An Island of Strangers
The social fabric of Britain is unravelling in many ways that go beyond mass migration
Towering columns
On his Substack, James Breckwoldt surveyed the salience of cultural war issues with voters to help understand the shifting sands of British politics.
Socially conservative voters consistently placed greater emphasis on non-economic issues (both culture war and traditional) than those with socially liberal values. This supports Noam Gidron’s idea that there are ‘many ways to be right’ where it’s enough to be conservative on just one dimension for someone to vote for a right-wing party.
For the political right, this highlights the strategic potential of non-economic issues in building a majority coalition. A lot of commentary around Reform UK suggests that their rise is fragile, because their voters span a wide range of economic views from Thatcherites to old left socialists. However, my findings suggest this might be the wrong way to think about it. Right-traditionalists and left-traditionalists may disagree on economic policy, but that only matters if economics is what’s driving their vote. Instead, they both prioritised the non-economic concerns that they share.
In other words, economic disagreement within a voter coalition is not a fatal flaw if the economy isn’t what’s motivating their political decisions. If voters aren’t using economic policy as a litmus test, then their differing views on it may not pose a serious risk to party unity. By focusing on the non-economic values their supporters share, they can hold together an ideologically diverse coalition that might otherwise seem impossible to reconcile.
At The Critic, Sebastian Millbank explains how Blue Labour has defied the sceptics and predicted the postliberal zeitgeist.
One thing I have always noticed about free market arguments is the tendency to conflate the defence of the effectiveness of private corporations with a rather sentimental story about individual human freedom and genius. Amazon may be an extraordinarily efficient organisation that produces considerable convenience for consumers, but it is also an example of economic centralisation par excellence, not some plucky anarchist commune. Indeed, the reality of modern capitalism is all too often the administrative state allying with the administrative corporation to crush the individual. If resisting this unholy alliance is “socialism”, then sign me up.
There is of course a role for a small but strong central state, especially in areas like energy policy, defence and strategic and industrial planning. This latter may be a dirty word for some, but it is hard to escape the feeling that here, too, current events are bearing out Blue Labour’s analysis. As I currently write, a state-owned Spanish firm has purchased Harland and Wolff, a Chinese steel firm run by a former communist official is closing down our last remaining steel foundry, and our nuclear power plants are run by the French government. In a world in which state subsidised and owned firms regularly outcompete and acquire British firms, doctrinaire opposition to economic planning looks dangerously naive.
Britain has paid a heavy price for its stubbornly laissez faire approach to industrial policy. It’s all very well celebrating the success of the service economy, or pointing to the failures of the 70s, but none of that ultimately does anything to change the fact that deindustrialisation has left festering socioeconomic wounds that are soaking up public resources. Nor has the present model delivered productivity gains and high levels of innovation. What is needed now is not economic dogmatism, but an economic realism directed towards protecting our culture and common life. Movements like Blue Labour, that leave aside the old, tired political duopoly, are part of the wave of the future precisely because they are rooted in political and human reality.
At ConservativeHome, Gregory Stafford believes legalising assisted suicide would mark a traumatic break from centuries of medical ethics.
As Parliament prepares for the Third Reading of Kim Leadbeater’s Bill to legalise assisted suicide, we too stand on the banks of our own Rubicon. To cross it would not only alter our moral compass, but fundamentally change the character of the National Health Service – a change that has not yet received sufficient scrutiny. Facilitating assisted suicide within the NHS would be at odds with its founding ethos and risk fracturing the vital social contract between clinicians and patients; a contract built on trust, care, and the preservation of life.
When we walk into a GP surgery or hospital, we entrust our wellbeing to professionals who we believe will recommend treatments aimed at restoring health, not hastening death. This expectation is deeply rooted in both medical ethics and public understanding. The Hippocratic Oath, with its commitment to “give no deadly medicine if asked,” remains symbolic of this trust. Florence Nightingale famously wrote that the first requirement of a hospital is that it “should do the sick no harm.” And the founding clause of the 1946 National Health Service Act defines its purpose as improving the “physical and mental health of the people.”
