The New Centre Right rises

The proposed repeal of Net Zero marks the end of an era

Towering Columns

In The Critic, Maurice Cousins shows how misplaced moral idealism is being overtaken by strategic necessity, as Kemi Badenoch pledges to repeal the Climate Change Act.

“In mistaking symbolic global carbon targets for strategy, Britain’s political class has confused moral aspiration with statecraft. Labour and Conservative politicians alike have congratulated themselves on “climate leadership” while presiding over industrial decline, fragile energy systems, and a nation exposed to every external shock.

It is not the first time Britain has made this mistake.

In the 1930s, as the historian Paul Kennedy notes in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Britain was “badly scarred” by the industrial horrors of the First World War and disillusioned by the “Carthaginian peace” that followed. The public instinct was to shun militarism, cut defence, and prioritise social reform. Baldwin and Chamberlain reminded their cabinets that “there were no votes in rearming” or interfering in European affairs. Against this backdrop, the policy of “appeasement” was therefore not regarded as cowardice, as it is today, but as the only moral and responsible course.

This, more than anything, is what gave appeasement its political force: it was not just expedient but popular and moral. Peace was seen as the highest moral good, just as Net Zero is treated today as the only responsible response to an existential threat. In both cases, governments were trapped between strategic necessity — rearmament then, energy affordability and security versus decarbonisation now — and publics demanding moral absolutes over hard choices.”

On his Substack, James Yucel explains the emergence of the New Centre Right (NCR) which is overturning the old Conservative orthodoxies.

“The NCR rests on five central planks. First, borders: the belief that Britain must have control of who comes in and the ability to remove those with no right to stay. Second, energy: a commitment to cheap, reliable domestic supply through new gas capacity, North Sea extraction, and nuclear, ending what they see as self-imposed energy scarcity. Third, planning and housing: a determination to break gridlock in the system and build homes at scale, cutting the shortage that locks younger generations out of ownership. Fourth, industrial strategy: targeted support for sectors Britain needs for security and growth, from advanced manufacturing to life sciences. Fifth, fairness and ownership: spreading capital, property and savings more widely, so prosperity is not hoarded in London and the South East…

This project defines itself against two alternatives. Compared with the old Tory model of hyper-globalisation, it rejects the idea that endless migration, free-flowing capital, and the services industry alone can sustain living standards. Compared with Reform UK, it offers something more serious than grievance: not just anger at decline, but a programme to reverse it.

Its ethos can be summed up in one sentence: produce more at home, reward hard work, control the borders.”

In The Times, Juliet Samuels calls for Rachel Reeves to ‘go big’ or face embarrassment at her next Budget.

“Reeves needs to take some political risks and give herself breathing space in the process rather than buying just enough headroom to last the next six months. Perhaps rather than whingeing about “populists” she ought to learn from them: go big. Stop running desperately after official forecasts and start remodelling the country…

Reeves is weeks away from standing up in parliament and admitting to the world that she and her party are the abject liars everyone said they were when they promised not to raise taxes. She can’t fight bond markets but that doesn’t mean she has to sit there like a lemon and wait to be gobbled up by the debt mountain, the runaway spending and the hidebound, bureaucratic money sink of rules and regulations. Unless, of course, she wants to.”

On his Substack, Andrew O’Brien asks “What is the point of the Conservative Party?”, arguing that it will need to abandon the Thatcherite consensus to remain relevant.

“For the first time in its history, the Conservative Party faces a serious threat not to its ideological left but to its ideological right. Reform is in many ways the Conservative Party’s nemesis, the consequence of the party’s own ideological contradictions in trying to be an anti-establishment-establishment party; a liberal-conservative party; an internationalist-isolationist party…

We unleashed the creative destruction of finance to preserve our industrial heritage, we destroyed it. We sought to expand choice in every domain, hoping they would choose to maintain traditional family and community values, we got isolation and dislocation. We sought to reduce the size of the state and taxes, but created such huge social costs that we made the state even bigger and more bureaucratic. We encouraged mass migration to fuel growth to buy social cohesion, but got neither. We sought to make Britain the vanguard in an international war against tyranny, yet through losing economic control of our home market, became economically dependent to those very regimes we opposed.

