Rewriting the Right: The case for restorationism

The best option to reorient the British right

Calling yourself a “conservative” has lost its power: you should call yourself a restorationist now.

It is hardly breaking ground, at this stage, to say that the Conservative Party is bereft of ideas. This is not a new contribution, but in the wake of Kemi Badenoch’s victory following an emphasis on the need for principles, this is a stunningly more urgent issue. It is not that Mrs. Badenoch is wrong, nor that Conservative Party members voted for her on this basis alone, but considering that one of the new co-chairmen, Nigel Huddleston MP, could only name ‘low taxes’ as a principle, there is clearly a widening intellectual gap threatening to swallow this party.

I once said that a period of opposition will be good for the Conservatives; but as time goes on, and the party slips further down the polls, I’m evidently wrong, and it’s clearly not good for the party as it stands right now. It may also not be good for the country, but then I don’t think there are many who were prepared to defend the status quo as it stood.

Years of absentee leadership have resulted in a sense of mismanaged decline, due in large part to the absence of any clear intelligence or thinking behind the doors of No. 10 in the last fourteen years, never mind the final two. The time is coming for the Right to clear its own house, intellectually speaking. There is a burning need for new ideas, yet the Party has not the self-awareness, the courage or the intellectual infrastructure to generate them.

What is even more of an obstacle is the problem that the efforts of the “intellectual right” - insofar as it exists - has been thrown behind roughly three, equally exhausted, tribes.

The tribes of the contemporary right

First in my mind, there exists the “common sense populists”, those who believe that the salvation of the Right lies in appealing to some thus far un-activated, latent wisdom amongst the “common people”. These self-declared voices of the people, who either ignore or are unaware of the irony of seeking intelligent answers by letting other people do their thinking for them, ought to remind themselves of the warnings of all great thinkers from Aristotle to Burke to Oakeshott, of the dangers of seeking legitimacy in popularity only.

The British peoples’ “common sense” has shifted on so many topics in the last few decades, appealing to this nebulous repository of intellect is like trying to catch air. Over the last 15 years, the British public’s opinion on gay marriage has shifted from indifferent to supportive; since 1960, the conventional wisdom on what it means to be “British” has ejected racial criteria; in May 2022, 81% of the British public liked Queen Elizabeth II, whilst by May 2025 only 61% of people like King Charles III – and in April 2024 only 54.3% support the institution of Monarchy.

I mention these points, not to bring attention to nor make normative judgements over their content, but to point out that, first, “common sense” is capable of (indeed, requires) change; and second, it is very often in the power of government to change that.

Attitudes towards same-sex relations over time. Source: gov.uk

As George Will reminded us in the 1980s, government has an inherent leadership element, and morals can shift in response to such leadership. When policies are implemented that run counter to the common sense of a people, if done carefully, those policies can transform the peoples’ “common sense”. This has been known since the days of Ancient Greece. Again, I personally am not making a judgement over what those policies ought to be; I am merely pointing out a governing reality.

The second group that has emerged amongst the British Right is the current one dominating the party, which is an adopted wisdom since the late 1990s that is a complete reversal of this centuries-old knowledge.

At the heart of government lies a yawning gulf of moral leadership, the dire consequence of the fusion between an ideological belief that any government action is an impediment to the freedom of a people, and a moral commitment of the New Left to refuse judgement over… anything, really. Some of the clearest expressions of this latter belief system sprawled themselves across the banners of the suixante-huitards, most notably the paradoxical “it is forbidden to forbid”.

“WORKERS. FRENCH. IMMIGRANTS. UNITED.”

In the space between these two philosophies swings the pendulum of our political class’s attitude to governance: government is only ever a necessary evil, and its only moral truth should be that there is no hierarchy of morals.

This attitude is the paralysingly failed paradigm of neoliberalism, under the umbrella of which has crept our state philosophy of multiculturalism, surrendering the security of our economy to market forces, and a refusal to police our own borders. To take a stance on any of these fulcra of the neoliberal paradigm is to presume your stance is correct; so, it is safer to take no stance and farm the thinking out to someone else.

Much of the “intellectual right” sees this attitude as the inevitable, natural, or true expression of what it means to be a conservative, especially in Britain, probably because of a mistaken understanding of the Thatcherite project, and the subsequent paradigm it introduced. And given that Mr. Huddleston MP can only name one of the foremost elements of neoliberalism – “low taxes” – I doubt there will be any serious change to this soon.