By introducing assisted suicide services into that framework, we would be breaking with a tradition of care that has endured for centuries. Indeed, during the Committee Stage of her Bill, Kim Leadbeater was compelled to table an amendment allowing the Health Secretary to reinterpret the NHS Act to accommodate assisted dying services. That alone should give us pause: the legislation would permit precisely what previous generations of lawmakers and doctors expressly forbade.
For The Telegraph, Balázs Orban argues that Hungary has demonstrated the benefit of raising the fertility rate to reverse demographic decline.
Surveys show that many people, even in wealthy countries, have fewer children than they actually desire. In the United States, 39 per cent of adults report having fewer children than they would like. People tend to have similar values. According to data from the Mária Kopp Institute for Demography and Families, 98 per cent of Hungarians consider family to be the most important value. The childbearing plans of young Hungarians have not changed: the majority still wish to have two children, and childlessness is not regarded as a desirable way of life.
Good family policy does not force women into out-of-date roles but creates an environment where starting a family is compatible with personal and professional ambitions. In Hungary, family policy is based on a comprehensive approach that supports women’s career goals alongside motherhood. As a result, the gender pay gap for mothers has been virtually eliminated. Hungary has developed a systematic, complex strategy to support families. It is based on the principle that those who want children should be helped, not discouraged…
…In 2010, Hungary ranked last among EU member states in terms of total fertility rate, but according to the latest Eurostat data from 2023, we have risen to third place. This significant progress is largely thanks to the targeted government family support policies implemented over the past fifteen years. As a result, since 2010, 200,000 more children have been born than would have been expected based on previous demographic trends. In parallel with the rise in births, the number of marriages has significantly increased, the number of divorces has decreased. Even the number of abortions has fallen significantly – all without the introduction of new restrictive legislation.
For the Financial Times, Martin Wolf considers the impact of global surplus savings being directed towards consumption instead of productive investment.
Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, domestic spending had predominantly been driven by credit-fuelled property booms. These phenomena were not unique to the US, though the US has long been the biggest global borrower. In the Eurozone and the UK, too, net borrowing by the countries with huge current account deficits, before the financial crisis, was largely driven by credit-fuelled property bubbles (as in Ireland or Spain) or fiscal deficits (as in Greece). When those property bubbles burst and financial systems crashed, the consequence was also huge fiscal deficits almost everywhere.
In sum, we now seem unable to turn surplus savings in some countries into productive investment elsewhere. One of the reasons for this is that the countries able to borrow sustainably from abroad have creditworthy currencies. This rules out most emerging and developing countries. It also, it turned out, mostly ruled out deficit members of the Eurozone. In such a world, it is hardly surprising that the dominant borrower and spender is the US government. But is that a good result of the liberalisation of the global capital accounts? Hardly! It is a huge failure that all these surplus savings are frittered away in this way, rather than invested in productive activities, above all in poorer countries.
Moreover, the deficit countries are quite unhappy with this arrangement. Yes, they can spend more than their aggregate incomes. But they are hardly grateful. Not least, if a country runs a large trade deficit, it will consume more tradeable goods and services than it produces, since its residents cannot import non-tradeables without travelling. So, in deficit countries, manufacturing, a central part of the tradeable sector, is smaller than in surplus countries, where the opposite is true. This point, made by Beijing-based Michael Pettis, helps explain soaring US protectionism and so Trump’s trade war. The latter may be chaotic, indeed irrational, but its origin is not hard to identify: manufacturing matters, politically and economically.
At Compact, Jon Toomey dismisses the need for reciprocal tariffs, instead favouring permanent tariff rates that protect domestic industry and reshore supply chains.
The idea that reciprocal tariffs will yield true reciprocity is naïve and historically unsupported. Reciprocal tariffs lack permanence, are vulnerable to political manipulation, and ultimately enable foreign countries to keep out American goods while flooding our market with theirs. Worse, they tie US trade policy to foreign countries’ actions, when what we need is sovereign control over our own economic future.
