Kemi Badenoch’s 96-page document The Right Way has been heralded by the Conservatives as the modern-day equivalent of Margaret Thatcher’s The Right Approach – the document that half a century ago laid the foundations of the Thatcher revolution. Instead of the usual ‘shopping list of policies’, it establishes – according to the Conservative’s website – ‘the intellectual foundations’ for the radical policies needed to ‘fix a country whose foundations require repair’.
Has Badenoch pulled it off? The plaudits are impressive. Andrew Roberts (‘clearly the product of profound thought’), Niall Ferguson (‘anyone who yearns to see broken Britain fixed will read it and cheer’), Robert Tombs (‘Kemi Badenoch’s first substantial analysis of what is wrong and what needs to be done, is impressive’), and that scourge of liberalism, John Gray (‘fresh thinking about the daunting problems that face us all’), have all praised the document. Even the Critic’s Marcus Walker, Rector of Great St Bartholomew’s and doughty defender of the Church’s traditions, has lent his unqualified support: ‘The arguments made and the proposals suggested come straight out of my – Burkean, Scrutonian – Toryism’. Yet ‘Tory’, ‘Burkean’ and ‘Scrutonian’ are odd words to describe a document that sees the answers to Britain’s malaise as lying in the restoration of economic laissez-faire and liberal individualism.
There is, of course, a liberal element to conservatism: a belief in the value of enterprise, private property, individual liberties, including free speech, and above all, equality of individuals before the law. Badenoch is commendably strong on ditching the corrosive politics of group identity and victimhood – and restoring in its place the principle that ‘every citizen should stand before public institutions as an individual’. And, of course, it is right that enterprise and wealth creation be encouraged, not penalised.
But at the heart of conservatism lies not the free market, not even our individual liberties, but the imperative to conserve a social, moral and cultural inheritance encompassing institutions, laws, settled communities, traditional forms of life, customs and manners – what Roger Scruton termed ‘a social ecology’. For without the social frame of this inheritance, there can be no markets and no individual liberties. Change is inevitable, of course, but as Disraeli argued, it should be change ‘carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people’, not some ‘abstract principles’.
That is why conservatives traditionally believe in a strong state, curbing the market where necessary to defend local traditions and national interests, interventionist when needed, above all defending our social and cultural inheritance. That is why Scruton was not a free-market liberal, warning instead that ‘global markets destroy communities’ and that the liberal, or neoliberal, belief in unadulterated free trade is founded on nothing but ‘free market dogma’ – a dogma that has rendered us defenceless against mercantilist China, which mercilessly deploys trade as a tool of imperial expansion. That is why conservatives – to the horror of liberals – have traditionally been protectionists. But it is a far cry from the principles of Thatcherite neo-liberalism that Badenoch offers in this document: namely, that the state should intervene in the market only in exceptional circumstances, and then only temporarily, that the City should be deregulated, and that international trade should be carried on according to the tenets of Richard Cobden’s mid-nineteenth-century Manchester School liberalism.
Nevertheless, Badenoch correctly identifies the central, foundational importance of our shared social and cultural inheritance in a series of admirably bold statements, whose appeal to traditional conservative sensibilities has evidently impressed the likes of Robert Tombs and Marcus Walker:
This nation should be a place where people, no matter their background or ethnicity, can belong to the same shared culture and values.
Our country is more than an economy and a government. It is also a people, a place and an inheritance that depends on an understanding of who belongs, what we owe one another, what our norms and customs are and what we believe is worth defending to pass on to the next generation.
Immigrants, Badenoch argues, must therefore integrate, assimilate, and ‘embrace our culture’. Badenoch emphasises the vital importance of re-building a ‘high-trust society’, where reciprocity is the norm and strangers are regarded as fellow citizens. And then there is this striking assertion of political belief:
This is where we draw a distinction between conservatism and what many believe a liberal society is: a hyper-individualistic view of society as millions of individuals doing whatever they like until somebody complains. Our way of life also contains shared norms, enforced fairly and passed on deliberately. Conservatism means having the nerve to defend these norms.
Who could doubt that, here at least, Kemi is the true conservative? Yet when it comes to identifying the shared values and norms that underpin a high-trust society, or to defining the shared culture into which immigrants would be expected to assimilate, or to explaining how this might be achieved, we are left none the wiser. Which is odd since Badenoch insists it is vital that we ‘say plainly what newcomers are expected to join’.
What is proposed is an end to identity politics (for example, by repealing the Public Sector Equality Duty) and the institution in its place of the equality of individuals before the law – a restoration of what we had before the advent of identity politics. This is most welcome, as are the tough measures proposed to control immigration, and the defence of freedom of speech. But what Badenoch is offering boils down to precisely the hyper-liberal individualism that she contrasts with conservatism. There are no proposals to support families, communities are not even mentioned, and British culture is reduced to little more than a set of legalistic ‘British values’ to which anybody can sign up.