Finally, the third group or project to which intellectual efforts are directed is the “progressive (liberal) nationalists”, the “prognats” that seem increasingly popular amongst the young and disaffected radicals of the new right. I am not entirely convinced this group has yet developed a coherent philosophy, but that hardly sets them apart from the other aforementioned groups, so this is clearly not a requirement to be taken seriously.

The underlying presumption of this group seems to be nothing unique, either: Britain is in a state of almost perpetual decline, and nothing in the existing paradigm can save it. This is not objectionable, but only in the sense that it is so obvious only the willingly ignorant would object. The problem lies in the still-confused solutions this group seems to give to the problems. More than anything else, this group seems to believe in materialism all the way down; they hold to a deeply economic vision of the future that sees the salvation of Britain in “unleashing” the latent potential of the high-IQ youth that is held back by a sclerotic and overly-regulated socioeconomic condition, and nothing else.

There is no capacity for the creation of a common social world beyond the shared ambition of wealth accumulation. The oxymoronic belief in a society of hyper-atomised individuals united only by their temporary agreement in the need for more money is one that collapses under the weight of any serious external pressure.

Their vision for the rebirth of Britain, as far as I can tell, is a complete overthrow of the existing political system in favour of a highly rationalised, meritocratic yet strict hierarchy that directs the energies of society towards some kind of vision. The vision, again, seems to be nothing more than wealth accumulation.

What is ironic is that the “prognats” seem to lean more on the “nationalist” than on the “progressive” part of the name, despite the understanding of “progressive” being more material than normative, though the progress they seem to value is the kind that will destroy the nation. I am not likening them to fascists - whether they want to be or not, I am not sure - but more like Napoleonists.

Napoleon before the Sphinx in the invasion of Egypt, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1886)

Yet there is a more conceptual problem with this ideological programme: that “liberal” and “national” are mutually distinct ideas, and therefore “liberal nationalism” is a contradiction in terms.

What we mean by “liberal” is a philosophical worldview which places the sovereign individual at the heart of the political order. There are a whole host of consequences that follow from this presumption, the foremost of which is that liberalism is incapable of creating by itself a method of drawing a line between who is in and out of the political order; it is a universalist philosophy, because it assumes all humans everywhere are the same “underneath it all” (whether they are rational self-maximisers or members of their economic class) which buys into beliefs that any person can simply “become” anything else by virtue of their choosing to be so.

A person might choose to become British just as easily as they choose a pair of jeans. And of course, conversely, they may choose to cease to be British.

Yet nationalism is an appeal to a specific, defined and partly-enclosed group of people. The words “nation” (natio), “people” (populus) and “ethnic” (ethnos) all largely come from the same Latin cluster of concepts that appeal to the same idea: a continuous pre-political identity. Pre-political here is absolutely important, because the identity was prior to, and expressed through, political institutions, and not merely “represented in” them or, even worse, “created by” them. My essay on custom and the role it plays in the creation of pre-political identity explores this further.

These two reasons are why the “progressive liberal nationalist” project is doomed to failure: first, the “liberal” element is an appeal to a rationalist, universalist understanding of the individual that cannot square with the “nationalist” conception of the individual as a product of the people from whom he emerges.

Under the liberal worldview, the individual may pass in and out of a nation as easily as he walks from building to building, describing himself at one moment as British and the next as French. His membership is reduced to mechanism, in which he is little more than an “inhabitant of a space”, and not a part of a place. The nationalist, however, recognises that a person (in his political identity) is not born into nature and capable of such free associative choice, but rather “comes from” somewhere – even if he is not bound to always “be” there.

Second, and more importantly, a focus on institutions as a method through which a people may be “made” or “created” will inevitably result in failure, as the circular problem of creating a people requires, at the absolute fundamental level, determining some method of inclusion and exclusion that is a) impossible under the liberal conception of humanity that refuses to admit differentiation (as above), and b) drawn from a set of values. What values are these? If they are historical, we will need to consult a prior set of experiences; if they are to be determined ahistorically, who will determine them, and how?

Who are the people?

This is a question broadly known as the boundary problem, or what Chantal Mouffe called the “democratic paradox” – you cannot create a demos through democratic means. If the only legitimate method of decision making is a procedural voting system (“democracy”), then who will vote on who is in the people? Or, put even more absurdly, who will vote to determine who gets to vote?

Being generous, one imagines that what the “progressive liberal nationalists” have in mind is something more akin to the 19th century emancipatory attitude that fuelled a lot of the late-19th and early-20th century agitations for independence from empires by peripheral peoples.

