What is the new consensus on the Right?

Beyond the Tory-Reform split a new radical conservative platform has arisen

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel criticises the backward-looking agenda of Tory “centrists”.

For one thing, by far the largest chunk of Tory votes — a quarter of their 2019 support — were lost to Reform at the last election, according to analysis by the Tory think tank Onward. But as long as Davidson and co stick to pro-business, anti-welfare waffling, and repress their urge to call anyone who would like a radical cut to immigration stupid or racist, they can be safely left to their own devices. They are not leading the party anywhere, and will reliably follow so long as the polling moves gradually in the right direction, which it tentatively appears to be.

It is left to the leader, then, to lead. Happily, on many issues, the direction in which the electorate would like to go and the changes required are increasingly aligned. Most people would support reshaping the state so instead of pouring money into welfare, fraud and truancy, it gives businesses room to grow and hire and spends on improving our innovative power, defence and industrial capacity. Most people would rather we imported small numbers of highly specialised migrants in fields such as nuclear physics and civil engineering rather than large numbers of poorly paid care workers from developing countries. Most people would rather see the state provide efficient services by promoting civil servants on merit rather than kowtowing to public sector unions by maintaining a vast payroll of pointless rule-makers, box-tickers and naysayers.

As for culture, Britain is in a revivalist mood. Our institutions need to be purged of the small-town tribalist corruption that enables grooming gangs and soft-touch policing of extremism. The utility of mass migration has been tested to destruction and it is time to admit that entry and settlement ought to be subject to a test of cultural compatibility as well as economic value. And the government needs to take a more forceful approach to breaking up ethnic and sectarian enclaves, promoting a unified patriotic identity over the violent squabbles of diversity politics. None of this involves a veer to the left but nor is it a return to the comfort blanket of Thatcherism and the worship of global “openness”. It is neither boring nor frightening. It is something new but also something conservative. And perhaps, with some luck, it is where Badenoch will take her party, and the country.

For The Spectator, Gavin Rice says the Tory-Reform civil war masks a remarkably coherent emerging intellectual consensus on the right.

But where the most exciting departures are taking place in centre-right thinking is in political economy. For both Tories and Reform, aspects of the old Thatcherite commitment to lower taxes and deregulation remain attractive, and some of these insights are right. Our tax structure has indeed become too redistributive, and far too many are now paying the higher rate. We have failed to embrace the challenge of proper regulatory reform after Brexit. But this rather thin soup of personal responsibility and state retreat while the forces of ultra-globalisation tear out the heart of the real economy is no longer enough.

It was heartening to hear [Robert] Jenrick talk of reindustrialisation in his interview with The Spectator this week. This is an agenda Nick Timothy, Neil O’Brien and I have been pushing for a long time. The argument has strong parallels with the drive to restore manufacturing and productive jobs in the US. Where it’s older but vital hard manufacturing like chemicals – which has collapsed by one-third in as many years – we must implement supply-side help, most obviously securing cheaper energy. But advanced manufacturing, AI infrastructure and our now-evaporated steel industry are examples of sectors that may not take off or survive without a more active state strategy. The global free market does not owe us a competitive tech or pharmaceuticals sector, and Britain’s high cost base has resulted now in two decades of rapid offshoring.

A restored commitment to economic solidarity and justice through opportunity is now orthodoxy from Badenoch and Jenrick to the libertarian online right and elements of the ‘Yimby’ left. Telling millennials and Gen Z they must work harder when the economic returns are a mere fraction of what they were in the 1980s is not good enough. The system must reconnect work, effort and material reward. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for another ‘national conservative’ goal: the creation of strong, resilient and happy families, where parents can have the number of children they want, not the number that penury and a broken housing market say they can.

For The Critic, pollster James Johnson says the maths simply does not add up for a Tory recovery unless the party can win back millions of defectors to Reform.

