Kemi Badenoch has only been Tory leader for about 10 minutes, but insiders are briefing against her already. The confected kerfuffle about her private Jag risking national security stinks of frenemies on the move and is only the latest in a drip-drip of undermining allegations. Meanwhile even her supporters complain of her agonising slowness in coming up with anything resembling a policy.
But what’s the alternative? Robert Jenrick, who was runner-up to Badenoch in last year’s Tory leadership election, is busy on social media, sometimes even — gasp — with policy ideas. Recently he added his voice to those urging Badenoch to get a move on with developing her own. The suspicion lingers, though, that he’d actually rather she got a move on out of the LOTO role altogether, so he can have a bash.
Jenrick could hardly be worse than Badenoch. Under her lacklustre leadership, the Tories have slid to a humiliating fourth place, behind Labour, Reform, and the Lib Dems, leading anonymous knife-sharpeners to float the most preposterous idea of all: bringing back Boris Johnson.
But this absurdity is surely emblematic of the Conservative Party’s, well, conservatism, in the small-c sense of preferring to stick to known quantities. The same goes for Badenoch. It’s just that the worldview she represents has purchase only with an obviously rapidly shrinking subset of the British electorate. And the fact that a high proportion of this subset happens to be Tory members able to vote in leadership contests is, under the circumstances, unfortunate for the party’s long-term viability.
So are the Tories doomed? It’s worse than that. The danger is that it’s not just our oldest political party which is stumbling toward irrelevance, but the entire system of government within which it formed and flourished.
The Tory Party coalesced during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, shortly after the Civil War and Restoration, and while England was still an absolute monarchy. Originally the party of the landed interest, in opposition to the mercantilist Whigs, in the 19th century came to embrace mercantilism themselves after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Later still, these Tories found a new opponent: Labour, the party of the industrial working class.
A century on, Britain is no longer an empire, and is largely de-industrialised. Most elites are not so much landed as post-geographic, enjoying rarefied existences as ultra-mobile transnational tax-exiles. The Blair era saw Labour, too, devoured by Whiggery. And now the postwar welfare system — premised on an ever-rising working-age population and perpetual economic growth — is staring down the barrel of demographic collapse, as its dwindling working-age tax base grows ever more overburdened and resentful.
And regardless of which party forms a government, we find the same policy is both keeping the fiscal show on the road, and greasing the national slide toward crisis: indeed, according to a recent report from David Betz, Professor of War Studies at King’s College, perhaps even civil conflict. This policy is the core of Reform’s challenge to Badenoch, and to the policy of every government of the past quarter-century: the Gordian knot the Tories spent 13 years pretending to pick at, before giving up and just making it bigger. That is, replenishing Britain’s declining workforce through large-scale inward migration.
The problem is an existential one for our settlement. Britain is a democracy; the voting public likes the welfare state, and doesn’t like immigration; but people aren’t having enough kids to keep the population stable, let alone growing. This has resulted in a wicked problem to which there’s no obvious solution that would both be effective and sufficiently popular to win a democratic majority. You can’t rebalance the books without welfare cuts so brutal you will immiserate millions, most of them voters, or tax rises that kill prosperity and enrage the better-off. And you can’t grow the workforce in the short term without importing workers; but while Britain is by any sane measure, one of the least racist places in the world, mass immigration is now so unpopular with those already here that even Keir Starmer is trying to sound like he wants to reduce it.
But no one expects him to deliver, any more than Boris did. For despite the electorate asking for lower immigration for literally decades, every government that gets voted in having pledged to deliver this has promptly seen the Gordian knot and sheepishly reverse-ferreted. After a quarter of a century of “talking Right and governing Left” on this issue, both main parties have forfeited the public trust.
As politicians flail fruitlessly around the “moderate” Overton window in search of a solution, a mood of angry despair has taken hold of the country. Everything is interpreted as yet another emblem of the same paralysis. Signs of social fraying are everywhere you look. Birmingham’s bin strike has now been ongoing for 11 weeks and counting. Petty crime has risen everywhere, especially in urban public spaces, including robbery and sexual harassment. Just 3% of Britain’s roads received any kind of maintenance last year. And this has all happened as the cost of living has continued to climb, and the mood to sour.
How far you believe any of the issues above is directly caused by immigration will depend on your political priors. Bin collection and road maintenance may seem a reach, but trust me: you can find disaffected Brits making the link — in the case of potholes, Farage himself. Others, meanwhile, grumble about foreigners accessing — implicitly, undeservedly — the British welfare state, especially desirable London social housing. The discourse makes little distinction between legal and illegal migration: Channel migrants have become a visually potent symbol for this mood of defensive scarcity, and corresponding anger at the seeming inability of governments to respond to rising scarcity by prioritising their own citizens.
