Far out of public view, a new form of conservatism, drawing on old wisdom, is taking shape. It may soon take the nation by storm.

I f you want a glimpse of England’s future, visit Birmingham. In the July issue of The Critic, Fred Sculthorp depicts the nation’s second city as a blend of migration-driven multiculturalism, swaths of urban decay and its associated social ills, academic and corporate islands of advanced scientific research, and neat enclaves of suburban prosperity. In short, a mixture of good and bad, new and old, native and newcomer, hope and despair, but notably lacking in the civic pride that had marked Birmingham since Mayor Joseph Chamberlain made the city world-famous in the 1870s as a model of urban government.

Under the Chamberlain dynasty (Colonial Secretary Joe, Foreign Secretary Austen, and Prime Minister Neville), Birmingham was first a stronghold of radical Liberalism, then of business-friendly Toryism, and finally of two-party politics — a long and competitive Tory–Labour struggle for dominance in city government. But the Tories last had an overall majority in the city council in 1984, and they last shared power with the Liberal Democrats in a coalition in 2012. That familiar style of England’s municipal politics has since been replaced by a new politics of ethnic bargaining in a city council dominated by the Labour Party, which is itself beholden to Muslim votes representing 30 percent of the city’s population. And rising.

This new model dystopia is symbolized most visibly at present by a strike of refuse workers, which has now been going on for five months and is expected to end around Christmas. Among other results, well-heeled localities and individuals have hired private sector contractors who pick up their rubbish and dump it in less salubrious areas of the city. And if you want to know more about urban England without actually going there, Sculthorp’s article helpfully includes a picture of modern South Africa as a guide to a future England if our current political and cultural tendencies persist.

Maybe, though, you would prefer to visit an older England which still exists and even flourishes outside the major conurbations, mainly in the countryside, villages, towns and more habitable small and medium-sized cities. This England is quite substantial, at least numerically. Recent government figures show that nearly 33 million people live in smaller cities and towns in England and Wales (with medium-sized towns being the most populous) and another 9.5 million in villages and rural areas. That adds up to about 43 million people — or 64 percent — out of a total population of 67 million.

Social surveys give a largely favorable picture of this England — the England of people David Goodhart describes as “Somewheres.” They have stayed where they were born, known their neighbors all their lives, work near their homes, and married (and sometimes divorced) the girl next door. This England is older, safer, quieter, and more relaxed. It has less crime, fewer migrants, a more balanced social structure, a stronger sense of community, and a general sense of local pride and well-being.

One can also sense in some of the sociologists’ comments on this England a slight impatience with this ambience of contentment. Might it perhaps lack the “diversity” that would encourage a more open-minded attitude to life’s exciting challenges? Is it perhaps too comfortable? Or excessively white? Or even — heaven forfend! — too English? A decade ago a distinguished Oxford demographer forecast to me that as people increasingly flee the cities for this Middle England, it would become a kind of Shire for Hobbits, which is how the native English will then be seen by government and the wider multicultural U.K. Given that various state agencies and national institutions now propose incentives for minorities to spend more time in the countryside to alleviate its present regrettable “racism,” however, their retreat may grant them only a temporary reprieve.

I recently arrived in England to attend a conference on Margaret Thatcher at Churchill College, Cambridge, which houses the former prime minister’s papers. Cambridge is itself a midway point between these two Englands. It is a medium-sized historic city with a university attached. Not just any university either, but that which between the wars hosted the Cavendish Laboratory, where nuclear scientific breakthroughs that led directly to the Manhattan Project changed the world. Ever since then Cambridge has been a world institution, a kind of condominium governed jointly by the U.K. government and the international Republic of Science, that has spawned science- and technology-based start-ups in and around the city and surrounding county. It presents an optimistic picture of how technically advanced, harmonious, and prosperous Britain’s society and economy might look if only immigration had been less “mass” and rooted mostly in people with higher skills — which is the bias of migration to Cambridge itself with its de facto ability to issue visas stamped by the Republic of Science.

That’s not how either immigration or the U.K. economy have turned out since Thatcher’s day, and those outcomes have led not only to the Tory Party’s recent humiliating defeat but also to a widespread ferment of debate on the right about migration, multiculturalism, national identity, democratic sovereignty, and what — if anything — conservatism has to say about these things. Temperamental conservatives across the spectrum by and large blame the Tory Party — in particular its liberalish “one-nation” wing — for presiding complacently over this slow decay of national cohesion. Some want to revive the party; some to replace it; others to emigrate.

