A few weeks ago, I attended a conference in London on the future of British conservatism, hosted by a thinktank funded by the Hungarian government. The future of British conservatism, it was swiftly revealed, was bleak — but not in the way the speakers intended. Like the Bourbons, British conservatism’s leading intellectual lights have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, clinging desperately to a cargo cult Thatcherism even as the British public prepare to win Starmer’s Labour a historic landslide. We need to return to “the classic texts of conservatism”, one elderly speaker told the audience: it transpired he meant the neoliberal theorist Hayek. Johnson’s thunderously successful 2019 manifesto would have failed in practice, a Tory big beast asserted, “because it was too social democratic”: the future, we were told, lay in unleashing the free market.
No-one appeared to appreciate the obvious irony that the event was hosted by a Right-wing government that ruthlessly utilises state power to advance its interests. Yet there is a reason, after all, that Hungarian conservatives aren’t attending events hosted by the Tory party, in order to learn from their success. Equally, no-one there appeared to grasp that the current volatility of British politics is a rejection of everything the Conservative Party holds most dear. For the past two generations, British conservatives have approached the state like an elderly non-driver suddenly given use of a powerful sports car: they don’t trust it, fundamentally they don’t believe in it, and would rather hand the keys to someone — anyone — else. And therein lies the root of their collapse. Having outsourced Britain’s governance to a coalition of hostile NGOs and a recalcitrant civil service, it is difficult for the Tories to inspire much fear about what Starmerism has in store for us: the worst we can expect is a slightly more competent version of what we already have.
The incoming Labour government will have no such qualms about using the state to advance its vision of the good. Take housing, one of the signature Conservative policy failures driving Millennial voters to political positions far to the Left of Starmer, While Conservative MPs made a conscious decision to appeal to the Nimbyism of their elderly base — only to be out-Nimbyed in turn by the Liberal Democrats and Greens — Tory-aligned wonks wasted time and frittered away power coming up with dead-end ideas such as “street votes” and tinkering with building codes, purely through an ideological obsession with appealing to the economic self-interest and aesthetic preferences of boomers. Labour, by contrast, plans to solve the problem through the simple expedient of forcing councils to build homes: the answer to the housing crisis is, as it always was, compulsion through state power.
In all Western democracies, 2024 marks the end of an order and the difficult birth of a new one. Yet in interpreting the failure of Britain’s current settlement, both sides retain their ideological blind spots. For those on the Left, Conservative failure was primarily economic, while for the Right, immigration is the Tories’ central sin: the truth is that both are correct. Britain’s toxic combination of economic stagnation and unprecedented immigration could not have been better designed if political instability was the conscious intention. The main story of this election is not the public’s resigned turn to Labour but the death of its centre-right, spiritually and intellectually exhausted by its suicidal commitment to both its own failed ideology, and in advancing the growth of that of its political enemies.
Yet with the coup de grâce about to be delivered to the ailing Tories by Farage’s populist Right, and even Starmer condemning the Conservative Party for its extremist Open Borders attitude to immigration, vowing to return asylum claimants from manifestly safe countries, Conservative wets lament that voters have abandoned their party for being too Right-wing. It is quite the opposite: the genuinely transformative effects of Johnson’s immigration policy have introduced a new radicalising factor in British politics that never before existed. All the old debates, about integration and British Values, have been rendered obsolete by the sheer, unprecedented scale of the country’s current migration wave. Even necessary Labour goals, such as their commitment to a house-building boom, will struggle to win support through the suspicion and hostility the Conservative immigration regime has needlessly injected into British politics. Having already plucked Farage from semi-retirement, Johnson’s most transformative contribution to British history has established the parameters for the 2029 and future elections.
It is a great irony, then, that Farage’s resurgent Reform Party represents Britain’s return to the political sphere of the European continent, a reflection of continental trends that even the great apostle of Brexit eagerly wishes to identify himself with. “Something is happening out there,” has become his catchphrase: he is right. The Conservative Party has radicalised much of Britain’s youth into wishing its destruction, and its replacement by something harder-edged on the Right. It is doubtful that the Labour wish to enfranchise 16-year-olds will long survive its first electoral taste of the zoomer vote. Even as European voters swung sharply to the Right, buoyed by increasingly radicalised youth, Brexit derailed Britain into the cul-de-sac of Americanised identity politics, whose worldview has been adopted by even the purported Conservative Right. Just as in Ireland the growth of Right-wing populism was until recently deferred by the rise of Sinn Féin, in Britain its energy was briefly absorbed by the Corbyn moment. That burst of Left-wing activism is now dead, with nothing to show for it, while the Corbyn outriders transfer their loyalties to a Green Party committed to a destructive combination of maximum immigration and minimum infrastructure: policies which, when implemented under the Conservatives, have proven to be fertile ground for Right-wing discontent. Farage himself is perhaps best understood as a Corbyn of the Right, a noisy and ephemeral protest against a system that no longer works: but if European analogies hold true, his mantle will surely be handed over to someone younger and harder soon enough.