They believe that Britain is kept under the thumb by some external forces and that, driven by desires for “progress”, they seek to revive the “nation” whilst extricating the state from peoples’ lives and “liberalising” them in the process. What they imagine, therefore, might be something more akin to a Machiavellian “dirty hands” approach to government that Richard Bellamy popularised in the late 1990s, in which a powerful externally-focussed state interferes as little as possible in the lives of the people whilst extirpating them from moral culpability for the “dirty work” that governance inevitably requires (violence abroad, incarceration at home, and so on).

But one final problem I have with the “liberal nationalism” is that liberals, as far as I can tell, have no compelling nationalist theory of economics. This may sound completely absurd – after all, “liberals” have been some of our most important politico-economic theorists, such as Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and so on. But I want to take some time to explain what I mean here.

“Economy” derives from oikonomia, the Greek word for the “management of the home” (oikos); for this concept to make sense, therefore, there must be both “something to manage” and “somewhere for it to be managed”. Whereas most modern economics recognises the significance of management, it is not entirely clear what: labour supply; money; wages; inflation; employee-employer relations; etc. What the ancient conception of economy asks, in distinction, is what the management of resources belonging to a specific (if not pre-defined – let us not forget that a family changes as members are born and die) group of people must look like.

The ruins of a Greek home in the Acropolis.

But as liberals – as I’ve explained above – have no conception of a specific people, nor how to define that people, their theories are incapable of being aimed at a nation.

A “nationalist conception of the economy” is not so absurd as it might sound, therefore; but we need to remember that “economic management” is not intended to apply to the world, because there is no singular “human community”. The current intention, for example, behind the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) “global minimum tax” is such an example of the liberal impulse: as illiberal as the move may appear (in its constraint of choice), the philosophical logic of a universal worldview requires that all humanity is the constituent subject.

I argue instead for something called ‘existentialist economics’ - the idea that the economic programme should not be one of ideological commitment, whether that’s to free trade, protectionism, socialism, capitalism, whatever. Instead, the economic programme of any nation should be to, first and foremost, secure the existence of the nation. For example, when Britain liberated our trading policies at the repeal of the Corn Law and entered our free-trading era, even then we did not surrender ourselves or our merchants to the mercies of global caprice; we invested heavily in our merchant navy and expanded the Royal Navy to such an extent that the Pax Britannica could be spoken of, policing the waterways and ensuring the free trade policies we now pursued could be practised.

Much the same is true of domestic economics. For example, part of the reason domestic trading in England could flourish as it did in the tenth century was because of Alfred the Great’s creation of burhs, fortresses dotting the countryside that provided safe haven and centres for trade. Consider the occasions of breakdown of law and order in cities: do shopkeepers feel safe to open their stores, knowing they will be unmolested in trading? Of course not.

But the point does not have to extend to moments of violent disruption - even low-level crime is enough to deter many from starting businesses or expanding existing ones. If a shopkeeper knows his shop can be burgled, and the police will be completely unable to either retrieve his stolen goods or prevent it from happening again, why should he try? And, by consequence, why should he place any faith in the political system that taxes him, ostensibly to keep him safe, and then fails to do so?

This is why campaigns like the excellent Crush Crime are so important; if a locked bike can be stolen from outside of a police station, and the police fail to do anything about it, it will only erode faith in that institution. More to the point, it will prevent other, simple but existential realities of political systems from functioning: people will be unable to grow their businesses, trade in good faith, work honestly, and so on.

The same is true of nations: if a government fails to ensure the businesses of a nation are not preyed upon by the predators of the economic world, is it going to inspire confidence? As much as businesses go to a nation for low taxes, they also go somewhere they know the law will be implemented and followed-through. This is part of the reason “protectionism” being rejected wholesale is short-sighted: “protecting” a company from failing is just as negligent as failing to “protect” a company from being taken advantage of or burgled.

But where does this leave us? What is the Right to do, if the economic orthodoxy to which it has wedded itself undermines the social and cultural identities it clings to, yet the highly-institutional option for redefinition is doomed to failure?

Where do we go from here?

I think Patrick Deneen’s recent book, Regime Change, is a fantastic intervention in this issue: Deneen argues for what he calls an ‘aristopopulism’, which is a recognition of the interminable political reality of the existence of a discrete elite and a people over whom they govern, and the need for a mixed constitution. Deneen’s argument is compelling, reaching back through the histories of politics and political thought to show that functioning polities have always had an elite that governs in the interests of the people, and a people that is active in the governance of their polity in a civic sense.