Of course they would also have to find ways to differentiate: leadership, experience, better plans, the economy, and presenting themselves as the most competent option. But to earn the credit of that differentiation, voters need to feel there has been wholesale change in the way the Party runs. That needs ultimate contrition and disowning of key parts of the Tory record in government. Evidencing that means policy change, but also decisions on personnel to show the party is serious — whether that is ejecting former leader Liz Truss, or sacking current Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel (an architect of the high immigration levels that put the Tories in the quandary they are now in). If this sounds familiar, it is because these are similar points made by Rob Jenrick when he was in the Conservative Party and since.

What is certain is that the status quo is not an option. The Conservatives cannot simply present themselves as an option in the middle of Reform or Labour — even if such a position is intellectually coherent, they will be squeezed out of the conversation. Some say that the Tories should focus on the economy, and that by the next election this could be the defining issue at the expense of migration. But that misunderstands how voters vote, especially those who have defected to Reform: they do not look down a list of parties and decide which is best on the given issue of the day, they vote based on which party feels like it shares their values the most.

The numbers show the only path to power for the Conservatives is through those who have left the party to Reform. It is a path that goes through a group that has defined British politics for the last decade: working and lower middle class, white, Leave-voting people in late middle age and older. If you are a Tory or Tory MP reading this: they are the only way you keep your seat or get more seats at the next election. If you are a liberal or centrist Tory or Tory MP reading this: there are not many people in the country who think like you, and there are very few people in the country who think like you and would consider voting Conservative.

And on ConservativeHome, Karl Williams teases out some of the tensions and commonalities in New Right political thought.

One of the greatest fissures in the New Right is on political economy, on free markets versus industrial strategy, between what Daniel Hannan has termed the FreeCons and NatCons. Leftists like Zack Polanski seem to see the British economy as a neoliberal hellscape of unfettered free markets, rampant exploitation and vertiginous inequality. But New Right free marketeers point out that the highest tax burden since the war and intensive government intervention through a sprawling regulatory state, industrial subsidies and price controls – the product of 14 years of Conservative government – is hardly ultra-Thatcherism on steroids.

New Right industrial strategists accept much of the free marketeer argument, notably on housing and net zero. But they also argue that the state has not been active enough in shaping the British economy according to national security considerations, for example on industrial capacity and the balance of trade; and especially in the face of Chinese, European and now American mercantilism.

Another important cleavage is around natalism and family policy. Few on the New Right would go as far as Hungarian-style birthmaxxing, but there are large differences on how to respond to the fertility decline and the fiscal challenges of an ageing population, differences that partially map onto the free market versus industrial strategy divide, but which are also partly refracted through religious commitments…These divisions on the right could be seen negatively, as a morbid symptom of the decadence and decay of an old order. That is certainly the tendency in left-wing reportage of the New Right in general. But this process could also be seen in a more positive (and almost Nietzschean) light, as creating the soil in which new and hybrid ideas can take root and grow.

For UnHerd, David Smith says Labour has no compelling story to tell the electorate, and has not grasped the brokenness of Britain’s economic model.

Our opponents are telling a clear story: Britain is broken; you have been shafted by a corrupt elite, the “uniparty”, or the 1%; the worst possible outcome is more of the same. We are not fighting Reform or the Greens so much as we are fighting this story. And if we lose, it will not be because of who the people at the top are, but because the stories we offer don’t have the same power. That is why the most urgent questions are not personal but political: in a rapidly changing world, how does this government define and deliver a decent life for ordinary people?

Beyond “we need to do better”, I am struck by the dearth of thinking in politics. Successful movements have always found ways to counterbalance personality politics via the rich seam of ideas, most obviously with Thatcherism’s dependence on the work of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. There is no shortage of policy proposals circulating at any given moment, but what are they anchored to? There is a near-total absence of ideology, or even of deeper thinking, both about how to define the problems we face and how to judge which answers are the right ones.

