The Centrist Dads are Being Left Behind
Both Labour and liberal Tories are fading into irrelevance
Towering Columns
For The Times, Juliet Samuel says Labour has hamstrung itself with its internal politics as the wider discourse has left it behind.
Rather than winning power for a decade, this ineffectual cynicism has left Labour’s voting coalition highly vulnerable to rival political formulations. Last week, Oren Cass, a Washington wonk of the self-styled “New Right” in America, made his pitch at an event…for conservatives to pivot towards a political “realignment” across western democracies where disaffected working-class voters ditch traditional left-wing parties in favour of a patriotic, protectionist offer from the right.
In various forms, this “new right” favours the interests of natives over migrants, of manufacturing over finance and of national security over free trade. (Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Le Pen and the resurgent German right are all test cases of its appeal.) It might be an agenda rife with contradictions but it’s broadly where Reform is positioning itself, and their polling numbers suggest it’s working. If the left leaves a vacuum where a programme for government should be, don’t be surprised if its voters end up being poached by the right.
Before winning power, Labour pitched a vote for Starmer as a low-risk way of fixing up the country. But McSweeney and co’s defeat of the neo-Marxist Klingons, however impressive and necessary, didn’t automatically make Labour fit for power. The main parties might paint Reform as reckless know-nothings, but at least Reform know they’ll have to fight to change anything inside government if they ever get the chance. McSweeney, however clever the electioneering, didn’t get that far.
In The Telegraph, Gavin Rice says both Sir Ed Davey and liberal Tories are chasing a group of target voters who do not, in fact, exist.
Just as Reform bled the Tory vote to make way for Labour in Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and the Midlands, so it allowed the Lib Dems to come through the middle in Oxfordshire, the Home Counties and the West Country. In short: they won new seats without winning many more votes. Reform’s damage to the Conservatives is masked by its poor seat conversion, yet it is for Kemi Badenoch by far the biggest threat. The scale of the 2024 exodus to Farage can be counted in the hundreds of safe Tory seats that fell either to Davey or to Keir Starmer.
This is confusing to many, especially those with no desire to learn. From Rory Stewart to Dominic Grieve and George Osborne, Tory wets with a murky understanding of 2010-2015, and a take on 2024 that is simply innumerate and wrong, display motivated reasoning when they try to explain the defeat. Quite simply, they would rather be dealing with smart, upper middle-class Tory-Lib Dem waverers than getting their hands dirty to win back defectors to Reform. Listening to their advice would be as disastrous for Davey as it would be for Badenoch.
Still, there are at least some voters who switched directly from Tory to Liberal, right? Yes, a few. But even this small cohort does not conform to the posh, “Remain-quake” hypothesis the One Nation Tories want so desperately to be true, and they are nothing like the high-status, Home Counties social liberal that Davey seems to want to win. These unrepresentative defectors are not very much like a standard Lib Dem at all. As Onward revealed in its post-election study, Breaking Blue, these voters more closely resemble the type who would usually opt for the Tories or Reform. They are largely non-graduate, C2 social grade, white, older, home-owning and voted Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. They don’t sound much like upwardly mobile, environmentally conscious, liberal professionals, do they? That’s because they aren’t. They are closer to the disaffected, suburban lower middle-class who voted Labour or Reform elsewhere: more Linda and Dave than Henry and Samantha.
Also in The Telegraph, Sam Ashworth-Hayes says fear of dinner party judgment may consign the Tories to irrelevance.
This [fear] helps to explain the paradoxical urge some members feel to defend the status quo most fiercely where it is least “conservative”; they need to signal that they are still morally within the boundaries laid out by the Left. Lay a finger on the European Court of Human Rights, and you are paving the way for the next Hitler. Suggest anything stronger than mandatory classes on black Tudors might be required to tackle segregation, and you are speaking the language of Enoch Powell. It should not be the case that the best defence a conservative party can offer on gender identity is “we only mutilated some of the young people the Left would have”. It should not be the case, either, that Conservative leaders can idly repeat the idea that diversity is an unalloyed strength without pausing to examine precisely why it costs so much to manage. That, however, was where we found ourselves in 2024.
