The Right’s new parties won’t save Britain Luxury beliefs will perish in a poor, angry world

So, when Rishi Sunak professed to feel, as he did this week, “a profound sense of urgency, because more will change in the next five years than in the last 30”, and declared “the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet the most transformational our country has ever known”, he was entirely correct. Where he is mistaken is in his belief that “the United Kingdom is uniquely placed to benefit”. Instead, Britain is almost uniquely exposed to the dangers of this harsh new world, through the compounded errors of those who ruled us during our brief holiday from history — and whose worldview, barely altered, rules us still. The world order crumbling around us is, unfortunately for us, the one around which our entire economic and political systems still revolve.

Britain is on a war footing, we are now told, as Sunak announces a return to the 2.5% of GDP defence expenditure previously announced by Boris Johnson just two years earlier: our fleet may be shrinking, our Army cannot withstand two weeks of war, and we still sell off what remains of our industrial capacity, but we are preparing for conflict nevertheless. In all the many examples of the gulf between Westminster’s bombastic rhetoric and concrete action, there is little that could instil a greater sense of dread. No one sane would wish to be led into war by the current Conservative Party, but then Starmer’s front bench hardly inspires confidence either: it is hard, observing the international situation and then glancing towards Westminster, to avoid feeling like a passenger sitting in the backseat of a vehicle revving up at the edge of a cliff.

Yet there is at least one modest victory we can console ourselves with before we crash the barriers: the destruction of the Conservative Party, at whose door half the blame for our current state of crisis can be laid. The possible extinction of the world’s oldest political party would, in less tumultuous times, seem a historic event: right now, it is the barest minimum we can hope for. Though a Starmer government may well be more competent than the revolving carousel of dysfunction the Conservatives have given us over the past decade, this is a very low hurdle to clear. Labour’s timid, vacillatory leader gives little sense of understanding the scale of effort necessary for national survival, and that the grand rebalancing of British strategy, announced by David Lammy, offers only a continuation of a worldview already splintering into wreckage, gives us little confidence in a dawning era of national renewal.

The entire system requires change — as Dominic Cummings says, “every aspect is rotten and this exerts a collective paralysis” — yet it is manifestly incapable of reforming itself. Indeed, it is a sombre augury of Westminster’s future stability that both Labour’s path to power and the corresponding Tory decline rely not on a sudden wave of enthusiasm for Starmer, but instead on disengagement from the political process entirely. Cynical and disenchanted, the voters are “quiet quitting” from British democracy, even as the Westminster system’s cascading errors make them poorer and angrier.

It is to arrest this volatile course of events that two new contenders are seemingly emerging to wrest control of the British Right from the Conservative Party’s skeletal grasp — Reform UK, already struggling for a populist party, can for now be written off. Both Cummings, whose “New Party” is apparently focus-grouping itself into being, and the academic analyst of populism-turned-aspiring-populist Matthew Goodwin, teasing the launch of a new Right-wing movement if enough people subscribe to his Substack, are seemingly readying themselves to “plough the old Tory Party into the earth with salt”, as Cummings puts it, and birth new political movements. Though both have, to differing degrees, won the ire of the defenders of the current order, jealous to maintain control of the ship of state as they steer it towards the coming iceberg, their emerging platforms diverge in tactics even as they agree on the fundamentals.

First, the parallels: correctly, both see the crisis of British politics as systemic. For Goodwin: “We have two big parties… that were born to provide answers to questions from a different era and which are ill-equipped to address the questions that face us today.” For Cummings: “The old parties have failed for decades, they’re programmed to fail, they’ll carry on failing.” Both see Labour’s turn in office as a brief, doomed interlude. In Goodwin’s analysis, Labour “will likely become very unpopular, very quickly”, as “while the Tories are simply too strongly rooted in an old politics, in an old world, to be able to truly adapt to the new world that’s emerging around us today… So too are Labour.” For Cummings, equally, as outlined in an excellent recent interview: “Labour’s just a carbon copy of the Tories… the MP ranks are filled with obviously useless people who can’t do anything. And the party itself is dead. It’s intellectually dead, organisationally dead, same as the Tories.” The result, he predicts, is that “everything will keep failing and everyone will be even more miserable by 2026 than they are now”.

The opportunity, or in Cummings’s phrasing, “market share” for an insurgent reformist party therefore looks excellent: yet the British political system, with its Early Modern parliament clustered round by whispering courtiers, is almost expressly designed to prevent such a possibility (indeed, to imagine a different, functional political system may now even face legal sanction). Where the two differ is in their approach to this problem. For Goodwin, the new movement — it need not necessarily be a party — may find its greatest chance of success outside Parliament. After all, Brexit was, he notes, “perhaps the single most important thing achieved over the last decade and it had nothing to do with winning seats in Westminster… Indirect political pressure, from outside the system, can often be as consequential as direct pressure from the inside.” For Goodwin, the guiding principle behind the new movement, its overriding goal, is “popular sovereignty” as “the only way to hand power back to the people, where it belongs”, though the means to achieve this outcome is so far left unsketched.

