Matt Goodwin: The revolution of liberal economics and radical cultural woke extremism has failed and left Britain broken and bewildered

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I’m not a member of the Conservative Party. And unless something changes I don’t currently plan on voting Conservative at the next election. But this month I did agree to address the National Conservatism Conference in London. Why? Because one of the most interesting and important debates in politics right now is where conservatism goes next – not only here in Britain but globally. From America to Sweden, Britain to France, Italy to Hungary, conservatives are now asking themselves the same questions. What is conservatism in the 2020s? How can it build a different electorate? And how should it involve in the years ahead? I wanted to contribute to this debate. So, here’s what I said:

Why are so many people in Britain today so utterly disillusioned and despondent with the state of the country? Why do so many of us walk around with a palpable sense that something, somewhere has gone fundamentally wrong – as though we’re trapped in a car with the doors locked, being driven to some dystopian destination? Why do 60% of us no longer feel able to say what we really think? Why do more than half of us think neither the Left nor Right represent our views? And why, over the last decade, have so many people desperately been trying to change course —whether by voting for populists, Brexit, or pushing through the post-Brexit realignment?

The answer is revolution. Over the last half century or so the British people have been subjected to a profoundly destabilising political, cultural, and economic revolution. It came in two stages. First, on the right, the one political party that’s supposed to care about our national community, the place we call home, ushered in a radical and relentless economic liberalism. And then, on the left, the one political party that’s supposed to care about ordinary working people accepted much of that legacy while ushering in a radical and rampant cultural liberalism.

By the time they were finished, by the 2010s, Britain had been completely and utterly reshaped around a bewildering, narrow and disruptive liberal consensus —a consensus which reflected the values of a new and deeply narcissistic elite minority who have shown remarkably little interest in the values of the wider majority. And what is this ‘consensus’ exactly? Well, it was defined by three things.

Firstly, it was defined by hyper-globalisation – a new and profoundly destabilising economic model which prioritises the interests of big business and the urban graduate minority over the interests of the wider national community.

Secondly, it was defined by an entirely new and historically unprecedented era of mass and uncontrolled immigration – a relentless and now visibly failing experiment which was introduced to help big business solve a labour problem but which is today not only failing to do that but is now also bringing us a glaring cultural problem.

And, thirdly, it was defined by the hollowing out of our national democracy —by the removal of Britain's claim to be a self governing, independent and sovereign nation. While power was sent up, to an insufficiently democratic and insufficiently transparent European Union, it was also sent sideways – to an array of unelected, amorphous and unaccountable ‘governance’ structures led by technocrats.

Britain, to quote one academic, was pushed into ‘post-democracy’ — a new era in which millions of people came to realise they were simply no longer able to influence the decisions that were affecting their daily lives and were no longer even in the national conversation that was taking place around them.

In these ways, the revolution reshaped the country around the values of a socially liberal and increasingly radically progressive new elite, it reshaped the institutions around the voice of this new elite while actively excluding, silencing and stigmatising the voice of millions of others, and it reorganised society around a new and profoundly divisive moral hierarchy in which, today, the only people who are seen to have social status, esteem and social honour are racial, sexual, and gender minorities or their supposedly enlightened white elite graduate ‘allies’.

Have you ever noticed, by the way, how the very same people who tell us over and over again not to engage in ‘culture wars’ routinely talk as though they’re in a war? And what has been the result of this revolution?

We were told it would lift all boats in society. We were told it would drive growth and prosperity. We were told things could only get better. We were told that all those who criticised the new consensus or who merely asked questions were the ‘closed-minded’ ones who did not understand the complexity and reality of the modern world.

But now fast forward to today and look around. We have a working class that's been battered and broken on all sides by stagnant wages, collapsing living standards and some of the highest regional inequalities in the western world, and was then derided as the ignorant thickoes, racists, gammons and bigots by the very people who claim to be the most liberal, the most tolerant, the most enlightened of all.

We have white working class kids who are now routinely the worst performers at every level of our education system and who are then told to reflect on their ‘white privilege’, their ‘white guilt’ and their ‘institutionally racist’ country while our universities simultaneously fall over themselves to take cash from China.

We have some of the highest rates of family breakdown in the western world with more than 40% of our children no longer living with both their mum and dad when they turn 18 years old. The number of single-parent families in this country is exploding while all the government does is incentivise mum and dad to get back to work as quickly as possible, viewing them as little more than economic units who should simply rely on other people to raise their children.

And you know the worst bit about that? It's the very same people in the new elite who tell us over and over and over again to choose freedom, to choose liberation, to choose gender fluidity, to choose diversity who are simultaneously the most likely to get married, to stay married, and to then have kids within a stable marriage.