The liberal old guard of the party – “Boomer Conservatives”, to borrow a phrase from the American discourse – is unlikely to see anything wrong with this approach, and to the extent that it does, is aware that fixing it will come with unpleasant consequences and disruption, alongside a loss of prestige. Far better to fortress themselves inside their pleasant homes and clubs, and ignore the world outside. And, of course, to turn their fire on those who are going to have to live with the consequences, and are trying to do something about it. The “Boomer Cons” freely criticise their would-be successors for pushing against the liberal ideals that led the party to its defeat. Yet if you ask them what they succeeded in conserving, how they made Britain better for the British, the response is long on spluttering rage and short on examples.
You can criticise Reform for many things, but it is at least clear which group of people comes first in its list of priorities. The question for the Conservative Party is whether it will be able to say the same. With the electorate polarising to the Left and Right, there would seem to be little future in an outfit which wishes to be the Liberal Democrats in a blue coat.
On his Substack, Nick Timothy says the Conservatives have changed on immigration and net zero, but must now become the party of economic hope.
The transformation of the economy must be emphatic. It is difficult to overstate the problems our country faces. We are over-indebted, and face rising borrowing costs and a currency under pressure. We have poor productivity, weak growth, and low wages. We have uncompetitive energy costs and what remains of our manufacturing base is under severe pressure. We have impossibly high housing costs. We will soon be spending £144 billion a year on benefits for people of a working age. We have weak middle management and – outside the elite universities – poor post-eighteen education and training. We run an enormous trade deficit, causing an addiction to foreign “investment” that sees us sell public utilities to be asset-stripped by foreign private equity companies and land and property to foreign sovereign wealth funds.
We are surviving today by selling off the possibility of prosperity tomorrow – corroding the very viability of the British economy. We need to reindustrialise and produce and export more. To do that we need many things, but most of all we need cheaper energy and the right incentives for converting research and innovation into viable commercial prospects and increasing investment in machinery and technology. We have to curtail day-to-day government expenditure so we can reform taxes and invest in the infrastructure we need. We have to sweep away the regulations that make it so expensive to build and so difficult to get anything done, and get Britain building again: airports, railways, roads, houses, new towns and more.
We need to tell a story of national recovery and the possibility of prosperity: a possibility that for too many – especially among the younger generations – seems out of reach. The politics of despair and campaigning as an outlet for pessimism can – when a party confronts rivals that seem down and out – be hugely successful. But the politics of hope and campaigning on the promise of a better future will – when executed with seriousness and credibility – always succeed. We need to tell younger voters in particular that with the Conservatives we will give them a future even better than the life their parents and grandparents enjoyed: with the skills and education they need to get on, the houses that mean they can get onto the property ladder and start families, and the kind of economy – underpinned by investment and advanced technologies, with good, well-paid jobs and the opportunity to build something for workers, entrepreneurs and investors – that makes them excited and confident about the future.
On his Substack, James Breckwoldt says governments must govern in the active - not passive - voice, and that means acknowledging trade-offs to the public.
Stopping the boats (in the active voice) would mean making moves such as amending or scrapping certain legislation, leaving the ECHR, or deploying the navy. That would infuriate most Labour MPs, the party’s liberal-left supporters and high-profile figures in the media, judiciary and NGO-verse. Growing the economy (in the active voice) would mean implementing big tax reform, major regulation changes or significant shifts in spending. Those that lose out will be very vocal and angry with you, whilst the winners might barely notice. Similarly, building infrastructure (in the active voice) would mean overhauling planning laws, overruling local councils, facing down local objections, and prioritising spending with long-term payoffs. That would bring out the “anti-growth coalition” no matter how you define it. Given this, it’s tempting to retreat into the safety of doing nothing. Action guarantees conflict. Being passive, in contrast, feels safer, because you’re less likely to trigger an immediate backlash if you don’t take decisions.