We stand in the shattered ruins of this doomed political project.

Every leader since then has, to ever diminishing levels of success, sought to put humpty dumpty back together. Each time it has taken the party further along the road to destruction.”

In The Times, ex-Labour candidate Matthew Syed documents his surprise decision to join the Conservatives to fight for economic sanity.

“I stood for Labour in 2001 and it was nothing like this. I was proud to stand on that manifesto, but it was miles to the right of anything today. Debt was 30 per cent of GDP. The top income tax rate was 40p. The triple lock didn’t exist. Welfare was under control. So were our borders. You may say that this was before the financial crisis, when growth stagnated. But here’s my explanation for the UK “productivity puzzle”: we responded to the credit crunch with higher deficits, higher benefits and the micromanaging of people’s lives — indeed, even the central bank got in on the act, juicing the economy with oodles of printed money. Quantitative easing was doubtless necessary after the crisis but it became a habit that went beyond all reason during the pandemic and beyond. This increased inequality and zombified our system, like mainlining opiates into the economy, as the economist Ruchir Sharma has described it.

Perhaps I might put it this way. An economy is an organic system that benefits from a tad of self-reliance. If you shield muscles too much, they atrophy. If you shield bones, they’re blighted by osteoporosis. Likewise, if the state responds to any difficulty with stimulus, printed money and more, you never clear out the dead wood, zombie companies proliferate (in 2016, 12 per cent of UK firms were “alive” only because of artificially cheap credit) and the expectation that the government will always offer support becomes part of the ambient psychology. The state now subsidises ten million people of working age and in the coming months you will — mark my words — start hearing plans for government-provided Ozempic for all, to combat obesity, coming on top of pervasive interference in free speech, non-crime hate incidents and more.”

Wonky Thinking

The Purposeful Company asks The Trillion Pound Question: Why has the UK economy failed to grow large successful multi-national companies? Nearly 3,000 private UK high-growth businesses have been bought by overseas buyers over the past decade and we have missed out on a trillion pound tech economy, the report finds.

“The confluence of accelerating AI-driven tech revolution and dramatically slowed living standards growth creates a ‘five minutes to midnight’ moment demanding immediate response. The UK has already missed out on the potential of creating at least a trillion pound tech economy, but in tech, every day is the start of the future and the UK can still choose to catch up by acting decisively.

The lion’s share of wealth and job creation takes place at the scaleup stage, this is why retaining UK ownership of a greater share of tech companies as they scale is both vital in generating value and living standards, and to building a resilient innovation ecosystem.

There must be a transformative scaleup in UK venture capital to close the equity gap, including reaching pro-rata US rates of VC investment. This is an essential role to be fulfilled via a revitalised British Business Bank, partnered with new pension superfunds and others, so supporting and retaining greater ownership of domestically owned start-ups and scaleups. Complementary measures include strategic public procurement, reforms to the grant and tax regime, closer regional coordination and public–private engagement led by intermediary institutions, corporate venturing, and broader financial literacy.

Such initiatives have a greater chance of success when embedded within a system populated by purposeful companies – firms whose conviction lifts ambition and drives performance. However, neither can thrive under the weight of poverty of ambition, short-termism and political hesitancy.”

On ConservativeHome, James Yucel lays out how the New Centre Right may want to use the first 100 days to reset the government. Across a range of issues from industrial production to family policy, a NCR would offer a bold corrective to the incrementalism of the past.

“We will not fix growth or fairness while planning punishes effort and protects inertia. Pilot a rules-based planning system where compliant schemes get automatic permission. Impose a statutory 12-week Builder’s Remedy with deemed consent so refusal by delay ends. Publish a national pattern book so mansion blocks and mid-rise terraces are by right in places people want to live. Reverse the 2018 NPPF Viability Assessment changes to the previous circular system. Lift the proposed Natural England Veto and nutrient neutrality holds with targeted mitigation. Restore market-based viability by reversing the EUV-plus default. Impose the proposed Grey Belt reforms and abolish all Green Belt protections within walking distance of major transport hubs. Replace Section 106 and CIL with a nationally set flat-rate Infrastructure Levy that captures uplift and applies to permitted-development change of use. End the Soviet-style land grab of no-hope-value CPOs and restore full hope value so owners are properly compensated, investment is protected, and land comes forward through the market, not coercion. Retire Labour’s 50 percent golden rule quotas that kill schemes and let density plus the levy do the work. Reverse Labour’s proposed upward only rent review ban which will inevitably kill high streets and inward investment. Introduce representative planning consultations following the Auckland and Hutt City models. Strip back the Building Safety Regulator to a risk-based regime, re-enable approved inspectors for mid-rise, and time-limit technical gateways.”