Over decades, Britain’s economic model has concentrated wealth and decision-making in Westminster while weakening the institutions, such as local government and trade unions, that once gave people real agency over their lives. Growth on its own will not resolve this if it is delivered through the same extractive dynamics that produced stagnation and insecurity in the first place. A different approach would prioritise productive capacity over rent-seeking, reciprocity over atomisation, and contribution over consumption. It would rebuild domestic supply chains, devolve economic power, and re-embed markets within social obligation. One could call it a new socio-economic covenant.

In The New Statesman, Paul Ovenden says Britain needs to embrace a Gaullist spirit of genuine sovereignty.

That light of national renewal is going to be harsh. It will require an honesty about what needs to change that is simply not in sight at the moment. Watching politicians dig their ideological trenches ever deeper – tax the rich vs shut the borders – one is left with a sense that we are surrendering to our troubles rather than taking arms against them.

Where people (wrongly) used to talk about polarisation, they now talk (rightly) of fragmentation: an electorate breaking into clusters. The temptation is for politics and political strategy to follow this, becoming ever smaller and shriller. Back to our values, shore up the base, hold what we have. In effect, this is to write off tens of millions of voters across the country. It is no recipe for creating a national story for a new era: it is an active choice to postpone any chance of renewal and instead take comfort in the schisms.

A modern Gaullist response to this moment would be to take on the frailty of our position and the smallness of our politics by acting bigger. It would be to give people a clear sense of what the sacrifices and the collective effort are all in aid of. In the spirit of comradeliness, let us take a generous interpretation of what Andy Burnham meant when he bemoaned in this magazine that we are “in hock to the bond markets”. It is both a cold, hard reality and a source of shame that we ended up here. But the challenge for Britain is more profound than mere market dependency. Whether it is our reliance on an unreliable ally for our defence, the fragility of our health system, our bloated but weakened state or our exposure to global energy prices, the story is the same: the life of the average Briton is not in hock just to the remorseless logic of the markets, but to outside events and actors everywhere.

Wonky Thinking

On his Substack, Sam Dumitriu defends the Fingleton nuclear review from critique by the Wildlife Trusts.

Nuclear is described as a ‘potentially risky technology’. Clearly, they are trying to tap into radiophobia and fears about Chernobyl style-disasters. Chernobyl, by the way, was the result of a reactor design that lacked a containment dome – Hinkley Point C’s containment is built to withstand a 1 in 10,000 year earthquake and direct hit from a jumbo jet - and the decision to run it in extremely unsafe ways. (For more detail, I recommend this paper from Prof Gerry Thomas, who ran the Chernobyl Tissue Bank at Imperial College London until recently.)

No form of energy generation is without risk, but nuclear stands out as the lowest-risk. Our World In Data reviewed multiple studies and found that nuclear power is one of the safest ways there is to generate power. Only solar is safer, but that doesn’t account for casualties as a result of mining the rare earths used in renewables.

EDF is described as a ‘company owned overseas’. As if that invalidates their arguments or makes them commenting on public policy in Britain (a country where they employ over 12,000 people) suspect…

…Let’s remember what’s at stake. Nuclear power is the greenest form of power there is. Not only does it generate zero carbon emissions in operation, it is also the most land-dense form of electricity generation. To produce the same amount of power as Hinkley Point C would require a solar farm the size of the Isle of Wight. And that’s before you get into the need for backup generation and new transmission upgrades.

If we are to tackle the biggest driver of nature loss (climate change) then nuclear must play a role. But nuclear’s role is limited by its cost. Yet the high costs paid in Britain are not inevitable. France, Finland, and South Korea all build plants for much less. Britain could bring costs down, but not when rules and regulations undermine long-term investments in supply chains and push up costs. Rules and regulations that even the NGOs concede have not prevented a ‘nature crisis’. That’s why the Fingleton Review is so important (and why it has seen such strong support). It explains clearly what’s needed to bring those costs down.

If the Government delivers the plan in full, then it will be transformative. But, they must hold their nerve in the face of organised opposition and misinformation from green groups.