Nonetheless, just like feeling a funny lump, a problem doesn’t go away if you ignore it. The longer nothing is done, the harder it becomes to fix later. If you avoid taking ownership and refuse to act, the issue festers. By trying not to be unpopular by avoiding anything offensive, you end up becoming unpopular for being weak, evasive and incapable of solving problems people care about. Not wanting to do the things that would stop the boats is fine in itself. Leaving the ECHR could damage Britain’s international reputation, using the navy to push back boats would be dangerous for migrants and servicemen, and tougher asylum laws could lead to many being sent to unsafe countries. From a liberal point of view, these are very high costs, so it’s understandable that Labour doesn’t want to pay them.
However, they also don’t or can’t admit that to the public (or itself). Being active voice doesn’t mean you have to stop the boats, but it does mean that you have to deal with the consequences of your belief that you don’t want to stop them. More arrivals mean more demand on housing, the NHS, schools, social services and councils that are already stretched. Without action, the system becomes overwhelmed, communities worse off, resentment grows and outsider political parties rise.
In the Financial Times, Tim Wu says Britain must avoid becoming a data centre farm for foreign investors.
Back in the 1990s, an original promise of the internet economy was that it would collapse the importance of geography and make everyone rich across regions. The best and brightest, no matter where they were, would develop apps, build online stores or otherwise profit in the magical age of the internet platform. “The World is Flat”, wrote Thomas Friedman in 2005, predicting a coming levelling of wealth between regions. Instead, in the US at least, nearly the opposite happened. Geography began to matter more, rather than less. A few regions — mainly the American coasts and parts of Texas, grew extraordinarily wealthy at the top of the tech food chain. That the platform, not the app, would take all the profit became well understood among tech investors. And, as the major tech platforms gained monopoly power, they increasingly extracted profit from the rest of the economy.
In states like Nebraska and Iowa tech policy now mainly consists of offering tax incentives and cheap power to lure in data centres, at or near the bottom of the food chain. While a boon to construction and the local economy, no one now imagines that a data centre is the same thing as a tech economy. The profits, high-value work and spillovers all go back to the coasts, which benefit from the cheap labour and power. It is about as close to resource extraction as tech gets. Many nations and regions have wised up to this dynamic. Texas has never sought to become a Silicon Valley colony, but instead nurtured and developed its own tech industry, like Dell and Texas Instruments, while luring big companies, such as Elon Musk’s X and SpaceX, with its light-touch on tax and regulation. By the 2000s Beijing had figured out where the profit and power lay, and used national security as a pretext for blocking and degrading the major US companies, including Google. While almost certainly a violation of World Trade Organization rules, protecting its infant industries was in retrospect a brilliant industrial strategy, at least for China. Europe seems to have learnt the hard way that bravely passing a few laws while allowing foreign businesses to monopolise your markets is not a winning strategy.
In that context, last week’s celebration in the UK seemed at times like a script from a previous decade. There were allusions to making the country an artificial intelligence superpower, yet the details were fuzzy. The numbers are impressive, but the £5bn Google has promised to invest in the UK also looks a bit different when you realise it has just committed more than $16bn to Iowa and Oklahoma. The UK has great advantages in talent, marketing skill and proximity to Europe. In truth, the big US tech companies need the UK as much as it needs them, as challenges to Silicon Valley’s dominance mount. AI is creating new opportunities to build, and offering the tantalising prospect of developing businesses faster and cheaper. But doing so requires being aware that, for better or worse, we are living in an age that is becoming decidedly more zero sum. Britain should welcome and celebrate the big investments but keep its eyes on the prize: the top end of the tech food chain.
Wonky Thinking
Public First released Building Prosperity: The economic case for a step change in London homebuilding. The authors, Jack Airey and Ben Savours, find that London hitting its housebuilding target would generate £40 billion of additional economic output.