The mixed constitution rejects that which I decried above, of following the impulses of the people in every aspect, because it offers a role of guidance for the elite and of authority for the people. In the same way I have argued for a “defence of custom”, as a way of recognising the pre-legal practices of a people as being an inchoate but valid set of rules for self-governance, the elite must step in to shape those rules into consistent and non-arbitrary forms that ensure everyone within the political community lives by those same rules.

But insofar as Deneen’s argument is centred on the American polity, we must do our best to convert his argument to Britain.

The first step, I argue, is that conservatives in Britain must – and indeed, are beginning to – wake up to the reality that the structure of the British State is completely and utterly warped, for two principle reasons: first, we exist in a depoliticised polity; and second, our state has been hollowed out.

I have attempted elsewhere to explain what depoliticization is, but for the sake of this essay, here is a simplified definition and some examples illustrative of Britain today, provided by Claudia Landwehr:

A political decision is: a) taken by a legislator or government that, from a normative perspective, should be democratically legitimate; b) a contingent choice between alternative options for action; and c) collectively binding for a specified community. Depoliticisation thus takes place where any of these three properties of decisions is lacking or denied.

Immigration is the primary example of depoliticisation in Britain today. It is the foremost problem, and has grown to such an enormous scale that it is transforming the body politic – the people – to whom the British State is responsible. As David Goodhart’s book, The Road to Somewhere, points out very nicely, the decision-making capacity by the great mass of the people was denied by excluding indirect decisions over the scale and pace of immigration (by its exclusion from every major party’s manifesto) until 2010, and thereafter excluding direct decisions. The attempt to farm this decision making out even further from central government to the Migration Advisory Committee only deepens this.

Yet while the British State has become depoliticised, any attempts to undo this depoliticisation through central government – still the primary organ of governance in the British constitution – are frustrated further by the hollowing out that it has experienced. This is a less intellectual problem, and one so much more easily identifiable (and, it must be noted, reversible); the British State has progressively moved its decision-making capacities upwards (to transnational or intergovernmental bodies such as the WTO, the WHO, the EU, the UN, etc.), outwards (to the Supreme Court - once the Law Lords - to charities, to the markets, to quangos, etc.) and downwards (principally through devolution).

The two problems are mutually-reinforcing, as once policy areas move beyond the purview of the central government, so too does oversight, and once devolved assemblies are given autonomy over policy areas, and are captured by ideologically opponents to Britain’s prosperity, continuity and constitution, so too does depoliticisation sink its teeth further in.

When accountability slips further and further from democratic responsiveness, it is little wonder the cultural fabric of England has been ripped so badly that people feel like strangers in their country.

The only time in recent years an attempt was made to directly address this malaise was Brexit. Not structurally: a vote to leave the EU does not, inherently, mean that the Gordian knot is undone, as we have seen with continued (indeed, rising) mass immigration, greater burdensome regulation, a more invasive State, promises for more devolution, and on and on it goes. The reason Brexit took on the revolutionary fervour it did was because of the passions it aroused and the supporters it attracted through the slogan “take back control”. This phrase has become so endemic to British discourse that even Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer used it in the run-up to the 2024 election, and again in the unveiling of the May 2025 Immigration White Paper.

Yet if Brexit was a revolution, of any kind, it was a conservative one.

Conservative revolutions

Can a revolution be conservative? It seems an absurd idea: conservatives are defenders of the existing state of affairs, and revolutionaries are their opponents, aren’t they?

But Brad Littlejohn was prepared to term John Jay a “conservative revolutionary”, and I think his prognosis applies much to Edmund Burke as it does to Jay. For example, Burke, very often the voice in the wilderness in British politics, warned that to act as if the British Parliament could legislate for the American people (the English-in-America, as he saw them) would be to push the nascent American sense of identity to a radicalism that would see them depart.

Burke’s own support for reform turned also into reluctant acceptance of the need for the American people to undo the bonds between themselves and the British, not in order to step away from their Britishness, but to preserve it - echoing Jay’s own claim that “America had not fought to gain independence so much as to maintain it”.

Yet if conservatism is as Sir Roger Scruton described it, as “a love of the real”, by which we mean things that do exist, rather than that which might exist, and we prize stability, how can we possibly endorse revolution? After all, as Michael Oakeshott said, conservative prefer “pleasant laughter to utopian bliss’” and what is revolution, if not a pursuit of utopia?

We can begin to answer this question by considering what conservatism means by ‘the real’, and what institutions are legitimate. Here, we can turn back to Burke, and consider his principles of political action, and the communities that generate them.

