, as seen in its recognition of a Palestinian state, bans on Israeli ministers entering the UK, and a crackdown on trade with Israelis and Israeli firms in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).

Just as Iranian leftists saw the Khomeinists as allies against US imperialism and the Shah, British leftists regard Muslims as righteous victims, Islamists their authentic voice, and natural allies in a common cause to topple imperialism, Zionism, racism, and the other terms leftists use to articulate their contempt for Western civilisation and their Rousseauian impulse to tear down all that represents tradition, order and beauty. Following the 1979 revolution Iran’s leftists were purged, imprisoned and executed by their former allies. We can only hope the same fate does not await today’s leftists but their welfare is a secondary consideration to our national welfare. Between now and the inevitable break-up of this red-green coalition, it could do substantial damage to our country and the wider international order.

In The Critic, Hubert Kucharski attacks politicians that have ignored the data showing higher migration has cut the pay of the British workers.

There is a strand of snobbery in parts of our politics that sees migration sceptics not as people with a different view, but as people who have not yet been taught the right one. It rests on a bold assumption that on the facts, those sceptical of mass migration are simply wrong. After all, we are told at length that migration is good for us. Migrants grow the economy, they staff the NHS, and they pay more in tax than they take out. Anyone who worries aloud about the numbers simply doesn’t understand how good we have it.

This has never convinced me. In a paper for Cambridge Circus Research, I used payroll data released by HMRC under Freedom of Information to measure what the rise in migration did to the pay of British workers across England. The first finding will please the optimists. Between 2015 and 2025, payrolled jobs rose by 2.8 million, and 2.3 million of them went to non-UK nationals. Migrants did not, by and large, take British jobs. The British working-age population was shrinking, and they filled the gap. The second will not. Outside London, where five in six people in England live, every additional migrant job per 100 residents cuts the pay of the typical British worker by about one per cent. Added up, that is around £18 billion in wages British workers did not take home in 2025 alone, about £78 billion in foregone wages over the past decade.

Now picture the person behind that number. They work in a care home in Stoke, or a warehouse outside Doncaster. They earn somewhere between £1,240 and £1,510 a year less than they otherwise would, not because they work fewer hours but because the same shift pays a lower hourly rate. For years they have watched the going rate stall, and for years they have been told, by people whose own pay never moved, and by politicians, that what they feel isn’t happening.

For The Times, Professor Dieter Helm writes about why politicians need to embrace climate realism.

Climate realism has at its core the recognition that addressing climate change is difficult precisely because it is going to be expensive. The fantasies about cheap renewable energy, with the leading world economies trying to emulate Britain by relying primarily on wind and solar with a bit of nuclear and a residual smidgen of gas are just that — fantasies. There are no cheap answers. There is no free lunch. And short of radically reindustrialising, for countries such as Britain, wind and solar are not securely based on home-grown mining, refining and manufacture. Almost all are foreign, mostly Chinese.

Facing the fact of higher energy costs is the corollary of recognising that we are living beyond our environmental means. We could choose to live within our climate means. There is a lot we can do personally. Stopping flying, especially for holidays, is one obvious example. Some of us do but most of us don’t want to rein in our carbon consumption and we don’t want to pay for our pollution. That is why we can all say we really care about climate change, as long as it has little or no costs to doing anything about it. That’s why when the cost of energy goes up, we shy away from the measures necessary to reduce carbon emissions. We don’t want to pay a carbon tax. We want energy subsidies, not energy taxes.

In response to the Iran war, more than 90 countries are already resorting to energy subsidies. Burnham and his chancellor John Healey are also looking in this direction for the budget. Affordability trumps climate change, and as long as it does the emissions will keep going up. We resist the obvious solutions to climate change and hence we get more climate change.

In UnHerd, Andrew Roberts warns against those on the far-right trying to rewrite the history of the Second World War.

“The idea that Hitler just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie,” Tucker Carlson told Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg in a recent TV debate, “and everyone believes it because they know nothing of the actual facts. But the truth is that Germany had big parts carved out of it, including parts of Prussia.” As for the Treaty of Versailles, which did indeed assign the previously German provinces of Posen and Western Prussia to Poland, Carlson states, “The UK had nothing to do with it at all.”…

This isn’t the first time Carlson has indulged Hitler apologism. Last September, he interviewed Darryl Cooper, who told him that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. A few weeks later, Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, the livestreamer who has described Hitler as “awesome”, “right” and “fucking cool”.