Except among the last group, this discontent is producing not despair but activism. Nigel Farage’s new party of the right, Reform UK, won a handful of seats in the 2024 general election, but it’s been leading in the polls for almost all of this year. Reform is now ahead of the Labour government by a comfortable margin of 34 to 25 percent, but it’s winning more than twice the 15 percent score to which the Tories have been reduced. As James Heale has documented in The Spectator, it’s also starting to acquire the organizational and ideological scaffolding of a full-blown political party. In particular, a new think tank, Centre for a Better Britain, has been founded by former Reform executives under the chairmanship of policy guru James Orr. He wears three hats, being also a Cambridge professor of the philosophy of religion and the U.K. chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation (the local parent body of the international “national conservatism” movement).

The CBB joins an already crowded agora of think tanks supporting different varieties of conservative opinion. These include the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies; the establishmentarian Policy Exchange; the liberalish Onward, which defends one-nation Toryism; and several more activist bodies of populist and/or traditionalist temper like the New Culture Forum. Journals and pamphlets are also being born. The Critic is the most substantial of journals that are sympathetic to Reform’s general outlook, having pioneered critical investigations of wokeness in Whitehall. All this heightened ideological competition has pushed the Overton window further to the right, with younger right-wing intellectuals embracing Trump-adjacent proposals like “remigration.” Smaller insurgent parties have accordingly emerged to the right of Reform on the grounds that Farage is too moderate on his (and their) signature issue of immigration.

In short, a fertile ideological free-for-all prevails. Interestingly, it includes the Margaret Thatcher Centre, which organized the academic symposium at which I spoke at Churchill College. Though the Centre is one of the loyalist para-party bodies that form a defensive phalanx around the actual Tory party — it holds its dinners at the Carlton Club, etc. — its symposium was devoted to Thatcher and Thatcherism rather than to the party’s current agonies. Its papers and debates amounted to a strong defense of Thatcherism as a continuing and important tradition within conservatism that addressed current political problems. Those sentiments were not confined to the Tories present. At least one leading Reformer was among the speakers; the debates between Tories and Reformers were cordial and revealed much common ground; and David Starkey delivered a well-received demolition of the “Blairite” constitutional settlement in which he combined a Tory defense of Britain’s traditional constitution (contrary to rumors, there is one, and it’s written too, just not all in the same document) with practical advice on how Reform could unwind the wokeness of the bureaucratic blob.

Once you get a level or two below their respective leaderships, the deep partisan divide between Tories and Reformers is easily bridged, and for a significant reason: Party members and activists on both sides blame the recent Tory governments from David Cameron to Rishi Sunak — not excluding Boris Johnson, even if reluctantly — for their current plight.

An entertaining New Statesman piece on the conference, longer on adjectives than arguments, found this celebration of Mrs. Thatcher and her “-ism” both mystifying and symptomatic of rigor mortis. That judgment reflects the devout belief of the Labour left and supportive bias of the progressive media that her achievements are “discredited” and her characteristic policies “irrelevant” to Britain’s problems. If that seemed like reality when Labour won last year’s election, it is now clearly myopia. Labour has since imprinted on the mind of the British electorate two clear impressions. First, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is at best ambivalent about the country he governs and hostile, even punitive, to its working- and lower-middle-class citizens because they have unprogressive attitudes on patriotism, borders, immigration, international law, Muslim rape gangs, and much else. The prime minister realizes that half of his voters detest these attitudes while the other half hold them and so he alternates between embracing and condemning them, thus earning the distrust of both.

Second, even though Labour inherited a bad economic situation, Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have made it far worse through early over-spending on large public sector pay hikes in what now looks like a reckless budget; tax hikes on farmers, private schools, and wealthy foreigners living in the U.K.; failed efforts to retrench on welfare spending followed by retreats from them; more massive borrowing in consequence; and a prospective fall budget of still higher taxes to fill in a budget “black hole” of $59 billion and down the road a pound sterling crisis followed by a political crisis within Labour.

It’s very hard to imagine two sets of political issues that call more clearly for Thatcherite solutions. Mrs. Thatcher’s successful leadership in bringing down inflation and reviving U.K. industry and all-round enterprise in the 1980s is too well-known to need explanation here. It’s interesting to note, however, that Starmer’s speeches are already employing Thatcherite themes on economic policy, such as the idea that deregulation for growth must precede spending. These themes will inevitably become more pronounced as the crisis deepens.

