Labour's Hollow Crown
Nigel Farage is enjoying the first fruits of his mission to smash the Labour Party and reshape English politics
Towering columns
For The Times, Juliet Samuel argues that Nigel Farage’s gradual embrace of economic nationalism has contributed to his political success.
Early Ukip was all for reheated Thatcherism. The answer to every problem, however unrelated, was to shrink the state, cut taxes and defeat the unions. But once Farage took the reins in 2006 and recognised that his greatest potential voter base was among the disillusioned working classes, many of whom felt let down by the Thatcherite revolution and deeply suspicious of Tory small-statism, the emphasis changed. The NHS began to be referred to in Ukip manifestos as a “cherished institution” and the party started to offer reassurances, like the idea that Brexit wouldn’t mean any kind of assault on workers’ rights…
…There is still ample land to be grabbed. Our politicians are tiptoeing fearfully around the idea of industrial policy, supporting intervention only when it is impossible to do anything else, as with our steelmaking. They have yet to plunder the best ideas road-tested in Asia, like recruitment drives for key talent around the world in particular industries; the establishment of industrial-science parks, complete with specialised schools, clinics, infrastructure and factories; or the greater use of profit-seeking, government-backed venture funds to stimulate investment. Economic nationalism, in short, does not need to look like Trump or Corbyn. It could look more like Korea.
The local elections are clearly no place for this kind of sweeping economic debate. Reform’s leaflets focus more on local council waste, bin collections and council tax. But if the party achieves its hopes of becoming the UK’s largest locally, it will face further questions about its breadth, coherence and credibility nationally. The cacophony of muddled, unprofessional and downright loony councillors heading into office will be something to behold. But the economic transformation taking place in the world is rich with political opportunity.
On his Substack, David Skelton believes that the Conservative decline is due to the failure to level up and reindustrialise the country.
Generally transforming the British economy would have required the Conservatives to show ideological agility, including in pursuit of industrial policy designed to reindustrialise and in the intelligent use of the state where it was necessary. When it came to shift from concept and slogan to reality, Conservatives weren’t always willing to give full-throated backing to policies that involved spending on infrastructure, development of industrial policy and effective and intelligent use of the state. And when conditions became more difficult and leadership changed, the project lacked sufficient Parliamentary champions, or even Conservative champions outside of Parliament, to sustain much needed momentum.
The lack of “true believers” in both Realignment and Levelling Up meant that it was never properly part of the DNA of the Conservative Party either inside or outside of Parliament. When it came down to the 2022 leadership election, both candidates in the final round made it clear that they didn’t want to prioritise tackling Britain’s regional inequalities (as I wrote at the time for The New Statesman). Liz Truss’s comic book libertarianism had no room for the intelligent use of the state that Levelling Up and reindustrialisation needed. Rishi Sunak’s austerity and neo-liberalism was also barely consistent with attempts to turn around regional decline.
Hence, the 2019 mandate of 14 million voters for Levelling Up and reindustrialisation was regarded as being less important than the “mandate” of 80,000 Tory Party members. A Parliament that started with bold promises to do whatever it takes to rebuild the economies of the North and the Midlands ended with the short-sighted cancellation and the collapse of the Red Wall.
At Compact, Emmet Penny explains how dependency on renewable energy led to the blackouts across Spain and Portugal.
As reported by Bloomberg’s Javier Blas, at the time of the blackout, the country had a slim percentage of dispatchable power generation in the mix. For those new to power-sector terminology, dispatchable means sources that can switch on to meet demand when you need them. Nuclear, co-generation, and natural gas, all dispatchable resources, made up about 20 percent of the power mix. These resources also have the added benefit of supplying the grid with the steady inertia it needs to maintain proper frequency.
The opposite of dispatchable power is intermittent power, like wind and solar, which Spain has in spades—they made up about 80 percent of the mix just before the blackouts. These sources, especially photovoltaic solar, can’t supply the requisite inertia the grid needs. So when these “atmospheric oscillations” took place, the Spanish grid was already in a precarious spot because its dearth of dispatchable power made it more vulnerable to frequency disturbances…
…Germany’s push to adopt renewables led to a deeper dependence on Russian pipeline gas (and then lignite coal and American LNG after the Ukraine War). Spain’s push has endangered European energy security in a different, more complex way. Thanks to over-reliance on wind and solar, restarting the Spanish grid is going to take far longer than it normally would because it lacks a robust fleet of dispatchable plants to aid in restoring power. What we’re seeing stems directly from policy decisions.
At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos reflects on how English national identity has become contested and is redefining the Right.
