Karl Williams: The New Right, then and now

Karl Williams is Research Director at the Centre for Policy Studies.

Politics on the right is in a state of high excitement. Rumours are swirling, MPs are defecting and new pressure groups are popping up left, right and especially centre.

But far more interesting than the political foment is the intellectual ferment, which is of an intensity not seen since the 1970s.

A by-product of this ferment is a new genre of introspective writing about the “New Right”: accounts of how centre-right political thought is developing in the wake of the 2024 general election that both describe and attempt to direct that development. The right might be split between two main political parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK, but as Gavin Rice notes, there is broad intellectual coherence and great energy in the wider centre-right nonetheless. Even left-wing commentators have been drawn to remark upon the dynamism of the New Right, some offering genuine insight and balance.

In contrast, initiatives that hark back to the centrist conservatism of the 2010s feel flat.

One of the contributions of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) to the renewal of the centre-right is our fellowship programme, now in its second year. Our aim is to bring talented, mid-career voices from business and industry into the heart of Westminster. And in our own introspective turn, the topic of the most recent monthly roundtable/dinner for the fellowship was ‘The New Right, Then and Now’.

The pre-dinner reading list ranged across conventional territory, from academic monographs on the ‘think tank archipelago’ of the 1970s to essays by some of the sharpest contemporary thinkers on the right such as Rachel Wolf, Neil O’Brien and Nick Timothy. But it also took in more niche material from the wilder shores of the online right, including from J’accuse and rival publication Pimlico Journal, X posts by top anthropologists and data autists; and satirical or celebratory videos made by online anonymous accounts (anons) with too much spare time on their hands.

One of the points of having such a diverse range of sources was to convey that the New Right of today is a plurality, just as it was in the 1970s. The most incisive book on Thatcherism ever written, Andrew Gamble’s The Free Economy and the Strong State, makes this point while dividing the New Right of that period into two broad tendencies, a liberal one (associated with the free market think tanks) and a conservative one (for example Roger Scruton and the Salisbury Review), with the former winning out in government.

Similarly, in Maurice Cowling’s lengthy preface to the 1991 edition of his Mill and Liberalism – essentially an insider’s prosopography of the 1970s New Right – he divides the intellectual innovators of the time into five strands or ‘faces’: parliamentarians like CPS-founder Sir Keith Joseph; various booze-soaked denizens of old Fleet Street; culture warriors (to use an anachronism) of the ‘Black Papers’ like Kingsley Amis; anti-Keynesianism economists and businessmen; and dons such as John Casey and Cowling himself.

A far from exhaustive list of the interconnected and overlapping groupings who might be considered to be part of (or at least adjacent to) the New Right in Westminster today would include: abundance enthusiasts (YIMBYs, progress studies, Looking for Growth, Anglofuturists); academics associated with Briefings for Brexit and/or the James Orr network; the aforementioned enfants terribles of the online right; assorted younger journalists and policy wonks whose writings have featured on ConservativeHome and made it into the pages of the Critic, the Spectator and the Telegraph in the last couple of years; clusters of thrusting young advisors around figures like Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick and Katie Lam; and the congregation of the church of St Bartholomew the Great.

The outward diversity masks many areas of agreement, however. Just as the New Right of the 1970s was reacting against the failure of the post-war consensus, so too is the New Right of today reacting against a failed consensus. Internationally, they might date the start of this consensus to 1991 and the ‘end of history’. Domestically, they might date the start of this consensus to 1997 when New Labour ushered in an age of state expansion, human rights law and mass migration which continued through the ‘14 wasted years’ in which – to quote Kemi Badenoch – the Conservatives ‘talked right but governed left’. The result, according to the New Right, is a country in economic and social decline.