But there was more to Thatcherism than tough-minded economic realism. I have quoted elsewhere Nigel Lawson’s early 1980s definition of it as “a combination of free markets, financial discipline, public expenditure control, tax cuts, nationalism, Victorian values ​​of self-help, privatization, and a dash of populism.” It will be seen that this wider definition of Thatcherism, embodied above all by Mrs. Thatcher’s leadership in the Falklands War, overlaps considerably with the cultural, patriotic, and traditionalist concerns of the “national conservatism” that unites James Orr with Tories like Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage with Robert Jenrick, and Boris Johnson with himself.

This blend of party and institutional competition, intellectual fertility, and social-cum-ideological fraternization on the right — many of the people in these groups meet, dine, drink, debate, and generally socialize with each other all the time — against a background of anguished pessimism over the future of their country means that national political debate is no longer merely national. It goes on — and goes on passionately — at almost every level of political authority from Westminster to the parish council.

That’s not likely to change while Keir Starmer’s hapless and tone-deaf administration continues to press on with raising taxes, censoring political speech, surrendering national sovereignty wholesale, and emitting political utterances that suggest the opposite of all these things. Consequently, a blend of these economic and cultural Thatcherisms is likely to evolve into the political commonsense of Middle England, even if under another name and claimed as their own by two or more parties advocating versions of it. In other words, though it’s the centenary of Margaret Thatcher, the death of Thatcherism has been greatly exaggerated.

A day after the conference I found myself discussing these issues with James Orr as he drove me from Cambridge through the country lanes of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk to the village of Long Melford on a late July afternoon. (My judgments above predate the drive. They are entirely my responsibility and can’t be blamed on Professor Orr.) He had invited me to lunch at his home in Cambridge with guests who included: two young philosophers; a young woman writer with many thousands of followers on Substack; a rare Catholic woman playwright whose plays — an even rarer distinction — have actually been performed; and Mrs. Orr (formerly a pop music sensation, now an Anglican vicar), whose model of unexpected hospitality is the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. It was a delicious meal and an alarmingly pleasant experience overall, rather like holding a front row ticket for a play of debate by Shaw or Stoppard and instead being ushered onto the stage and expected to contribute to the sparkling dialogue. For a while I imitated spectators at Wimbledon, eventually joining in to give my reason for visiting Long Melford.

“It’s a pledge to a young woman,” I explained. At the New Culture Forum Literary Festival weeks before, I had arrived with 20 of my books to sell and no means of accepting payment. The young lady running a mobile book stall, fully equipped with credit card facilities, had offered to sell my books to conference attendees — she actually sold four in the remaining hour of the festival. She also offered to take any unsold copies back to her bookshop in Long Melford for sale there — and all that on generous terms. Not entirely generously, I offered in return to visit the bookshop, sign copies of my book, and give a talk about writing it. I was scheduled to deliver the talk at 6:30 p.m. that day. James told me I would never make it to Long Melford in time, and perhaps also intrigued by the bookstore’s name — the Oldspeak Bookshop (advertising itself as Britain’s “only conservative bookshop”) — offered to drive me there and back. We set off.

Long Melford was cited by the London Times in 2018 as one of the “most desirable” villages in Britain. Its name comes from its unusual geographical layout, stretching as it does along a single three-mile road with homes, shops, pubs, restaurants, etc. on either side until it reaches the Mill ford of a tributary of the River Stour. It seems to have been a desirable location from the Fall. People were living there and manufacturing iron as early as 8,300 b.c. The Romans built two roads through the district and left several skeletons in their wake, one encased in a stone coffin. Following the Norman Conquest, the village was recorded in the Domesday Book as having 41 villagers, who increased greatly in number during the medieval period as the town grew prosperous in the woolen trade.

Two centuries later it had gained a weekly market and an annual fair. That prosperity survived the Black Death in 1348; another plague in 1604 (though 119 villagers perished); the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, who transferred the local manor to Sir William Cordell; and the odd moments of serious turmoil in English politics from the (First?) English Civil War to both world wars. In the Civil War a puritan mob chased the Royalist Countess, Elizabeth Savage, out of Long Melford to London, where she died in poverty. In World War II, Glenn Miller’s band played to villagers and injured airmen from two local USAF and RAF bases in a local hospital. Today, Long Melford (pop. 3,918 in 2011) has two stately homes — Melford Hall and Kentwell Hall, both visited by Elizabeth I — Holy Trinity, the only parish church in Suffolk, which is mentioned in Simon Jenkins’s book on Britain’s most beautiful churches; a Non-League football team; a water meadow and a network of walkways; and an undoubted atmosphere of tranquility and contentment.