If the coming electoral wipeout is a voter rejection of the double-liberalism of the Conservative Party, is this the first post-liberal election? If it is, then it is a bitter pill for the intellectual post-liberals who sought to construct a humane and prosperous society from the wreckage of the liberal order. The actually-existing post-liberalism we are getting is one born from the blasted wastelands of provincial Britain, not the Merry England dreams of Anglo-Catholic academics. Post-liberals failed to transcend liberalism: instead liberals collapsed it by themselves. London journalists perform their ritual pre-election tours of the wider country, reporting back in horror at their sightings: a land of high streets shuttered apart from dubious money-laundering fronts, of visible public squalor and degradation. Times journalists travel to the West Midlands to reveal rubbish-heaped streets and the open and newly-assertive tribalism of Birmingham’s new demographic majority. Novara’s Aaron Bastani reports back from once prosperous Middle England market towns where “blackpilled” zoomers proclaim their disaffection from a country changing before their eyes, and their loyalty to Farage. It is a bleak world the Westminster class no longer understands. This is the Britain the liberal Tories created, and it’s about to wipe them out: soon enough, it will wipe out Labour too.
For if Farage’s Reform presages a new ethnic identitarianism among Britain’s native population — a radicalisation almost entirely the result of Conservative immigration policies — then the electoral challenge for Labour is represented by the parallel identitarianism of the ethnic voting blocs whose support it once took for granted. It is not encouraging for Britain’s future that the Gaza War, in domestic politics, has taken the shape of rival Jewish and Muslim blocs contesting mastery of the streets and the state’s favour; nor that the Conservative Party, in openly courting the Hindu nationalist vote, has made the implicit ethnic factionalism of the British party system increasingly explicit. Within this context, George Galloway’s Workers’ Party is a genuinely fascinating development, in translating post-liberal politics for a Muslim voting bloc: indeed, except for its emphasis on “foreign policy independence”, its pitch effectively mimics Johnson’s 2019 manifesto. Deeply conservative on issues of sex and gender, it has identified the weakest point in the fragile Labour coalition and targets it ruthlessly. Similarly, the Muslim Vote campaign aims to mobilise British Muslim voters against Starmer on a pro-Palestine ticket, vowing a “25-year war” against Labour.
Like other politicians of his generation, Starmer simply does not understand the country he is about to rule. The machine politics of ethnic voting blocs, once a Labour asset, now constrains him in both foreign and domestic policy choices. When Starmer vowed to return Bangladeshi economic migrants posing as asylum seekers, he was condemned by his own party functionaries in the East End, with Poplar and Limehouse MP Apsana Begum accusing him of “dog-whistle racism”, and the Labour deputy leader in Tower Hamlets resigning from the party in protest. The former Labour inquisitor Halima Khan, now running against the Party as a Workers Party candidate, even accused Starmer of “fascist rhetoric”. The idea that Britain may possess an asylum system functionally distinct from open borders is increasingly taboo among the identitarian activist base that Labour nurtured: yet his ability to grapple with the problem will determine whether British politics continues on its Rightward European path.
Observing this election vindicates the academic Philip Cunliffe’s thesis that Brexit should be understood less as a one-off withdrawal from a continental trading bloc, but rather as a revolutionary catalyst which would end up collapsing the Westminster system under its own contradictions. For all the inevitability of Labour’s victory, it is the overtly anti-system candidates on the fringes who are driving the debate, in a process perhaps analogous to the collapse of the centre driving French politics into historic crisis. Like expanding the franchise to the young, it is doubtful in these circumstances that the incoming Labour government will undertake any of the bold promises on electoral reform that seemed so attractive in their earlier position of weakness: but a strong showing for anti-system candidates, which is not reflected in parliamentary representation, will further accelerate the widespread belief that Westminster governance is increasingly divorced from the popular mood. None of this affords much optimism for Britain’s future political stability.
In the current election, then, the contours of Britain’s future politics are already visible, hazily taking shape. It is likely that this will be the last election of the old form of British politics, and the herald of the new, this year’s debates pregnant with all the coming malignities of the near future. The 2024 election reveals a system at an advanced state of decay but not yet at the point of collapse: yet neither the economic forecast nor the international situation present much hope that Labour will wrest the country from its tailspin. None of this is desirable, and none of it was necessary: but this is what British politics looks like now. The future will lie with those who can navigate the restive and suspicious country that actually exists, and cobble a path to power from among its tribal blocs and sullen electorate, translating the febrile mood of provincial Britain to the ramshackle edifice on the Thames that, increasingly nervously, still claims to represent it.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/