These commentators are not unhinged outliers; they are part of a larger movement of ultra-MAGA propagandists who want to rewrite the history of the Second World War, only with Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt as the villains, and with Hitler as a visionary but misunderstood leader who was merely trying to do the best for his people. They are helped by the sad fact that so much of the generation who remembered the war, and thus can give first-hand testimony to what ludicrous rot this all is, are naturally slowly succumbing to the inevitable passing of time. In Britain there are wannabe MAGA types, including “groypers”, “incels” and “chuds”, as well as devotees of the manosphere, who also circle around weird antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi-adjacent worldviews.

For The Times, Trevor Phillips says that we must not ignore the growing sense among the public that the streets are no longer safe.

Only when the whole nation feels safe inside secure borders will it be willing to expend resources on the welfare of fellow citizens. And while the dystopian picture painted by transatlantic newspapers may be exaggerated, it seems remarkable to me that our everyman prime minister had nothing at all to say about the biggest source of personal insecurity in Britain today: fear of crime and incivility.

His advisers may have told him that the issue is receding as a public concern. Yes, many categories of officially recorded crime are falling; but recent surveys have shown that fear of crime is not. Some 39 per cent of Britons no longer feel safe walking alone after dark, and a majority believe that most types of crime are more frequently committed than in the past.

There is a growing sense that our criminal justice system, rather than keeping us safe, punishing and therefore deterring those who commit crime, routinely favours those who would do us harm. The revelation that a known sex offender, Zafer Dogan, had been bailed on three separate occasions to the address from which he had gathered images from a nearby playground, creating grotesquely manipulated, explicitly sexualised versions of children, disgusted most people. Unusually, Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, turned up in the public gallery to watch the man’s sentencing, emerging from the courtroom to denounce the criminal justice system.

Wonky Thinking

The UCL Policy Lab launched a collection of essays Britain Renewed: Conservatism and the Communitarian Tradition at Conservative Party Conference featuring a range of contributions from Conservatives about how to renew thinking within the party. One of the contributions is from Jack Rankin MP on ‘Pragmatic Liberalism’, a section is provided below:

Prime Minister Andy Burnham believes that our woes start and end with Margaret Thatcher, conveniently forgetting what life was like before the Iron Lady’s premiership: the three-day week, blackouts and frequent strike action bringing the country to a standstill. Thatcher is a huge inspiration for us Conservatives and rightly so; there is much to be taken from the Iron Lady’s example around supply side reform, facing down the trade unions and lowering the tax take.

Regardless of the merits of the argument, people on the left (and now the right) blame Thatcherite liberalism for the challenges of today: deindustrialisation, mass migration and a commitment to free-market ideology above the national interest.

Hence, relitigating the 1970s is exactly what the new Prime Minister wants us to do. Conservatives today should recognise that the demands of today are different, our country is in a different place, and people are craving new ideas.

And indeed, too strict an adherence to liberal ideology has complications. Undoubtedly, unrooted globalisation where Britain is treated as an economic zone rather than a country with its own interests and its own people, has lost public support in my party’s time in office. Liberalism, and its libertarian strand, both social and fiscal, converged in a potent tipple.

Migration

The fiasco of importing millions of low skilled migrants, in pursuit of headline GDP growth, was perhaps the climax of this kind of thinking, in which GDP was pursued at the expense of all else. Not only is it unsustainable as fiscal strategy but its impact on social cohesion has been catastrophic and will be difficult (though not impossible) to undo.

Water

To prove to the voting public that we have heard their concerns, Conservatives should be clear that we only support free markets where genuine competition exists. In my view, although it is very much not party policy, the water industry fundamentally lacks the competition that makes privatisation effective. Alongside that politicians are not willing to truly let companies fail. Thus, governments have essentially created an environment where there is no jeopardy, risk is socialised, reward privatised. In defending the indefensible status quo here, we have allowed many to immediately condemn anyone who mentions free markets or privatisation as free market ideologues.

Deindustrialisation

Similarly, many feel that the pursuit of free trade and cheap imports above all else has contributed to deindustrialisation, with the associated jobs and wealth displaced to developing countries – in particular China, which is increasingly considered to be a hostile actor. The category error, as economist Shanker Singham articulates, was believing that liberalisation of trade at the border would naturally lead to domestic market liberalisation. This same naivety was the operating principle behind David Cameron’s Golden Age with China.

Podcast of the Week

For Sky News, Ed Conway discusses the future of the country’s gas network and what happens as the gas storage levels if the gas runs out, using previously unseen emergency planning exercise to reveal what would happen if Britain ran out of gas – including how decisions over power outages are made and who could be cut off first.

Quick Links

Labour wins Holborn St Pancras by-election in London.

Boots has been sold to the Canadian Weston family for £7bn.

Anthropic asks users to stop abusing its chatbot Claude.

The Prime Minister wants to ban non-compete clauses in contracts.

UK gilt yields hit 28-year high during global bond sell off.