For a decade now, the country has been engaged in a slow-burning, chaotic period of democratic revolution, from Brexit’s violent rupture with Westminster’s decades-old political consensus to the electorate’s wild and desperate lurches between any party pledging to break the trajectory of decline. Northern England has emerged as the neglected kingmaker in British politics, delivering ephemeral landslides to Johnson’s Tories and then Starmer’s Labour before violently rejecting each in turn. Soon, if the polling is accurate, it will be Reform’s turn to be rewarded, and perhaps rejected, by this volatile and angry electorate. A Westminster lobby entranced by the drama of the new party’s rise has yet to grapple with the consequences of its likely failure…
…Nairn’s prediction of a modernising, “Gaullist” English nationalism, which remakes a sclerotic Westminster state whose ancient essence it claims to defend is perceptive: it is, perhaps, an Anglofuturism avant la lettre. The St George’s Day messages of the Conservative Party’s most energetic asset and de facto leader, Robert Jenrick and of his ideological ally beyond party lines, Rupert Lowe, speak to this current. In Jenrick’s video, England is not just “a great nation” but “a great people” too: an appeal to an identity Labour cannot comfortably utter.
Its paeans to historical glory, a modernity-defining legacy of scientific and technological advance, and unapologetic declaration that remembering England’s past “will give us the dare and determination to build a better England still” are a spine-tingling reflection of this developing political current. Its pointed inclusion of Cromwell is both a hint of the almost revolutionary nature of the necessary reform, and a nod to the internet Right increasingly driving mainstream conservative discourse. In the same way, Lowe’s video, made by the anonymous propagandist of the internet Right “Brewgaloo”, prominently features Jenrick over Lowe’s stirring speech calling for a Great Repeal Act of Westminster’s maladaptive laws, as the first act of “national restoration”. Concorde, red squirrels, Glastonbury Tor and King Alfred whizz past, near-subliminally: this is what Nairn predicted, and feared. It may yet be what the nation demands.
At ConservativeHome, Miriam Cates stresses the need to persuade boomers of the importance of raising birth rates to avoid demographic collapse.
Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are an historically unique generation. During their lifetimes, life expectancy has increased enormously, from 68 to an incredible 82 years. Boomers are the first generation – and likely the last – to enjoy funded pensions for, on average, two whole decades of retirement. Better (or worse) still, thanks to international financial reforms in the 1970s and 1980s asset price inflation has delivered many Boomers unearned property wealth worth hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of pounds, a phenomenon that has simultaneously locked younger generations out of home ownership altogether.
In other words, the Boomer generation had everything… everything, that is, except for enough children to sustain the population and support the costs of an aging society. This isn’t to say Boomers haven’t worked hard or contributed much to the nation. Of course they have…
…Yet the entitlement mindset of some Boomers that accompanies their extraordinary good luck presents a significant political barrier to taking the necessary steps to reduce the costs to young people of having children. To raise the birth rate, we will have to redistribute a significant proportion of state spending from older people to young families. In a democracy, such a shift requires the electoral consent of the Boomer generation who, due to their sheer number, exercise far more political power than the young.
At The Critic, Yuan Yi Zhu looks at why Canadians dodged the opportunity to break from the failed status quo.
Having once proudly boasted about serving as Justin Trudeau’s economic adviser for several years, Mr Carney campaigned on claiming that he had nothing to do with the past decade, during which Canada has suffered from every sort of calamity imaginable, be it economic or cultural, as a result of the Liberals’ policies. Most shamelessly of all, after a decade of accusing Canada of being a genocidal state, the Liberals wrapped themselves in the flag — and once again seem to have convinced Canadians that they were the patriotic party.
Ottawa-watchers know that Mark Carney’s Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party are the same thing. Carney’s chief of staff is a failed Trudeau minister, while his director of policy is a former Trudeau adviser, whose vacuous smile obscures much low cunning. Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s disgraced principal secretary, is back in the fold, as is David Lametti, the former justice minister who, more than almost anyone else, is responsible for disabled Canadians being offered euthanasia. Almost every one of Mark Carney’s ministers has behind them a long list of Trudeau-era failures, both policy and moral.
None of this seems to have mattered to Canadians voters. Between Donald Trump’s deranged ravings about making Canada the 51st state and Carney’s shiny CV (Canadians are an almost uniquely credentialist people, particularly when the credentials are foreign), the sins of the past decade were forgotten. Having a few months ago vowed — if the polls are to be believed — to consign the Liberal Party to the history books, they have instead given it a new lease of life.
Wonky thinking
On his Substack, David Goodhart considers how the divide between Anywheres and Somewheres has developed in Britain and Europe over the past decade. Populist parties have either broken into the mainstream or supplanted centre-right parties across the continent. Deindustrialisation, mass migration, and European integration have continued to fuel the populist wave. It remains to be seen what new settlement can be reached and who will shape it.