The biggest casualty of the ‘Britpopper consensus’ is the idea that immigration is an unalloyed economic good or desirable on anything like the scale of the last 30 years (indeed, some Conservatives seem bent on outflanking Farage on this point). There has been a turn against Theresa May’s Net Zero and Boris Johnson’s ‘green industrial revolution’ in favour of energy security and abundance. Fixing the state is a priority – not just reform of public services, but of Whitehall, the quango state and the para-political charity-industrial complex. Alongside this, Walter Bagehot is out and there is an almost Leninist preoccupation with the realities of power in modern Britain. On the world stage, a more hard-nosed realism is elbowing out the delusions of ‘Global Britain’. And there is a renewed focus on the nation-state as the locus of political legitimacy and action, and a rejection of many international institutions.

There is another commonality too: age. The reading for the recent Thatcher Fellowship roundtable included texts on how intellectual change happens. Alongside F.A. Hayek’s classic ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’ essay, there were chapters from Randall Collins’ magisterial The Sociology of Philosophies. Anyone who works in a think tank will recognise his characterisation of intellectual conflict as ‘the ongoing struggle among chains of persons, charged with emotional energy and cultural capital, to fill a small number of centres of attention’. Some of the most important struggles are across generations.

While the New Right is influenced by slightly older writers like Ed West and Aris Rousinnos, and political pioneers like Nigel Farage are integral, most New Right thinkers are in their 20s and early 30s – hence the popularity of the ‘Nick, 30’ meme – and are reacting against the older, comfortable, establishment right. There is a deep scepticism towards Nelsonian optimism but at the same time little patience for pessimism or nihilism in the mould of Peter Hitchens. There is an insider-outside dynamic too, although more than one Gen-Z ex-anon can now be found in establishment right-wing organisations, each worming their way inwards like the shard of Morgul-blade in the shoulder of fat and complacent hobbit. The long counter-march is well and truly underway.

Yet there are crucial dividing lines within New Right thinking too. These will be the places to watch in the coming years. As Collins writes, ‘it is conflicts – the lines of difference between positions – which are implicitly the most prized possessions of intellectuals’. The most intense intellectual innovation happens around fissures where thinkers are in conscious tension with one another.

One of the greatest fissures in the New Right is on political economy, on free markets versus industrial strategy, between what Daniel Hannan has termed the FreeCons and NatCons. Leftists like Zack Polanski seem to see the British economy as a neoliberal hellscape of unfettered free markets, rampant exploitation and vertiginous inequality. But New Right free marketeers point out that the highest tax burden since the war and intensive government intervention through a sprawling regulatory state, industrial subsidies and price controls – the product of 14 years of Conservative government – is hardly ultra-Thatcherism on steroids.

New Right industrial strategists accept much of the free marketeer argument, notably on housing and net zero. But they also argue that the state has not been active enough in shaping the British economy according to national security considerations, for example on industrial capacity and the balance of trade; and especially in the face of Chinese, European and now American mercantilism.

Another important cleavage is around natalism and family policy. Few on the New Right would go as far as Hungarian-style birthmaxxing, but there are large differences on how to respond to the fertility decline and the fiscal challenges of an ageing population, differences that partially map onto the free market versus industrial strategy divide, but which are also partly refracted through religious commitments.

A further area of disagreement is on how to understand the unfolding historical moment in which today’s New Right finds itself. Some people focus on electoral realignment, drawing on frameworks proposed by political scientists like New Right prophet Matt Goodwin or David Goodhart. Others focus on the collapse in elite competence, and are drawn to initiatives like Civic Future, the Thatcher Fellowship and the Prosperity Institute’s Edington Fellowship. Others, such as the author of Conservatism in Crisis, combine the two approaches though analysis at a more meta-level.

These divisions on the right could be seen negatively, as a morbid symptom of the decadence and decay of an old order. That is certainly the tendency in left-wing reportage of the New Right in general. But this process could also be seen in a more positive (and almost Nietzschean) light, as creating the soil in which new and hybrid ideas can take root and grow.

What remains to be seen is the shape of the political vessel in which, sooner or later, the political thought of the New Right will be transplanted into government.