On his Substack, Andrew O’Brien says the language of “reindustrialisation” must be backed up by serious plans and serious funding.

Reindustrialisation risks becoming just another ‘vibe’ in politics, like planning reform. So what would a genuine shift to reindustrialise the country look like? As someone who emphatically agrees that we need to reindustrialise, here is a five-point test for whether any politician or political party is serious about it.

1. How much are you prepared to spend?

Dismiss out of hand anyone that says that his can be done by just letting the private sector get on with it. In a world where China is flooding markets with cheap products, where Europe and the United States are pumping tens of billions of pounds worth of subsidies every year, where Britain is starting from an incredibly weak position, this is not a cost-free policy.

I do not think anyone has a credible figure on how much it will cost to rebuild Britain’s industrial base, but we are likely talking about hundreds of billions of pounds over several decades. Of course, some of this can come from the private sector, but whether it is rebuilding our energy system, spreading the use of robots through industrial grants (as Rian Whitton has advocated), infrastructure development (e.g. freight rail and road), underwriting loans and investment (as South Korea did effectively post-war), rebuilding industrial skills and training (we could be short of 1.5m engineers by 2030) facilities, there are a lot of things that need cash. This is before we consider the basic raising capital for firms and R&D expenditure.

Any reindustrialisation programme that is not backed by at least £20-30bn of British capital (see below) a year, every year, for several decades is not credible. This cost element is important because a major factor for why we deindustrialised is that governments were not prepared to spend what was needed to help industry, they wanted to cut taxes or increase welfare expenditure or the NHS. It is not easy to resist those pressures, but ultimately, we will have lower welfare and more sustainable tax revenues if we reindustrialise. It’s a long term bet.

Now in the grand scheme of things, that isn’t a huge amount of money, we are spending over £1.3 trillion in the UK every year in the public sector alone, but it will mean privileging reindustrialisation over ‘retail politics’ that is easy for newspapers to report but does nothing to advance our fundamentals.

If someone is talking about reindustrialisation and not talking about the huge cost, then you know they are not going to do anything in office about it (see this Labour Government).

2. Where are you getting the money from?

This might seem like the same point as above, but it isn’t.

Money can always be found from overseas. However, we have learnt from bitter experience that depending on overseas capital for industrial investment is a hiding to nothing. For every Sunderland Nissan ‘miracle’, there are dozens of British manufacturing firms bought up, hollowed up, split up and shut down. British firms are not perfect, but they do give us more strategic control.

If we aren’t planning to reindustrialise using primarily British private and public capital, we are not going to get very far. In a globally uncertain world, we need to ensure that we are in control over investment, not hoping that boards in Delaware, Frankfurt or Tokyo do us a favour.

Foreign investment will, to a large extent, take care of itself. If international firms wish to invest in Britain, we should welcome it with open arms and support it (provided that it is genuine investment and not geopolitically risky). However, we should not depend on overseas capital to deliver reindustrialisation. If we think something is important, we need to put our own money behind it. If we believe an industry is key to our future (e.g. steel, automotives, pharma, defence etc.) then we need to mobilise domestic capital and ensure that domestically owned firms are in the driving seat.

How do we do this in practice? A combination of putting the National Wealth Fund / UK Investment Bank at the service of reindustrialisation, using pension funds and other domestic savings institutions to invest in British energy production and changing corporate governance to ensure that Britain has a seat around the table when decisions are made about the future of strategically important companies would be a start.

If the plan, as per our current and previous industrial strategies, is just to say Britain is ‘open for business’, then you know it is not credible.

3. What are you doing beyond energy?

We need to reduce the cost of industrial energy. This is clear and obvious.

However, as the chart below shows, lower prices does not equal boost in production. In the case of iron and steel, we know the problem was a lack of investment alongside allowing overseas products (e.g. China) to flood the domestic market. You could develop the same chart, I am sure, for other heavy industries.