Where Goodwin is then a genuine populist, Cummings, by contrast, leans towards elitism: the effective models he cites as examples are California tech CEOs, “the subset of elites who are a) most competent at building but also b) almost entirely disconnected from mainstream politics”, particularly Marc Andreessen and other Silicon Valley would-be philosopher kings. The Cummings solution is built around “the elite Insider network”, who “are overwhelmingly in hedge funds, banks, VCs, PE, tech startups, research labs, academia and so on — keeping their heads down and building walled gardens between themselves and political madness”. Yet even here, the Cummings model is more democratic, in practice, than our current sclerotic system.

As he told The i:

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when Britain was the most powerful country in the world its domestic politics was extremely decentralised and now that so much is broken we are more centralised than we have ever been in terms of where there’s power and money. If you’d said to people in 1800 or 1900 that all sorts of decisions about what happens in Bolton or what happens in Birmingham and ‘Do we build this or not build that?’ will be decided by some 27-year-old PPE idiot in the Treasury they’d have just thought this is complete madness.”

Yet ironically, the two radical opponents of Westminster dysfunction depend, to a certain extent, on the ancién regime’s survival: but the greatest shock we face, with Starmer likely at the helm, is yet to come.

Like other European nations, only perhaps more so, Britain has committed itself to the war in Ukraine and the corresponding confrontation with Russia. Unfortunately, due to a combination of Western deindustrialisation and political dysfunction, and Ukrainian errors of military planning and organisation, that war is not going well. For all that Cummings’s dismissal of the Ukrainian state is too vicious for his analysis to gain much currency in Westminster, his assessment that Britain has found itself “getting into a war of attrition with Russia who we pushed into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power” is unfortunately correct. With even Ukraine’s leading commanders cautioning that military victory is unattainable and the best outcome is a negotiated peace settlement — a sentiment until recently taboo in Britain — the mismatch between Britain’s stated strategy in Ukraine and the war’s likely outcome is increasingly stark. A cynic would suggest that Europe’s actual strategy in Ukraine is to buy time, at Ukraine’s expense, for our continent’s own rearmament, while Biden’s aim is merely to palm final defeat onto Trump.

Yet with the war in Ukraine concluded, will an angry, more powerful Russia attack Nato itself? The answer is: we do not know, but fear the worst. Would a Trump administration go to war with Russia to defend the territorial integrity of Lithuania or Estonia? Again, we do not know, but the anxiety of Nato officials on this question is not reassuring. The United States, on whose military power our political settlement ultimately depends, has found itself on the back foot in Ukraine, humiliated in the Red Sea, and rushing to prepare itself for a war in the Pacific in which geography and industrial capacity weigh steeply against it. Living standards in Britain have been battered by the war in Ukraine, but the economic shock of America’s looming confrontation with China will vastly outweigh anything we have ever known. When, as seems likely, America withdraws its attention from Europe’s security to wrestle with its existential rival, our necessary expenditure on rearmament and perhaps mobilisation — even if we avoid open war with Russia — will vastly reduce available spending on the social welfare we have come to expect.

Indeed, the emphasis by both Cummings and Goodwin on “woke elites” and culture wars already seems outdated: it is hard to see such luxury beliefs long surviving a world where British voters, already poor and angry, will be poorer and angrier than we have known in many decades. Yet of the two aspiring reformers, it is Cummings who seems most alive to the possibilities as well as threats posed by the great storm forming on the horizon. As he observes, overhauling a political system is “seemingly hard, but history shows it’s doable but it happens in response to huge system changes. Historically, wars and pandemics are things that reshape states, and financial clashes. So now we’ve got all of those things.”

But even the most radical reformer would find it hard to derive much optimism from the present international situation: Britain’s political system only survived the 20th century through American military intervention, kept on life support by the unmatchable industrial base of the rising superpower. Without this deus ex machina, and in a world where China fills America’s Forties role — only this time, on our opponent’s side — it would take unreasonable optimism to imagine that either Sunak or Starmer will muddle Britain’s ramshackle state through to victory. 

We are in a situation where everything around us is rapidly changing, to our detriment, and yet our leaders act as if at the end of it, everything will somehow stay the same. Macron’s recent warning, that “a civilisation can die” in a “brutal” way in which “things can happen much more quickly than we think” seems closer to the mark. If the crisis is pregnant with political opportunity, as it proved to be for Lee Kuan Yew, it is increasingly likely to come in the wake of defeat.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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