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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
“The right is not split”, Nigel Farage said this week, because “the Conservative party is not on the right in any measurable way”. Having pushed tax and immigration levels to all-time highs, while promising the opposite, the Conservatives are polling behind Farage’s party, Reform UK. With Labour also at a low ebb, people on all sides of politics are wondering if this is a moment of realignment.
The new right is looking across the Atlantic and seeing the vanquishing of the leftwing version of McCarthyism, which had turned liberals into witch-hunters. But it needs to draw a second lesson, too: about the dangers of triumphalism and over-reach, and what happens if you jettison the conservative principles of gradualism, healthy institutions and the rule of law.
Farage made his observation about Conservatism during one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever seen, at a conference of conservative thinkers staged by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. I spent part of this week there with 4,000 other people, including many jet-lagged Americans, New Zealanders and Canadians, all searching for something better than the narcissism and declinism they feel is gripping the west.
Online videos of the speeches don’t reflect how broad a group this was. I met Christians campaigning against pornography; social entrepreneurs helping the homeless; students promoting free speech; business people looking for causes to get involved with, and young people disturbed by materialism and social media. There were some cheers for the Maga movement, but not many. I met no one who wanted to sell out Ukraine.
The two conference hosts seemed to embody a choice facing the European right. The British Conservative peer Philippa Stroud, who has spent her career fighting poverty, spoke about humility, family and God. Her co-host Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, observes no higher power than himself. He rambled on at length about what he called “the environmentalist climate scam”, which he claimed was “genocidal”. The other people in my row looked bemused. Even Farage was surprised. That didn’t stop him, though, floating an old theory about sunspots and volcanic activity which was debunked by the International Panel on Climate Change years ago.
It’s one thing to point out that high electricity prices are crippling British industry, and to ask whether we want to become more reliant on China to meet net zero targets. It’s quite another to remark that it used to be hotter under the Romans, or to claim that changing weather has nothing to do with us, and that we don’t have a duty to the next generation to do something about it. Optimism won’t come through climate denial, nor by accusing environmentalists of wanting to kill other human beings.
Nor will it come from hubris. When Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch advances her critique of the bureaucratic state, and says the problem is not liberal values but weakness, she is on to something. But when she claims that only the Tories can save western civilisation, as she did this week, she sounds absurd.
Why do so many people become monsters, once the political tide starts to move their way? I understand the right’s desire, on both sides of the Atlantic, to hit back at a left that has cancelled the writers and thinkers, while accusing anyone who objects as inventing a culture war. In both the US and UK last year, majorities of people told surveys they were sometimes afraid to speak their minds. Parts of the left have presented common sense positions — that Shakespeare shouldn’t carry trigger warnings, that immigration levels are straining public tolerance, or that critical race theory is corrosive — as extreme. But self-righteousness is unappealing wherever it comes from.
Fifteen years ago I started to write the occasional piece about the impact that globalisation and mass immigration were having on livelihoods, and culture, in parts of England. I went to dinner parties in London with professional people who had never been to those places, or even heard of them. I later worked with colleagues who exposed the Rotherham grooming scandal — in the very “legacy media” that the hard right loves to hate. I watched council leaders and police chiefs who had failed the victims cling on to their jobs while we, the journalists, were accused of racism.
Our politics is now being rocked by the voters who were ignored by a university-educated political class. They can’t be parodied as just bitter old white men. Since coming second to Labour in 89 seats at the election, Reform is gaining ground among women and more moderate voters, according to More in Common. This is driving Labour into a change of tone, and perhaps of policy.
Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney worries that Labour has drifted too far from its working-class roots. He is interested in the “Blue Labour” ideas of Maurice Glasman, the Labour peer who speaks for “the people who didn’t earn a living on email during Covid”.
It’s hard to imagine Glasman and Farage, the two Brits, knocking around together at Trump’s inauguration. But there is one thing they agree on: Britain needs a robust policy on illegal and legal immigration that lets us know who’s here and lets us control our borders. That is, I suspect, the way to take the heat out of so much of our politics. Let’s have a debate about the trade-offs and the practicalities of that. But let’s not learn the wrong lessons from across the pond.