First, ‘the real world’ is, in this scenario, a specifically political world, in which we, as a community, build through time the manners through which we live together; this is built out of spontaneous action between individuals who naturally live together in a pre-existing social context. In this, we can see that conservatism’s answer to the underlying question of political philosophy – how do we live well together? – is one built on experience and historical society, and not the principles that Burke rejected, such as abstracted ideas of natural rights. Abandoning these things that have been built through time in pursuit of something that might be better, if it can exist, seems foolish to the conservative, as there is no guarantee that this outcome will be the case, and we might lose what we know does work in the process.

What we do have, however, are institutions that aggregate the knowledge that has assisted in the process of this political world-building. This means that, as each person only has knowledge available to him and his circumstance, the knowledge of a community is generated, collected and dispersed slowly, through experience. It is the purpose of institutions to aggregate from their members the knowledge that is relevant to them; it makes no sense, for example, for the Church of England to be concerned with the rules of a game of football.

Legitimate government is not decided by procedure (i.e. election or divine right) but by respect for epistemic foundations; knowledge as generated over time and enshrined in institutions. Some forms of government are more conducive to the protection of this inherited knowledge than others - Hans Hermann Hoppe, for instance, makes the argument that monarchy is more conducive to long term government because it has what he calls a low time preference – but fundamentally all forms of government can “go wrong”, because they are tempted by power, as has been warned from Aristotle to Hobbes. Hence the question of rebellion is determined not by principally illegitimate government but by formally and epistemically illegitimate action.

Legitimate government is not decided by procedure, but by respect for epistemic foundations; knowledge as generated over time and enshrined in institutions.

Legitimacy rests, first and foremost, on respect for tradition, because tradition has generated both the society over which governance is exercised, and that governance itself. Tradition is merely a shorthand for custom, behaviour and social rules almost everyone knows but few can articulate beyond simply “that is the way it is done”.

Tradition, however, is not an ossified series of statements issued by some dead man or group of men to whom we pay undue reverence: rather, it is a collection of the practical solutions discovered by free association, in the vast organism of civil society: those little platoons Burke so loved.

Traditions gain, therefore, their renewing legitimacy from daily involvement in which we rework and reinvent them all in the constant flux of civil society; but this flux can quickly undo the foundations on which those traditions rest, as the convulsions of daily life and the panic of emergency can lead us into reaction. We need, therefore, institutions to ensure that flux is channelled productively, and does not risk losing the positive experiences that have led us to the present circumstances.

This is all very well, but what then for the question of revolution? Given that, for the conservative, the question of revolution is tied so closely to legitimate government, we need to understand what legitimate government is, so we can know when it is illegitimate. Or, perhaps to paraphrase Burke, we need to know what can guide our actions in the moment of emergency; after all, revolutions can and do go so disastrously wrong, as the litany of human history shows us, usually because of a proud belief that the revolutionaries can remake society from the ground-up.

For conservatives, then, legitimate government strays into the grounds of illegitimacy when, for whatever reason, it undermines these three points of good governance: respect for tradition; undue interference in the behaviour of civil society; and violation of the autonomy of institutions.

But there is also an occasion when revolutionary action by conservatives is seen as necessary; when a government is resisting the organic change of the society over which it governs. Of course, all things being well, the government should be limited enough that it does not need to change too much to follow the movements of society; but when the traditions in which we all participate shift over time, government must shift with it, otherwise what former Prime Minister David Cameron called the dead hand of government will paralyse us into inaction and prevent tradition being renewed as it must.

In all occasions of revolution, then, conservatives must have reference to (and reverence for) tradition, either to protect it from erosion, or ensure its free flourishing. After all, as Burke shows us, in the moment of emergency the guiding principle ought to be one of reverting to - and restoring - those traditions we can trust and the organisms that generate them, not the utopian dreams of rationalist universalism. In this sense, there comes a moment when a conservative revolution is not only possible, but desirable – and, as it usually is an existential attempt to save what is left of a society, necessary.

Credit to Wrath of Gnon

Brexit was such a revolution, not in its bones, but certainly in the form it took. Asking, as the Battle of Ideas did, whether Brexit was a revolution “by or against the establishment” misses the point, and presumes that revolutions only ever operate in a top-down fashion, whilst many (in fact, most) cut vertically through, not horizontally between, social classes. This is Deneen’s point; an elite can (and should) act in the name of the people.

Instead, Brexit held within it an expression of the spirit of the Glorious Revolution, of an attempt to right an historic wrong that had been long-imposed from an alien culture (on both occasions, by Europeans) in a spirit that united sentimentally conservative people from all social classes.