You know, conference, my parents divorced when I was five. So let me just offer a reply to some of the media coverage of this conference. If somebody tells you that promoting strong families and doing all we can to keep families together is not that important, is old fashioned, or is reactionary then I would suggest they simply have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s the greatest investment a society can make —it’s simply much easier to raise strong children than it is to fix broken adults.

We also have spiralling numbers of ‘deaths of despair’ or ‘slow-motion suicides’ where mainly middle aged working class men are now killing themselves through alcohol and drug abuse and rampant loneliness. That's what happens when you strip meaning, purpose and dignity from people's lives — they give up on societies which have clearly given up on them, which offer them no sense of belonging.

We’ve completely hollowed out and overturned our communities, exposing them to rates of economic and demographic change which make the very notion of community impossible. Too many communities have become places where everybody used to know your name but where today you barely know anybody at all.

And we’ve got a new elite in this country, on both the Left and Right, which is simply far more invested in tearing down the cultural guardrails which used to hold our people together – strong families, strong religion, a strong national identity, a strong grasp of our history and achievements, and a strong, shared set of values.

Many of the people who lead us today, who disproportionately dominate the institutions, have not only embraced a profoundly divisive brand of radical ‘woke’ progressivism but what some scholars call ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’. They tell us we can celebrate any identity, any culture, any history so long as it’s not our own. They tell us we can celebrate any and every minority group under the sun so long as we do not celebrate the wider majority. And they tell us that if we do want to draw attention to our distinctive British or English identity then we must repackage this national identity as a celebration of the universal and international liberal themes of diversity and multiculturalism.

Britain is a remarkably welcoming and tolerant nation with some of the lowest levels of racism in the developed world. This is why so many other people also want to be able to call it their home, too. But to say ‘diversity’ is the basis of our entire national identity is like saying we have no real identity of our own.

It’s just another example of what some scholars call the ‘Luxury Belief Class’ in western societies — the people in power who routinely advocate policies, ideas and beliefs which both signal their sense of status and moral righteousness to other elites and bring them few if any costs but which simultaneously impose very real and serious costs on many of their fellow citizens who are left to pick up the pieces.

Mass immigration is one example. Demanding safe and legal routes for refugees and illegal migrants with no clear limit is another. So too is hyper-globalisation, gender identity theory, critical race theory, and repudiating our national identity and history. All these fuel the new elite’s feelings of moral righteousness while leaving everybody else to have to grapple with the full effects of these decisions on the ground.

Whereas the old elite derived their sense of status from money and goods, today’s elite increasingly derive their status by signalling their commitment to radical progressivism while stripping away the cultural guardrails which many other people see as a crucial source of their status, identity, and belonging. And then we wonder why so many people feel so utterly disillusioned and depressed. All the stories about who we are as a people are being eroded and undermined, if not overturned. And the only new stories that are emerging are inherently divisive.

And what else do we have? Our children being sexualised and politicised in the classroom —by the state— which is exposing them to belief systems which simply have no serious basis in science. Many of our schools have turned into the Wild West, bringing in outside campaigners and organisations which are not regulated, which teach children how to choke their partners during sex, which urge them to choose one of 72 different genders and then refuse to even show parents the materials they are using to teach their children because of ‘commercial sensitivities’.

And we have a low-productivity, low-growth, high tax, London-centric economy which is still organised far too strongly around the City and financial services and which simply does not make things anymore. From taxation to housing, our political economy now routinely puts the interests of global corporations and foreign investors ahead of the wider national community. Much like a drug addict, our economy and big business have become completely hooked on cheap migrant labour and consumption while our political leaders are too scared to force them to get sober and get real.

This week, many prominent journalists and commentators who have supported this broken consensus for decades have furiously tried to criticise this conference and silence any criticism of their beloved project. Some of them are sitting in this room.

So let me ask them some questions. Where is the economic growth you promised us? Where is the productivity? Where are the improving standards of living? Where are the happy citizens with a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives? Where are the strong families? Where are the united communities? Where are they?

They’re not here. The project, the revolution, has failed. The economists were wrong. Tony Blair was wrong. David Cameron and George Osborne were wrong. The ultra free traders were wrong. Consistently, the liberal revolution over promised and then under delivered. The evidence is now clear should you care to read it. Finally, albeit 20 years too late, we now know hyper globalisation not only disproportionately damaged the economic interests of workers but imposed enormous cultural costs, too, driving a sledgehammer through our families, our communities, and our social fabric. And, you know, I never seem to hear liberal conservatives discussing this evidence.

Who voted for all this? Seriously – who voted for it? The answer is nobody voted for it. That’s why, over the last decade, millions of people, the Forgotten Majority, have been pushing back. Somebody once said that all political realignments are surrogates for revolution and that’s exactly what’s been taking place — a counter revolution against the new elite who routinely prioritise their own values over the values of others, who prioritise their voice over the voice of others, and who unlike the old elite don’t appear to like or even respect their fellow citizens and cultural inheritance.