Notwithstanding the pleas of centre-right “moderates”, Reform’s insurgent rise demonstrates the appeal of this harder-edged scarcity Right. Beyond the Tory party base, it’s already largely displaced the civic-nationalist Cameroon worldview. As the IPPR recently warned, it also threatens the Left. The shift is structural: and wherever you stand on these issues, their widening salience reflects the way immigration has become an explosive proxy for more general dissatisfaction with the current settlement.
So what to do? The problem is especially acute for the Tories, because their only remaining charismatic figure — Boris — is irreparably tainted by failure to untie the central Gordian knot: a betrayal so egregious it bears his name, the so-called “Boriswave”. Meanwhile, Badenoch embodies the very civic-nationalist Right now rapidly losing ground to the insurgent scarcity kind.
All of this was supposed to have been resolved in the great Borisquake of 2019, in which he promised to “get Brexit done” — along with, or so voters hoped, a corresponding drop in low-skilled immigration. He made (empty, as it turned out) gestures at “levelling up” poorer bits of the UK, moving left on economics and right on culture, and breaking us out of the stale double-liberal consensus everyone agreed was driving polarisation across the country. And yet, six whole years on, the same stale double-liberal consensus has the country in a tighter stranglehold than ever. It’s just that now, thanks to Boris’ lockdowns and subsequent attempt to jump-start the economy with mass immigration, this comes with a burgeoning and unpleasant side order of ethnopolitics; and — because the jump-start didn’t work — also looming fiscal crisis. And the only way to keep a lid on this volatile mix seems, increasingly, to be repressive controls on speech.
“The stale double liberal consensus now comes with a burgeoning and unpleasant side order of ethnopolitics.”
This, then, has been the medium-term consequence of so-called “moderate” governance. So no one should be surprised to see Reform sailing urbanely into the socially conservative, economically Left political territory that sat there, empty and unloved, the whole time Boris was supposed to be claiming it for the Tories. Promising to protect social welfare while radically slowing immigration is consistently popular. And yet neither the Tories nor Labour have claimed this open political goal for their teams.
Why? Competing economic interests is one factor: today’s post-geographic elites usually stand to gain more, economically speaking, from keeping the borders open. And as the “collapsologist” Peter Turchin has argued, where the wishes of elites and the masses diverge, even in a democracy, it’s always the elites who get their way.
But it’s also possible that no one has seriously tried this policy offer because there’s no way to deliver it with a shrinking native tax base. Farage is now promising the impossible: generous welfare and zero immigration. Trying to square this circle with a declining native population has scuppered both the other parties, and it’s not clear how Farage will succeed where all before him failed. At least, not short of radically altering the frame itself. For, as Turchin also notes, when elites turn away from the interests of the polity as a whole, in favour of simply diverting resources toward themselves, historically the resulting is eventually serious political unrest: the unhappy prognosis of Professor Betz.
Turchin suggests the best-case scenario under such conditions is takeover by a counter-elite more willing to accommodate the broader public interest. He notes the remarkable stability of Britain, relative to other European polities, in meeting and resolving moments of crisis such as the Corn Law riots, with an adjusted settlement. So who knows: perhaps Reform, or some version of the Tory Party that has had a complete personnel, personality, and history transplant, might be that counter-elite. Stranger things have happened.
But absent radical change, the Gordian knot would still be uncut. And if Boris taught us anything, it’s that simply saying “Why not both?” won’t do. Cakeism has been comprehensively discredited. Johnson, is in fact, not just the wrong answer but the answer to the wrong question. What’s needed isn’t just a more appealing leader to deliver the existing formula, but a different formula. Or, perhaps, an even more profound change. It’s not impossible that eventually some sufficiently radical counter-elite will conclude that giving the British public what they need will require sharply limiting the same public’s ability to have a say in what they want.
The last time we were shaken by political questions as profound as today’s, the turmoil produced civil war, then Tories and Whigs, and, eventually, parliamentary democracy to mediate between public desires and political power. Now, a long way down that arc, that public wants two irreconcilable things — and keeps destroying parties that fail to deliver one or the other.
The only way this can change is either via a shift in public sentiment radical enough to permit the necessary trade-offs — or, alternatively, the unhappy outcome predicted by Professor Betz. That is: political chaos on the level of the era just before the Tory Party formed, out of which some new settlement is able to emerge. Perhaps, even, so transformative a change as that earlier one from absolute to constitutional monarchy. So-called “moderates” might reflect that, however slender Reform’s chance of success, in this context Farage is the conservative choice.