Homebuilding in London is in freefall. Housing starts have collapsed to historic lows, far short of the Mayor’s target of 88,000 new homes per year. Without decisive political action to reverse decline, the capital’s chronic housing shortage will continue to grow, driving up rents, worsening affordability and undermining the city’s economic dynamism. Taken together these effects pour sand into the engine of the UK economy.
A major economic opportunity Our economic modelling shows that reversing the decline in homebuilding would create immediate and long lasting benefits for London and the wider UK economy, driven above all by productivity gains that would raise living standards in the capital. Delivering the Mayor’s target of 88,000 new homes per year by 2028 would generate a powerful economic uplift. By 2034, the total annual impact would peak at £40.4 billion (2025 prices), equivalent to 6.5 per cent of London’s GDP and 1.6 per cent of UK GDP. This growth would come from the immediate stimulus of construction activity and the longer-term structural benefits of a larger, better functioning housing market. It would be made up of the following effects:
● Construction-led growth: Delivering 88,000 homes per year would generate up to £14.8 billion of annual GVA from 2028, with a cumulative £118.7 billion to the end of the next parliament. This represents a 2.4 per cent boost to London’s GDP in that year, sustaining tens of thousands of jobs in construction and supply chains. It would be approximately equal to the contribution of the whole hospitality sector to the UK’s capital.
● Rent savings and consumption: More homes would ease pressure on rents, delivering up to £607 million of annual rent savings by 2035. These savings would translate into higher consumer spending, adding hundreds of millions to London’s retail and hospitality sectors.
● Agglomeration benefits: A larger housing stock would allow more working-age people to live in London, deepening labour markets and driving productivity gains. By 2035, this could generate £3.7 billion of additional GVA annually, with the benefits compounding over time.
● Internal migration and labour market transformation: Lower housing costs make London more attractive and accessible to younger, highly productive workers from across the UK, and encourage dynamism in the labour market. By 2037, this could add more than £30 billion per year to London’s economy - about 5 per cent of London’s GDP, or 1.1 per cent of UK GDP.
These estimates do not include the additional GVA that would be generated by future occupiers of the expanded housing stock. That figure would be substantial, but primarily a reflection of London’s population simply being larger. Instead, our modelling focuses on the mechanisms through which jobs are created, disposable incomes rise and productivity improves - the drivers that directly lift wages and living standards for everyone in London.
Finally, building 88,000 homes a year would also unlock significant community and fiscal benefits. Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy contributions would strengthen local infrastructure and services. 3 Additional tax revenues — peaking at £6.2 billion in 2034 — and the billions of pounds in extra economic output driven by higher rates of homebuilding would provide the Government with greater fiscal headroom to make choices around public spending.
Boosting London’s long term prosperity
If London continues on its current path towards record low homebuilding, the city risks a lost decade of fewer new homes, weaker growth and declining competitiveness. In a worst case scenario, London’s competitiveness is irreparably harmed as our international competitors develop industries in which London used to be world leading, meaning London loses its ability to bounce back and drive the UK’s wider economic growth and competitiveness.
Conversely, an ambitious step change in housing delivery would provide a structural boost to productivity, wages, and living standards that endures for decades. As this report makes clear, the economic uplift is powerful, but it will only be realised if decisive action is taken by policymakers to remove the barriers that currently stall homebuilding in London.
Onward published Reindustrialising Britain: The case for industrial zones, by Zachary Spiro and endorsed by Lord Houchen. The report draws on international examples to argue for radically stripping back planning and environmental restrictions in designated areas, giving more powers to mayors and accelerating grid connectivity.
Supporting British industry has been a priority for British Governments for decades. The UK Government had a Secretary of State for Industry continuously from 1970 until 2007. Theresa May revived the title in 2016, under the auspices of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Since then, successive Governments have published a dizzying array of plans, policy and frameworks, with Labour ministers having issued their Modern Industrial Strategy in June of this year.