Bright Blue launched a new set of essays on how the centre-right should reform the social security system, making the case for more generous welfare for families, not just pensioners.

“When designed well, social security means that people can live without the fear of having nothing to eat, of struggling to pay for essential utility bills, of not being able to provide for their children. It allows people to be entrepreneurial and take risks and make choices that may be more costly in the short run but pay off in the long run, in the confidence that the short-term cost will not be synonymous with starvation or homelessness. Rather than picking up a ballooning bill for local authorities and the NHS, it can take the appropriate burdens off their shoulders – and much more cost-efficiently – by preventing ill health in the first place. It can restructure the economy to incentivise savings or produce economic multipliers and drive growth. It can prevent crime, compensate for unfair misfortunes and allow disabled people to capitalise on their potential. It can mean children are not kept awake listening to their parents arguing about how to make every penny count. It can support the formation of families and help fight our upcoming demographic crisis.

British conservatives have long recognised these realities. They have always supported the Church, which had been the key source of welfare for Britons for centuries. Following in the legacy of Disraeli, they supported the gradual extension of social reform, such as the extension of state-funded education or unemployment insurance. In the forties and fifties, the Tories backed most of the Attlee Government’s welfare reforms. Later, under David Cameron, the Conservatives emphasised ‘compassionate conservatism’ as one of the Party’s key tenets. Most recently, it was the Tories who introduced the pension ‘triple lock’, and vigorously defended Winter Fuel Payments – generosity which ought to be meted out more evenly. Conservatives should demonstrate the same generosity that they have shown pensioners to the rest of those in need and the same fiscal prudence that they have shown elsewhere when it comes to pensioners.”

Book of the Week

Tom McTague’s Between The Waves accounts the debates about Britain’s relationship with Europe since the Second World War and its eventual departure from the EU. At the core of the story is the emergence of a new intellectual group within the Conservative Party in mid-1970s that sought to overturn the consensus that Britain needed Europe to save herself.

“At the time, however, none of them believed they were part of a ‘movement’, let alone a revolution in British politics. They did not meet to plot some great overthrow of the Tory hierarchy. No one would have believed any such thing remotely possible, even if it had been desirable. What they represented was a mood. They were united by a certain sensibility, a loose desire to ‘wrench the public mind out of the groove it had been running in since 1940’, as Cowling put it later. They were rebellious, reactionary and provocative. Together, they consciously rejected what they saw as the progressive zeitgeist. According to the conservative journalist Bruce Anderson, ‘It was never a deep ingrained plot. They just wanted to enjoy themselves.’ Cowling himself said as much, years later: ‘There is a tendency in much left-wing analysis to overestimate the novelty of the New Right, even of the economic New Right, and to ignore the extent to which its “new ideas” can be found in the thought, rhetoric and practice of the Conservative Party throughout the twentieth century.’ The Toryism that they embodied in 1975 did not suddenly emerge in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s; like Gaullism in France, it was woven into the national character – a ‘disposition’, as Oakeshott put it.”

Quick Links

The chief suspect of the Manchester synagogue killings was named as Jihad al Shamie, a Syrian who was granted citizenship in 2006.

UK IPOs have fallen behind Oman, Poland and Indonesia.

Rachel Reeves is seeking to water down the influence of the OBR.

Janan Ganesh says that buyers’ remorse may save the Conservative Party.

A quarter of wealthy people are considering quitting Britain under Labour.

The Chinese Navy is testing how to destroy Royal Navy vessels.

The NHS claims that first-cousin marriage helps create stronger families despite health risks.

The Church of England picks its first female Archbishop of Canterbury.