When Badenoch complains that immigrants are creating ‘miniature versions of the countries they came from’ instead of integrating, and that this is ‘a recipe for disaster’, it seems that she is questioning the ideology of multiculturalism. But later on, she qualifies her position with the statement, ‘Of course, difference and diversity can flourish within our shared British identity, but they cannot become a substitute for it’. Well, people’s private lives, lifestyles and religious beliefs are their own concern – and always have been. We are all liberals in that respect. Perhaps that is all Badenoch means. But the slogans ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’ are the ones usually associated wielded by those who advocate multiculturalism. And if difference and diversity can flourish ‘within our shared British identity’, which we presume signifies our shared British culture, we are led to wonder what is the residuum that will bind us together as a nation. Are we to be a multicultural society – or are we to share a common culture? It is unclear.
The problem is that Badenoch, like other liberal-conservatives, evades the existential issue because it is judged too controversial, too ‘divisive’, perhaps too dangerous. The issue in question can be condensed into a simple question: ‘What is a Nation?’ The French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan famously answered it in a lecture in Paris in 1882. The nation, he argued, was ‘a soul, a spiritual principle … the possession of a rich legacy of memories … this sense of past glories, shared sacrifices and regrets that unites a people’.
Conservatives in the Tory tradition of Burke and Scruton instinctively understand this. For them, our traditions of democracy and liberty, our sense of social trust, are not born out of abstract declarations of rights; they are rooted in our sense of being a nation, of belonging to a people, with a shared history and culture. It is what Scruton terms the ‘pre-political we’ that underpins liberal democracy. But for this shared sense of national identity and culture ever to develop necessitates a settled population, which usually takes the form of, or evolves into, an ethnic majority with strong ties of kinship – a sort of extended family. There is no requirement here for ‘ethnic purity’; merely the recognition that for a shared history and shared memories to accumulate, there must be continuity. And all this is radically undermined by the mass immigration of peoples whose culture and values radically differ from those of the host population. In these circumstances, assimilation becomes impossible, and the result is more akin to invasion – or ‘population replacement’.
Now, when Badenoch argues in her document that the politics of identity must be opposed ‘from the right as well as the left’, that identity politics ‘in support of majority groups’ is a ‘mirror image’ of minority identity politics, she is in effect denying the validity of the ancestral culture and identity of the host population – the English people. Yet if there is to be a shared culture, shared norms and values, in any substantive, meaningful sense, it is this host culture, this national culture, into which newcomers must assimilate, just as they have done in the past. And in England, that host culture is English culture and civilization, the culture of the indigenous population.
Just how our parallel communities are to be integrated into ‘British culture’ is a question that mainstream politicians, including Badenoch, dare not address. Indeed, they are probably wise to evade it, and to leave ‘British culture’ undefined, because the unmentionable problem, the elephant in the room, is not Islamic extremism; it is that the values of mainstream Islam are not compatible with the values of a secular Western society. Assimilation in any meaningful sense into a shared secular Western culture is simply not possible for millions of British Muslims – which is why they choose to live in parallel communities under de facto Sharia Law.
However, by evading the fundamental issues of culture, identity, and nationhood – along with the challenge of Islam – mainstream politicians and commentators ensure that our nation will continue to fracture and self-segregate. Moreover, the attempt to deny the existence of the English people, to deny the validity of their historic culture and identity, their history and shared memories – as the Parekh Report did in 2000, when it officially branded our country a multicultural ‘community of communities’ from which the English seemed to have been excluded, and as Badenoch seems to be doing by speaking of ‘majority identity politics’ – will inevitably stoke anger and resentment among the English, with inevitable consequences for civil peace.
Badenoch could have drawn on the Danish model, which is the obvious example of a nation insisting that immigrants integrate into the host culture and instituting practical policy measures to achieve this. In Denmark, these measures have included education in Danish society, history and culture, individual contracts to ensure integration and active citizenship, the specific targeting of Muslim immigrants as those likely to find it hardest to integrate, and controversial measures to dismantle ‘ghettos’ and disperse their populations. But she has chosen not to do this, opting instead for the safety of well-tuned platitudes and catchlines.
Perhaps it is just too dangerous to bite the bullet. In France, where politicians are more outspoken, and the battlelines are more clearly drawn, there is real fear that the country will descend into anarchy and civil war. On the one side are conservatives who defend French culture and civilization, Christian France, La France Éternelle – and on the other side the Islamic-left, who want to build a new France on the ashes of the old. In the middle are elite centrist liberals, epitomised by Macron, whose politics of consensus, appeasement and paralysis are increasingly discredited.
Our inner cities and urban areas – our banlieues – are calm for now, but only because we have adopted multiculturalism as a secular religion and bent over backwards not to offend the sensibilities of our Muslim communities. Meanwhile, the indigenous population, the English, notably the rebellious working class, have been kept in check through censorship and repression. As Michael Reiners wrote in our summer edition (‘Why Britain Must Adopt the Freedom of Speech Bill (2026)’), we now have ‘a sweeping suppression of speech suppression which now punishes political dissent more harshly than violent physical disorder’. But if the conservatives, possibly in alliance with Reform, were to win power and attempt to reinstate ‘no ifs, no buts’ freedom of speech, including the right to satirise and cause offence, there is every chance that our multicultural society will be blown apart. One need only consider the consequences for civil peace of someone publishing a satirical cartoon, or novel, or film relating to the Prophet Muhammed in Britain today.
France may ignite first – but at least there are those on the French political right who know what they are fighting for. It is time that British conservatives recognise what they are fighting to conserve, and wake up to the magnitude of the challenge.