This prioritisation has stemmed from the long-term decline in British manufacturing and industrial sectors, with the share of UK GDP taken by manufacturing having more than halved in just the past 20 years. This has had a significant impact on geographic inequality, with the average London worker now 50% more productive than the average in former powerhouses of global industry like the Midlands.
This deindustrialisation is despite the UK being extraordinarily well-placed for a renaissance in capital intensive, R&D sectors – home to world-leading research, as well as being the third largest destination for venture capital investment on the planet, often raising more than twice as much as other major European countries.
Government attempts to address the problems have not worked because policymakers have been looking in the wrong places. Decades of policy failure have prevented British firms from having access to the core ingredients for industrial businesses: plentiful space for R&D and manufacturing, and cheap, reliable energy.
This failure has been significantly the result of choices by politicians. A system of national and local land control that intentionally rationed space for businesses to expand or invest, as well as politicians who frequently saw industry as merely a tool to tackle unemployment, rather than vital to Britain’s economic performance. An unreformed system of environmental regulation that forces every developer to spend months undertaking detailed surveys and assessments, all with no guarantee of being able to build anything once they’re done. Policymakers loading up businesses with policy and network costs to pay for green subsidies and grid expansion, even as prices soared above that of European comparators.
The combination of these forces has led to an extreme shortage of the infrastructure and built environment necessary to create the industries of the future. In just data centers and laboratories alone, the UK is missing approximately £60bn in capital investment relative to the US.
To revitalise Britain’s industrial sectors, as well as prepare it for the technology sectors of the future such as life sciences and AI, there needs to be radical reform, to create new industrial zones with different governance, regulatory and energy arrangements to the rest of the country. These could be located all across the great cities and industrial areas of Britain, including the North and Midlands, as well as the Greater South East.
The specific proposals in this paper are all based on extending existing government policies, or robust international examples. They are:
Governance of Industrial Zones – Creating new, geographically defined industrial zones, in which elected regional mayors, not local councils, will be responsible for local planning decisions and policy frameworks. Planning requirements set by local authorities will be removed. This will result in democratically elected mayors, representing an entire economic agglomeration, making policy decisions.
Regulation of Industrial Zones – Within industrial zones, national regulations on environmental impact assessments, wildlife conservation and statutory consultation will either be significantly streamlined or removed. The capacity of groups to challenge the granting of permissions via Judicial Review will be significantly curtailed, as will authorities’ abilities to slow down development through enforcement of noise complaints. This will significantly reduce the time, cost and legal uncertainty associated with development.
Podcasts of the Week
The Spectator held a conference with US think tank American Compass to discuss the Transatlantic realignment. Robert Jenrick, Nick Timothy, Miriam Cates, Henry Olsen and Gavin Rice discuss how to save and rewire the UK economy.
On Commonplace, Oren Cass, Matt Yglesias and Marshall Kosloff discuss whether the “abundance” agenda in energy, housing and state capacity is just “repackaged neoliberalism”.
Quick Links
The UK population rose at its fastest rate in 75 years, 98% of which is net migration.
Low birth rates in England could cause the closure of 800 primary schools.
Brick colour rules are holding up housebuilding, according to the CEO of construction company Henry Boot.
The shutdown of Jaguar Land Rover due to a cyber attack was a “wake up call” for cyber resilience, according to an academic.
Boris Johnson denied immigration data from his premiership, insisting the public voted for “control” rather than reductions.
President Trump suggested a plan for Sir Tony Blair to take over administration of Gaza.
The Prime Minister’s chief-of-staff, Morgan McSweeney, is under scrutiny over failure to declare £740,000 of donations while running the think tank Labour Together.
Keir Starmer says the unqualified economic benefits of immigration should never have been accepted by the Left - despite formerly backing free movement himself.
Investors warned that Andy Burnham’s plans to borrow more if he became prime minister would spook gilt markets.