Just look at their reaction to the rebellions of the last decade. ‘The voters don’t know what they’re voting for,’ they say. ‘They’re just a bunch of racist idiots,’ they say. ‘They were duped by dark money and social media,’ they say.

But this is total nonsense. The people out there knew exactly what they were voting for. I should know. I sit in focus groups and poll them all the time.

They were voting for national not global interests. They were voting for lower not higher immigration. They were voting for more not less voice in the conversation and the institutions. They were voting for slower not faster social and demographic change. They were voting for communities not individuals. They were voting for and not against our distinctive national culture, identity, and history. And they were voting for a new politics, not a return to the old broken status-quo.

But what have they got in return? Well, I’ll say it because so far nobody else at this conference has said it. They got a Conservative Party which has failed. They got a party which no longer knows what it is or what it wants. They got a party which thinks it’s still living in 1988 rather than 2023. They got a party which is so obsessed with rehashing the old arguments about economic freedom that it’s failed to realise that many voters today are also crying out for cultural freedom – freedom from mass immigration, a stifling political correctness, and a dogmatic new elite.

They got a party which talked over and over and over and over again about lowering immigration only to then slam its foot on the pedal and drive us into even higher rates of immigration. They got a party which took power in 2010 when net migration was 230,000 but which I suspect will be turfed out of power next year with net migration at close to 1,000,000. They got a party which has not only failed to solve a major housing crisis but has not even bothered to admit that we have absolutely no hope of solving this crisis when we built 204,000 dwellings last year while running net migration at 504,000. I mean, seriously, can we get real for a second?

They also got a party which talked about reshaping Britain’s national economy around ‘high skilled’ immigration but which then set the salary thresholds for migrant workers as low as £21,000 —more than ten grand below the average wage. They got a party which in the worlds of my Gen-Z students is now routinely gaslighting the country by telling voters what they really want is not lower numbers but ‘control’, when all of the available evidence points in the very opposite direction.

They got a party which talked the talk about forcing big business to invest more seriously in British workers but which then retreated at the first possible moment, keeping the tap of cheap migrant labour turned on and thereby removing any incentive whatsoever for business to train and invest in our own workers. They got a party which talked about investing in people who have not passed through our broken model of higher education but which has since put the number of international students and their relatives on steroids so that universities are not incentivised to change their broken business model while often it’s the kids from outside Britain rather than the kids inside Britain who are benefitting the most.

They got a party which promised to Take Back Control only to then Completely Lose Control of Britain’s borders and is clearly not prepared to do what needs to be done to regain control of them. They got a party which talked about restoring our judicial independence but then refuses to do the things that would actually allow a supposedly sovereign country to decide, on its own terms, who comes in and who goes out.

They got a party which spent years criticising the Left for pushing millions of our fellow citizens on to welfare and dependency on the state, but which now presides over a country in which close to five million working-age people are on out-of-work benefits while once again turning to mass migration to try and plug the gaps and not talking about any of it, hoping nobody will notice what’s really going on. They got a party which talks about putting the nation first but which failed, under Boris Johnson, to even keep a requirement for British companies to advertise jobs in Britain first. They got a party which has failed at every turn to roll back the creeping influence of a thoroughly unBritish, divisive, and dogmatic radical progressivism —presiding over government departments which under their watch have invested massively in ‘diversity and equality’ and shady providers —including one which as recently as last year was listed as a government partner despite sending breast binders to 14 year old girls without their parents permission.

They got a party which calls itself Conservative but which has since allowed a whole array of issues which people care passionately about -- the rights of women, the rights of children, our shared history, our national identity, and our remarkable cultural inheritance, to be repackaged as toxic ‘culture wars’ which can no longer be debated unless they’re being attacked. And they got a party which they thought was serious about building an entirely new political economy and society but which has instead merely given them more of what they rejected nearly seven years ago. More mass immigration. More London-centric economics. More hyper-globalisation. More radical woke progressivism. More political correctness. And a national conversation and prevailing culture which is ever more tightly shaped around the values and the voice of a liberal urban minority while ignoring the rest of the country.

Conference, it’s about time somebody told it to you straight. The Conservative Party has simply never invested in the people who invested in it. It took their votes for granted, gave them little in return and is now wondering where they’ve all gone. It squandered a historic opportunity to realign its electorate, its political geography, and the wider country and has gone from giving the world a masterclass in how to bring about a political realignment to instead giving a masterclass in how to ruin one.

Today’s conservatives have consistently failed to do what they have always done throughout their history to survive and prosper – they have failed to reinvent. And political parties which do not reinvent do not survive. It is this, more than anything, which not only explains why the conservatives are heading for defeat at the election next year but why they may well be kept out of power for a much a longer period of time than they currently realise. I wish you good luck for your debate. Because it’s more important than ever.

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