The uniparty baby boomer settlement has simply grown arthritic in too many respects, leaving a sense of stagnation and disillusionment with politics and a growing number of voters who feel their wealth and well-being draining away. Compare the optimism that even non-political people felt about New Labour’s thumping victory in 1997 in the UK with the justifiably low expectations accompanying the 2024 Labour landslide.
Unforseeable events have contributed to slow growth - the 2008 financial crash, the Euro crisis after 2010 and Brexit in 2016, the Covid pandemic 2020-2022, the Ukraine war related energy crisis - all feeding into the backdrop of sclerosis that seems to be the unavoidable fate of low fertility/ageing societies requiring ever higher taxes and debt.
There has been a more structural constraint on economic dynamism too: the left’s social and cultural advances from the 1980s onwards created pressure for stronger safety nets - meaning more business regulation and ever rising welfare spending - which has placed strict limits on the right’s economic victory after the Thatcher/Reagan ascendancy.
But the accumulating resistance to the Anywhere settlement is best attributed to disenchantment with excessive openness. In the economic sphere the opening of borders and markets - with globalisation at the international level (most notably China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001) and the Single Market in the EU - did for a period boost growth, restrain inflation and drive down prices. But it also elevated the consumer above the producer, the knowledge economy above the industrial one, and meant uncomfortably rapid de-industrialisation, and the destruction of long established ways of life—one of the drivers behind Trump’s chaotic tariff policy.
In the political sphere the opening of markets required weakening the nation state through the pooling of sovereignty in supranational institutions, especially within the EU. It also saw power flowing from elected politicians to the judiciary as international legal conventions, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, took precedence over national courts and politicians.
In the cultural/social sphere more open borders meant much higher levels of immigration and rapid demographic change, while human rights legislation made it harder to favour national citizens before outsiders or deport people who arrived illegally. Meanwhile, on the left, diversity and identity politics tended to eclipse solidarity and a proper focus on the revival of post-industrial regions.
As noted, the dramatic opening of European economies and societies has brought many benefits over recent decades but it has now breached the limits of democratic consent and created too many losers. I have never met anyone who wants to live in a closed society but the form that openness has taken has benefitted some far more than others.
In the medium-term populists are likely to continue their onward march at the ballot box, accompanied by more inchoate protests such as the Gilets Jaunes movement or the anti-immigration riots in the UK in summer 2024, without being able to fully set the agenda.
Nick Timothy appeared on The Peter McCormack Show to discuss how broken economic thinking, a bloated and overreaching state, uncontrolled immigration, and the collapse of cultural confidence have led to Britain’s current malaise.
Book of the week
We recommend The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius by George Orwell. Written during the Second World War, Orwell produced one of the twentieth-century’s most thought provoking works on the nature of English national identity. It remains a timeless reflection on the traditions and customs that had long defined the country, while also being a clarion call for revolutionary change.
National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with one another. Spaniards are cruel to animals, Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling. Obviously such things don't matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing is causeless, and even the fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell something about the realities of English life.
Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’, would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being called a sleep-walker.
But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.
But in all societies the common people must live to some extent against the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts, etc. etc.) which are designed to interfere with everybody but in practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities. And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost forgetting the name of Christ. The power-worship which is the new religion of Europe, and which has infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common people. They have never caught up with power politics. The ‘realism’ which is preached in Japanese and Italian newspapers would horrify them. One can learn a good deal about the spirit of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the windows of cheap stationers’ shops. These things are a sort of diary upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.
The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something that is always written off by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class. Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it. Well within living memory it was common for ‘the redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the premises. In peace time, even when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny standing army, which is officered by the country gentry and a specialized stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum proletarians. The mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and their attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No politician could rise to power by promising them conquests or military ‘glory’, no Hymn of Hate has ever made any appeal to them. In the last war the songs which the soldiers made up and sang of their own accord were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist. The only enemy they ever named was the sergeant-major.
Quick links
Reform won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by just six votes on a 17.4% swing and is projected to make major gains in local elections.
Over 10,000 people have crossed the Channel at the earliest point in the year since records began.
Economic confidence in the UK has dropped to its lowest level on record, lower than both 1979 and 2008.
No new homes were started in two-thirds of London's 33 boroughs in the first three months of 2025.
The UK spends almost half as much on public service pensions as on the entire state pension at a cost of £60 billion a year.
Almost 40% of the UK’s semiconductor workforce is set to retire in the next 15 years.
Analysis shows that the fiscal effects of non-EU immigration is negative in almost all European countries.
DeepMind UK employees are seeking to unionise so they can block deals with defence companies and the Israeli government.
Defence companies have told employees to not charge their phones in Chinese-made electric vehicles due to security concerns.
Unions threaten to strike if the government rejects teacher and NHS pay demands.
The Conservative Political Centre used to be a valuable tool for teaching activists about the first principles of conservatism.