Karl Williams: The New Right, then and now
Trust is earned, not demanded.
Karl Williams is Research Director at the Centre for Policy Studies.
Politics on the right is in a state of high excitement. Rumours are swirling, MPs are defecting and new pressure groups are popping up left, right and especially centre.
But far more interesting than the political foment is the intellectual ferment, which is of an intensity not seen since the 1970s.
by-product of this ferment is a new genre of introspective writing about the “New Right”: accounts of how centre-right political thought is developing in the wake of the 2024 general election that both describe and attempt to direct that development. The right might be split between two main political parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK, but as Gavin Rice notes, there is broad intellectual coherence and great energy in the wider centre-right nonetheless. Even left-wing commentators have been drawn to remark upon the dynamism of the New Right, some offering genuine insight and balance.
In contrast, initiatives that hark back to the centrist conservatism of the 2010s feel flat.
One of the contributions of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) to the renewal of the centre-right is our fellowship programme, now in its second year. Our aim is to bring talented, mid-career voices from business and industry into the heart of Westminster. And in our own introspective turn, the topic of the most recent monthly roundtable/dinner for the fellowship was ‘The New Right, Then and Now’.
The pre-dinner reading list ranged across conventional territory, from academic monographs on the ‘think tank archipelago’ of the 1970s to essays by some of the sharpest contemporary thinkers on the right such as Rachel Wolf, Neil O’Brien and Nick Timothy. But it also took in more niche material from the wilder shores of the online right, including from J’accuse and rival publication Pimlico Journal, X posts by top anthropologists and data autists; and satirical or celebratory videos made by online anonymous accounts (anons) with too much spare time on their hands.
One of the points of having such a diverse range of sources was to convey that the New Right of today is a plurality, just as it was in the 1970s. The most incisive book on Thatcherism ever written, Andrew Gamble’s The Free Economy and the Strong State, makes this point while dividing the New Right of that period into two broad tendencies, a liberal one (associated with the free market think tanks) and a conservative one (for example Roger Scruton and the Salisbury Review), with the former winning out in government.
Similarly, in Maurice Cowling’s lengthy preface to the 1991 edition of his Mill and Liberalism – essentially an insider’s prosopography of the 1970s New Right – he divides the intellectual innovators of the time into five strands or …
Trust is earned, not demanded.
Karl Williams is Research Director at the Centre for Policy Studies.
Politics on the right is in a state of high excitement. Rumours are swirling, MPs are defecting and new pressure groups are popping up left, right and especially centre.
But far more interesting than the political foment is the intellectual ferment, which is of an intensity not seen since the 1970s.
by-product of this ferment is a new genre of introspective writing about the “New Right”: accounts of how centre-right political thought is developing in the wake of the 2024 general election that both describe and attempt to direct that development. The right might be split between two main political parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK, but as Gavin Rice notes, there is broad intellectual coherence and great energy in the wider centre-right nonetheless. Even left-wing commentators have been drawn to remark upon the dynamism of the New Right, some offering genuine insight and balance.
In contrast, initiatives that hark back to the centrist conservatism of the 2010s feel flat.
One of the contributions of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) to the renewal of the centre-right is our fellowship programme, now in its second year. Our aim is to bring talented, mid-career voices from business and industry into the heart of Westminster. And in our own introspective turn, the topic of the most recent monthly roundtable/dinner for the fellowship was ‘The New Right, Then and Now’.
The pre-dinner reading list ranged across conventional territory, from academic monographs on the ‘think tank archipelago’ of the 1970s to essays by some of the sharpest contemporary thinkers on the right such as Rachel Wolf, Neil O’Brien and Nick Timothy. But it also took in more niche material from the wilder shores of the online right, including from J’accuse and rival publication Pimlico Journal, X posts by top anthropologists and data autists; and satirical or celebratory videos made by online anonymous accounts (anons) with too much spare time on their hands.
One of the points of having such a diverse range of sources was to convey that the New Right of today is a plurality, just as it was in the 1970s. The most incisive book on Thatcherism ever written, Andrew Gamble’s The Free Economy and the Strong State, makes this point while dividing the New Right of that period into two broad tendencies, a liberal one (associated with the free market think tanks) and a conservative one (for example Roger Scruton and the Salisbury Review), with the former winning out in government.
Similarly, in Maurice Cowling’s lengthy preface to the 1991 edition of his Mill and Liberalism – essentially an insider’s prosopography of the 1970s New Right – he divides the intellectual innovators of the time into five strands or …
Karl Williams: The New Right, then and now
Trust is earned, not demanded.
Karl Williams is Research Director at the Centre for Policy Studies.
Politics on the right is in a state of high excitement. Rumours are swirling, MPs are defecting and new pressure groups are popping up left, right and especially centre.
But far more interesting than the political foment is the intellectual ferment, which is of an intensity not seen since the 1970s.
by-product of this ferment is a new genre of introspective writing about the “New Right”: accounts of how centre-right political thought is developing in the wake of the 2024 general election that both describe and attempt to direct that development. The right might be split between two main political parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK, but as Gavin Rice notes, there is broad intellectual coherence and great energy in the wider centre-right nonetheless. Even left-wing commentators have been drawn to remark upon the dynamism of the New Right, some offering genuine insight and balance.
In contrast, initiatives that hark back to the centrist conservatism of the 2010s feel flat.
One of the contributions of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) to the renewal of the centre-right is our fellowship programme, now in its second year. Our aim is to bring talented, mid-career voices from business and industry into the heart of Westminster. And in our own introspective turn, the topic of the most recent monthly roundtable/dinner for the fellowship was ‘The New Right, Then and Now’.
The pre-dinner reading list ranged across conventional territory, from academic monographs on the ‘think tank archipelago’ of the 1970s to essays by some of the sharpest contemporary thinkers on the right such as Rachel Wolf, Neil O’Brien and Nick Timothy. But it also took in more niche material from the wilder shores of the online right, including from J’accuse and rival publication Pimlico Journal, X posts by top anthropologists and data autists; and satirical or celebratory videos made by online anonymous accounts (anons) with too much spare time on their hands.
One of the points of having such a diverse range of sources was to convey that the New Right of today is a plurality, just as it was in the 1970s. The most incisive book on Thatcherism ever written, Andrew Gamble’s The Free Economy and the Strong State, makes this point while dividing the New Right of that period into two broad tendencies, a liberal one (associated with the free market think tanks) and a conservative one (for example Roger Scruton and the Salisbury Review), with the former winning out in government.
Similarly, in Maurice Cowling’s lengthy preface to the 1991 edition of his Mill and Liberalism – essentially an insider’s prosopography of the 1970s New Right – he divides the intellectual innovators of the time into five strands or …
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