Last year, the United States amassed an alarming $1.2 trillion goods trade deficit. The rising US trade deficit is the direct result of competing against nations that heavily subsidize their industries, exploit cheap labor, and erect numerous non-tariff barriers to American exports. In 2024, we ran a staggering $295 billion goods trade deficit with China, powered by Beijing’s state-backed economic model, which includes massive subsidies, currency manipulation, and industrial espionage. These aren’t the actions of a trading partner—they’re the tactics of a strategic adversary…
…If America is serious about confronting China, then President Trump must use trade negotiations not as one-off deals, but as leverage to force our trading partners to choose a side. Nations that want access to America’s enormous consumer market must demonstrate that they are not going to absorb China’s overcapacity, be transshipment hubs for Chinese goods, and will not be staging grounds for Chinese industry to receive preferential access to the US market. That means aggressive enforcement of Section 232 tariffs, the imposition of country-specific quotas in strategic sectors like pharmaceuticals and steel, and a refusal to tolerate transshipment schemes dressed up as “reciprocal trade.”
Wonky thinking
UnHerd has published the results of an investigation into the Islamist groups that have access to Number 10. It raises serious questions over how activists have been influencing the Government’s approach towards Islamophobia and the grooming gangs scandal, and enabling the growth of sectarian politics.
In the 21 constituencies where Muslims make up more than 30% of the electorate, Labour’s vote share fell by an average 29 percentage points. The safe seats held by Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and other ministers became marginals. Prominent MPs such as shadow cabinet member Jonathan Ashworth were turfed out, and TMV helped the ex-Labour renegade Jeremy Corbyn return to Parliament. One of the TMV coalition’s leading members is MEND — the organisation with which Labour had severed its links. MEND had now had its revenge.
Khalid Mahmood, whose 15,000 majority was wiped out in Birmingham Perry Barr, tells me that in its anxiety to staunch the loss of votes, Labour has failed to exercise due diligence. “People have got through to the leadership without any vetting,” he says. “I’m shocked by some of the stuff they’ve been involved in, and yet they’re going to be determining important areas of policy, especially on Islamophobia. How does a government minister appoint people with these connections?”
According to Mahmood, the challenge from Muslim radicals also explains why Starmer has refused to hold a national inquiry into the Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs. Islamists, he points out, often claim that the attention paid to the gangs’ ethnicity is itself driven by Islamophobia: “They like to say that overall there are more white abusers, but real, horrendous crimes have been committed by Pakistanis and Bengalis. There have been key gangs in these communities, and this has got to be dealt with.” Thus Labour’s “trepidation” over TMV may increase the future risk to vulnerable girls.
Back in 2012, when Starmer was director of public prosecutions, there seemed to be no such trepidation: Starmer said there was “clearly an issue of ethnicity that has to be understood and addressed”. But in April, his safeguarding minister Jess Phillips made clear there would be no national inquiry into grooming gangs. It is worth noting that in 2024, a TMV challenger slashed her majority from more than 10,000 to just 769.
Meanwhile, the lobbying continues, with familiar faces cropping up at the new organisations replacing those which have been barred from Westminster. In March, Akeela Ahmed — one of the five members of Angela Rayner’s Islamophobia “working group” — launched a new British Muslim Network (BMN) which promises to ensure that “British Muslim perspectives and experiences can engage with and shape policy”, and its supporters include the ex-Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi, who has often appeared at MEND events and reportedly once advised it on a “makeover”…
…Today, though, the Islamist lobby is in a far stronger position than when Brown excommunicated the Muslim Council of Britain. Exercising its religious muscle, TMV has toppled Labour MPs, is the biggest electoral threat to survivors such as Jess Phillips, and has scored significant wins in the recent council elections, including in Lancashire where there were victories for Maheen Kamran, who wants to prevent “free mixing” between men and women, and Azhar Ali, the Rochdale by-election candidate dropped by Labour last year for antisemitism.
So while many moderate Muslims reject Islamism, TMV can call on a growing voting bloc to drown out those moderate voices. And even though individuals such as Muddassar Ahmed reject these radical organisations, they nonetheless owe their access to the corridors of power to the sectarian vote marshalled by TMV, putting them in hoc to the actions of a group with radical connections.
At Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, Dr Jostein Hauge, in conversation with Professor Emily Jones and Dr Amir Lebdioui, debated the intense geopolitical competition for industrial supremacy between the United States, China, and the European Union.