So anyone that says their reindustrialisation strategy is simply to ‘scrap Net Zero’ or ‘energy abundance’ and hope for the best is not being serious. Cheap energy is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for reindustrialisation. Let’s not become a new MATE.

We need a huge range of other interventions, including…

4. What do you think about protection?

Donald Trump has politicised tariffs and now people seem to be taking position on tariffs based based on vibes, rather than substance. However, it is very hard to see how Britain is going to be in a position to reindustrialise in many areas (e.g. automotives, steel, chemicals) without some form of protection.

It is a cliché, but almost every country around the world that has successfully industrialised has used a combination of tariffs and other forms of protection (e.g. favourable terms of capital, regulation, tax concessions etc.). Britain did it. The United States did it (and is doing it again). Germany did it. South Korea does it. China does it. The list goes on.

Britain is in a weak position and any form of protection is going to hit consumers in a way that is unlikely to be popular when considered on a measure-by-measure basis (although I believe that politicians can make the case and win, just as Thatcher / Blair did for deindustrialisation). However, there is no long term gain without some short-term pain.

Are you prepared to use tariffs to protect domestic production and ask consumers to take the hit? Are you prepared to sail close to the wind of international trade agreements? Are you prepared to get British institutions to work very closely with firms to pin point opportunities to set global regulations in favour of British production (and privilege economic wins over other forms of diplomacy)? Are you prepared to bailout companies that invest big but fail so that they can try again?

If you do not hear that from someone advocating reindustrialisation some conversation about broader protectionist measures, then they are not serious.

5. What do you think about planning?

Don’t worry, I am not going to be writing about planning reform (although we do need to reform planning to make it easier for industry, as I have written about previously). I am talking about economic planning.

Economic planning does not necessarily mean state ownership. It does not necessarily mean collective bargaining or Industrial Development Certificates. However, at its core it means not simply reacting to events and consciously seeking to create a particular economic structure. A structure that markets (or the public) may at times resist.

Reindustrialisation is not the ‘natural’ bend of the UK economy. We are a highly service-based, highly-financialised economy; heavily weighted to city-based agglomeration. These are not things that lend themselves to growing industry as a proportion of GDP. So tweaks or rhetoric are not going to change much. We are going to need to take several steps to get to the result we want and we need to prepared to intervene constantly.

So you need to plan. There are formal (e.g. stated policy objectives like manufacturing as X% of GDP) and informal methods (e.g. bending state institutions to favour particular activities, as we have seen with financial services since the 1980s). But you need to boost state capacity (and private / independent capacity too) to understand, monitor and develop interventions that can support industry. Governments produce a lot of policy papers but in my experience are not good at planning and analysis. Look at the OBR, which has scored 1/10 in terms of forecasting ability compared to other agencies in The Sunday Times. We need to build up state capacity to understand what is going on and develop new models for how to transition our economy towards industrialisation.

Reindustrialisation is planning heavy compared to other sectors because there are so many moving parts. This is not like ‘tech start ups’ where someone in their garage can buy some computers, develop code and then start selling it. The physicality of industry, the long investment time-frames, the need for infrastructure, the interdependence of supply chains, the geopolitical challenges, all mean that planning is inevitable. It is not surprise to me that the death of planning effectively marked the rapid decline British industry (and the US to some extent).

Philosophically this is difficult for both left and right. The right cannot bring itself to accept that its ‘market knows best’ ideology was flawed. The left cannot accept that it was wrong to turn its back on planning to look ‘modern’. But they will need to accept that there is nothing ‘modern’ about letting things run their course and that markets do not always know best.

Anyone who is serious about reindustrialisation will need to embrace some form of economic planning and building the state apparatus to achieve it. If they are not prepared to countenance planning and building up state capacity, then they are not serious.

Podcast of the Week

On The Winston Marshall Show, Reform MP Danny Kruger lays out the radical reform needed to the British state, arguing that all roads lead back to Blairism.

On Times Radio, Juliet Samuel goes head to head with Matthew Parris on the claims of Tory “centrists”.

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