Yet the revolution of Brexit was squandered. And while Boris Johnson had a major part to play in the squandering of the Brexit revolution, it was the vast networks of the depoliticised, hollowed-out Blairite British State that conspired to frustrate the conservatives who sought to finally restore some sense of power to the British State. This wasn’t a revolution over high-minded principles, but the heart of the “take back control” slogan; power. Power to actually do things. Once that had been restored, then the capacity to deliver on the interests of the people could be retaken.

Brexit was not a revolution “by” the elites, or even “stolen” or “coopted” by the elites; it was a desire to restore power to British elites. Elites which had, in the British constitution, always been responsive and responsible to the British people.

For all of this, conservatives must know that “Brexit” is not an event or a moment but a process. “Get Brexit Done” may have worked as a slogan, but it hid the truth that the Brexit revolution – indeed, any revolution – is never done. Politics is never “finished”.

The need for intelligent constitutionalism

A century after the Glorious Revolution, the Whig Aristocracy feared (wrongly, it must be said) that the hard-won constitution of 1689 may be undone by a tyrannical king. Wrongly, not because that is impossible, but because it would not be George III who would do so. Less than a century after the calamity of the first half of the 20th century, the spectre of fascism is conjured even when discussing the democratically elected 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump. Political memories may be short, but cultural and civilisational memories are long.

As a result, conservatives in Britain cannot make two important mistakes: first, of sitting back and thinking Brexit is “done”, simply because we left the EU; there are still thousands of EU laws on the statute books that the Conservative Party failed to eradicate, and the new Labour Party government is pursuing a closer relationship with the EU than is acceptable (not necessarily because of Brexit, but because it is simply a bad idea). But second, we also must not think Brexit has failed. Brexit’s generals have been frustrated in places, such as Johnson, but so too have they been empowered, such as Nigel Farage MP, and the British State now has the power to reconstruct itself. Parliament remains sovereign, and could – tomorrow, if it so wished – undo the vandalism of the last 25 years. It could actually undo every law ever enacted.

There are two warnings to issue at this point: against statism, and against economic determinism. The first is the more complex, because of all of the above, but needs careful consideration, and a significant caveat to everything I have written above. The British State is a complex machine with many component parts that, not by design but by growth, all complement one another: when Montesquieu extracted his famous “separation of powers” idea from the British constitution, he was remarking on the fact that the constituent powers of the constitution do not always work together (not, as is often misunderstood, that they are separately occupied).

In fact, the more accurate phrasing of Montesquieu’s axiom in the British context is more likely to be the distinction of powers.

Insofar as the Prime Minister is the highest official in the land, he is drawn from one of the two Houses (by convention, the Commons, but not strictly), and must balance his membership of the government with his constituency commitments – as must all of the cabinet.

With this in mind, conservatives must work to undo depoliticisation and hollowing-out, but in such a way that restructures the State with conservative principles in mind, knowing full well that the open contest of democracy means the State may again be controlled by our enemies. No one part of the State must be empowered to overbalance the other parts – something that would require the Commons being prepared to surrender some of the powers it has agglomerated to itself over the last half-century.

Many constitutional changes are reasonable (the Lords not being able to prevent money bills, for example), but most make the Commons the primary organ of government, and so returning powers to Westminster must be counterbalanced with a sufficient (re-)distinction of powers that means, when conservatives are not in government, there is no insurmountable risk of its desecration once again.

Likewise, with economic determinism, we cannot reduce conservatism to a simple defence of an economic vision of the world. Being able to name “low taxes” as the only principle to which conservatives are wedded is proof of an inability to think seriously about the British polity. “Low taxes” for whom? And for where? The liberal oikophobia I mention above is the inevitable consequence of this unrooted worldview, and must be resisted so that conservatives might sufficiently differentiate themselves from their ideological opponents, as well as offer a unique and compelling programme of government.

But there is also a conceptual urgency behind abandoning economic determinism. Making “the free market” the source of freedom roots the social order in economics, and while socialism fails because of its inapplicability to the reality of social life, socialism becomes possible when the economic order and the social order become indistinguishable. If we are able to develop an economic vision that is part of a greater political project, and reflexive enough to serve that project’s needs first and foremost, we can avoid this pitfall.