Book of the week
We recommend Conservative Thinkers from All Souls College Oxford by Richard Davenport-Hines. The author explores the Oxford roots of English conservatism as Cabinet Ministers and academics exchanged ideas around individualism, consumerism, democracy, and militarism. Prominent figures included the underrated and wrongfully neglected Tory historian Keith Feiling.
He upheld the established church as a pillar supporting stability. ‘I stand for the Church of England as by law established because … it unites us most.’ No one standing in Westminster Abbey could, he said, believe in nonconformity: ‘the worship of the Church of England has to be venerable, catholic, and ordered.’ Feiling was less concerned with the Church that holds the keys of man’s salvation than with the Church that was, in his phrase, ‘the guardian of the inherited virtue of the nation.’ The Tory commitment was “not to the Church that promises a new Heaven but to the Church that sweetens an old earth. Not the Church that dispels the fear of death, but the Church that arms the weakness of life.”
Feiling respected Anglicanism as ‘historical, charitable, beneficent, tested by time’, and felt that the alleviation of compulsory church attendance and of prohibition on Sunday sports had engendered a new mentality of unbelief and materialism. ‘Did the material burden of the old régime approach in weight the mental turmoil of the new?’ he asked. ‘In a hundred ways I could illustrate what I hold to be true, that even wrong belief is better for a people than unbelief.’
The historian and controversialist F. S. Oliver stood alongside Cecil in Feiling’s frontline of conservative thinkers. Oliver’s books influenced thoughtful leaders of his party in the 30 years that ended with the Great Depression and the great dictators. ‘Inequalities among mankind’, he declared in 1906, “and the orders, ranks, classes and the degrees of respect that arise out of these inequalities, are matters for gratitude and not for regret, since no human institution that has emerged from barbarism could ever work without them.”
Feiling was of like mind. ‘Every Tory must reject’, he wrote, ‘the claim that one human being as a political animal is equal to any other human being in rights and powers and therefore has an equal right to vote.’ The franchise should depend not on human equality but ‘on education, on material equipment, on rank, on possession, on the balance of social power.’ Otherwise, under a system of extended or universal suffrage, elections would resemble a frantic auction in which candidates outbid one another in offering bribes to voters: plunder, in effect, from taxpayers, dolled up as entitlements and even rights. Democratic politics would become a degrading exercise in false expectation-raising if, as George Saintsbury wrote, Commons legislation was framed to satisfy ‘a mere brute majority.’…
…He identifies ‘the genuine Tory spirit [as] a constant and deep attachment to the Crown coupled with a horror of uniformity of institutions and of economic formulas.’ Pride in work and contentment in life are Tory duties as well as Tory virtues. The more that people are fitted to fend for themselves, the larger will be the forces of Toryism. Social stability is preferable to escalating wealth. Cautious steps forward, or at least policies offering only modest hopes, seemed humane to Franklin/Feiling, whereas the belligerent confidence of laissezfaire capitalism dehumanized life, cheapened values and ended in ‘the drab discontent of materialism.’ It is absurd, he thought, to expect patriotism from people who worry day and night about the casualness of their jobs or the possibility of sudden eviction from their homes.
Quick links
Polling showed 50% of people believe immigration is the most important issue, the highest level since June 2016 as Labour presented its immigration white paper.
Representatives from the American and Chinese governments agreed to a trade deal in Geneva, pausing retaliatory tariffs for 90 days.
Clean energy sectors made up a record 10 per cent of China’s GDP and supported a quarter of its growth last year.
White-collar job vacancies are declining sharply in the United States, particularly among software developers.
Data from the 2025 local elections suggests Reform is turning out more voters than in previous elections.
Prison guard had their throat slashed by an inmate with an improvised weapon.
Committee to select the next Archbishop of Canterbury includes a Palestinian archbishop, a Maori priest, an Argentinian engineer, and a Ghanaian economics professor.
Argentina’s libertarian leader has tightened immigration restrictions.
The First Lady of Sierra Leone has been renting a council flat since 2007 despite her extensive property portfolio in Africa and having left London in 2018.
Leicester City Council's planning committee approved a proposal to turn a former pub into a mosque.