The need for a right-wing lexicon

One thing the right needs to do, and perhaps most importantly, is start talking seriously about the concept of Britishness, as both an historically unique and real identity but also as a central fulcrum around which a British people can be retrieved. And this needs to be not so simple or trivial as “British values”: there is nothing inherently wrong with that phrase, but it usually means “values that are in Britain”, rather than any values that are uniquely or identifiably British. British identity is a more important and compelling project, even if they are connected to values. I’ve argued (as above), for “British custom” instead - that’s another option.

Second, conservatives in Britain need to build an extra-political or meta-political ecosystem. The Right in America has done this very well, with organisations like The American Moment, that seek to identify and empower conservative voices outside of the formal structures of politics, educating potential conservatives in practical, moral and philosophical tools that can arm them for the future.

The Right does not stand for equality of opportunity, it actually believes in inequality, and should be unapologetic about that. Inequality is a productive force, largely because it lies both at the end and beginning of competition. Of course, saying so today is anathema.

There are some fantastic efforts being undertaken to this effect, but when there is such a large and self-sustaining ecosystem of left-wing movements that are able to educate and train ground troops without them even realising it, it cannot be left to one organisation only.

Third, philosophically-minded “conservatives” need to stop speaking in the language of the Left. Kemi Badenoch’s recent accession to the leadership of the Conservative Party summoned some fairly egregious examples of this, with Charles Moore saying “a black African woman leading the oldest political party in the world would be a sight for sore eyes”, whilst James Cleverly MP (sincerely, and without the slightest hint of irony) accused the Labour Party of being “male, pale and stale” whilst insisting that “Labour’s constant obsession with identity politics doesn’t actually translate into action”.

If we are only ever using the language of the left, we are fighting on their terms, on their ground, and in their territory. We are charging up the hill. It does not matter that we are disagreeing with the Left, but that we are being drawn into talking about issues they have decided are important, rather than issues that the right values. Why are we even talking about transsexual identity, for instance?

Even Sir Roger Scruton, who is often criticised by more communitarian Rightists for being too liberal in his anthropology, often exhorted the Right to improve its language, telling us that the Right fought for happiness and stability, not freedom, or to overcome the dichotomous misrepresentation of “liberty vs. order”.

Forging a new language will take effort, time and energy - of that, I am fully aware. But the work is necessary, otherwise the Right will not even know itself, never mind what it is fighting for. For instance, the Right needs to stop saying it is for “equality of opportunity” - equality is a left-wing or liberal principle, it is not a principle of the Right. The Right does not stand for equality of opportunity, it actually believes in inequality in the social realm (but not the legal realm), and should be unapologetic about that. I personally believe in the equality of soils before God, from which every human draws equal worth and dignity; but I also know that I treat my family with more love than strangers, because of the natural bonds of human association, as well as the history we share. This is why (as Bijan Omrani expertly shows) the Christian impulse formed the basis of the English belief in equality before the law. But equality through the law is a misrepresentation of this ancient belief.

Inequality is a socially productive force, largely because it lies both at the end and beginning of competition. Of course, saying so today is anathema. Richard Vinen, one of the finest historians of the Conservative Party and conservatism (even if he is not a conservative himself), was right to say that the Conservatives are very unlikely to defend inequality, and I believe his ascription to democracy and social media is accurate.

Likewise, the concept of human rights is a liberal one, for two reasons: first, the modern concept of rights has been developed most by liberal thinkers - Locke, Mill, Rawls, Dworkin, Scanlon, Waldron, etc; and second, the “humanity” of human rights is a distinctly liberal one of autonomous, perfectly rational individual. Diagnoses of the inhumane “humanism” of liberalism abound, better than I could write, but the point remains: “human rights” are a language of the Right’s opponents, and to talk that language is to concede the ground before the battle has begun.

The case for restorationism

In this vein, conservatives need to find a term for their vision of politics that is not defined by a left-wing lexicon and allows itself to be drawn into the linguistic ground that favours its opponents. We cannot allow ourselves to be called “reactionary”, because that supposes we are allowing the left to take the lead from the start; nor can we be “traditionalists” because that supposes we defend a specific form of tradition or are opposed to “progressives”. Well, as CS Lewis said, if one has taken the wrong turn then the most progressive thing is to turn back - but arguments are not won on the turn of phrase and sleight of hand.

That is why I think the most attractive term for a right-wing, philosophically conservative movement for the future ought to be restorationist.

For a number of years now, I have moved away from the ‘conservative’ label, because I felt continually that the conservative impulse had been led astray. This is true from two perspectives: first, the ‘realpolitik’ perspective; and second, the cultural perspective.

In terms of realpolitik, the conservative impulse usually crystallises (as I explained above) around the institutions that have proven themselves to be valid through both historical experience and their defence and constitution of the customs of a people. The first of these - historical experience - does not necessarily mean that something has to be ancient to be valid. By the mid-19th century, the police force had grown beyond the shores of England to be a worldwide peace-keeping standard, but it had only existed for a generation.

Is it right to say the police, as an institution, has not gone astray? 1,000 arrests a month for social media posts is not a failure of the law only; the police, as an institution, does not have the choice over which laws to enforce, but the police, as individuals, are forced to, by virtue of the overwhelming number of crimes they must now police. So while the drug gangs run over county lines, and white-collar crime rises, the police choose to enforce the “easy” laws.

But where institutions go rotten, the revolutionary conservative (or conservative revolutionary) should look back to the wisdom of Burke, not just for his quaintness, as many conservatives often do. Instead, Burke’s willingness to use aspects of the constitution that had not decayed to restore those aspects that had is key here:

Your Constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your Constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a Constitution very nearly as good as could be wished.

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last generations of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born, servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.

It’s a long quote, but it’s important. We used to say don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, and that folk wisdom is what’s at play here: we should not get rid of all that we have, in pursuit of what we might want. And even if we get what we want, we might lose what we had. A constitution with some functioning aspects is better than a new one altogether.

The frontispiece for Hobbes’ Leviathan

The temptation here is to lay out a programme for government. That is not my business; I do not wish to lay out exactly which policies I would like a future government to pursue, though that will come in time. Instead, I want to make the case for restorationism as a philosophy of state.

Emily Jones argued that the self-perceived raison d’etre of the c/Conservative in Britain in the mid-19th century was the defence of the constitution. In this sense, the Conservatives had a very clear philosophy of state: defend the constitution that had emerged through over a millennium of refinement, conflict, and compromise. The purpose of state reform, policy, and innovation was geared to this goal. For example, in discussing the seemingly paradoxical Conservative embrace of the referendum, Jones writes that:

Dicey believed that the introduction of the referendum—as used in Switzerland—to British political and constitutional processes would provide ‘the means of giving effect to democratic conservatism’ and he corresponded frequently with Salisbury on the topic. Dicey was a democrat who believed in the principle of popular sovereignty, yet he saw the potential usefulness of the referendum as a practical means of resisting radical political change that lacked the consent of the nation.

A static state was, as conservatives of the late-19th century understood, actually obstructive to the preservation of the constitution. If we wanted to distill this philosophy down to a slogan, it would therefore be “a dynamic state to preserve a permanent constitution”. But, as I’ve tried to explain above, “constitution” here is distinct from the state, because it is a people that is permanent in the Burkean sense - always changing, never young, never old, communing between the dead, living, and unborn. Permanence in change.

But now the conservative philosophy of state is extremely confused. The institutions of state that the conservative of Dicey’s era would have defended are long-changed: the Supreme Court has mangled the Law Lords; the Lords is a deracinated husk; the devolved assemblies have fractured the sense of a united body politic; and the acquiescence of the state to foreign laws has neutered the government. Besides, with no clear idea of who the British people are (or is), beyond vague references to British values, there is an even harsher objective of understanding who the state functions for.

Liberalism as a philosophy of state is quite clear: the individual is paramount, his identity is malleable, and he is the author of himself. On that basis, the state that interferes with that basic anthropology is a bad one. But this is actually the philosophy of the law, and not the philosophy of government: the slow elision of the law with the state is a consequence of the over-legalisation of our polity, attempting to resolve through law all forms of disagreement rather than political mechanisms.

The truth - simple, but powerful - is that the law is concerned with individuals, and governments are concerned with peoples. A state is, indeed must be, loyal to its own people first and foremost, and the customs that bring that people into existence and allow it to continue.

The restorationist philosophy of state must, I argue, be centred on one basic principle:

That any law that prevents the functioning and organic growth of the British constitution as it has existed, in some form or another, for over 1,000 years, needs to be repealed.

This is the starting point: the specific laws that must be repealed can be discussed and identified (such as the Human Rights Act (1998), which grafts a foreign court onto the British constitution with no accountability), but to prevent a runaway reactionary revolution, and keep a sense of coherence and logic to the British right, this principle grounds that political action.

There are many people who are doing fantastic work in this space already, and there must be even more if the philosophy is to move beyond the thin version I have laid out above (of constitutional and statehood focus) but - as far as I can see - there is no single unifying idea that undergirds them, and provides the ground for cohesive action. This is my offering for that ground.

Restorationism is the future of the British right.