After a short reconnaissance, we found the Oldspeak Bookshop in a small square just off the main road. Its founding owner, Joanne May — the enterprising young woman who had volunteered to sell my books at the literary festival for actual money — has written an elegant essay here on the role that independent bookshops play in the preservation and transmission of national traditions and civilized virtues to today’s public and to later generations. They are the neurons of civilization.

As the name of Ms. May’s bookshop suggests, the values she especially wants to preserve and transmit are the embattled, despised, or — worse — forgotten conservative, classical liberal, and traditionalist ones. I was there to do that in the course of signing and selling copies of my Sleepwalking into Wokeness: How We Got Here (2024). With only a few days’ notice, Ms. May had assembled a respectable crowd of more than 30 people to listen. The talk went . . . well, modesty forbids, but the audience really livened up when the topics of Mrs. Thatcher and Thatcherism came up. It was plain that she remains well regarded in Middle England as a sort of very English heroine and indeed as the standard by which to judge later prime ministers — which by and large means unfavorably.

I felt confirmed in my earlier argument that whatever happens to the Tory Party, Thatcherism as a set of ideas and as a memory of achievement has a lively political future ahead of it in Middle England. That said, it’s unclear which party is likely to be its standard-bearer. I asked the audience: How would they vote today in a national election? Out of 32 people, 28 replied “Reform” versus one loyal Tory who was steadfast for the blues. Two abstained. James and I then moderated a good-natured, even friendly, debate between a socially diverse group of the English crossing more than one class divide. They batted around ideas and policies that were visibly — not massively, but clearly — to the right of what the last Tory government and the current Labour government both regard as “the politically possible.” But the sole Tory, the many Reformers — most of them ex-Tories — and the handful of abstainers did not find much to disagree about in the emerging policy mix — and nothing to disagree about passionately.

Ms. May’s Oldspeak Bookshop is an institution helping to foster what amounts to a political “vibe shift” in Middle England not only because of the debates she hosts, but also because of the range of conservative classics she’s making available in the store and online. They include Churchill, of course, and Roger Scruton. But also Renaud Camus and Ryszard Legutko, William F. Buckley Jr. and Theodore Dalrymple, and a whole host of people unknown to me but oddly enticing. Almost the only false note in the conversation between James, Jo, and me over dinner after the debate concluded — we were on first name terms by then — was when someone (I hope it was James) advised that her stock should include literary classics that stimulate the soul’s imagination as well as political ones that may influence votes.

“We stock Everlyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Dickens, Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Orwell, Dostoevsky, etc.” Jo exclaimed, her voice hot with indignation. Her website more than bears out her claim, and so does her personal aspiration to the civilized traditions that she has now acquired without the help of college by her own voracious reading. She’s following the example of her bookworm mother, Lesley, who along with Orwell is Oldspeak’s inspiration. As a lively, non-graduate, enterprising young woman who is investing her own money, time, and enthusiasm in a mission more important but also financially riskier than most small businesses, she sounds as if Peter Thiel — to be consistent — should at least take out a big annual subscription to Oldspeak.

The other moment of surprise in the dinner conversation was when James — whose Rolodex equals Who’s Who  —mentioned in passing that he had introduced Thomas Skinner to JD Vance.

“You don’t know Thomas Skinner?” said Jo skeptically, as though she believed Skinner (unknown to me) to be a much more prominent public figure than the vice president of the United States. About a week later, the Daily Mail splashed on the story that during his British vacation, Vance had invited Skinner to a “beer-filled” barbecue where a good time was had by all. It also informed me that Skinner (trademark slang term: “bosh”) has become enormously popular in Britain as a market trader with a cockney accent, cheerful self-confidence, a prosperous family background but a working-class affect, and an enthusiasm for reinventing traditional English food by means of his buoyant appearances on . . . yes, The Apprentice! As a result, Skinner is now flirting with entering politics, the vice president sees him as a Trumpian ally, and a different kind of cultural conservatism with broader social appeal is emerging across the Anglosphere. It’s important that it should be influenced by Jo’s voracious reading as much as by Skinner’s guiltless advocacy of English opinion, folk customs, and appetites.

Americans visiting Britain might therefore think of leaving London when they’ve seen a few plays for different kinds of cultural refreshment in one of the distinctively beautiful regions of Middle England — Cornwall, the Lake District, the North Riding of Yorkshire with its austere Moors and lush Dales, and of course Suffolk for a good meal in The Swan and a restorative read at the Oldspeak Bookshop in Long Melford.

You never know who you’ll run into in those quiet places. I’m told that the Oldspeak Bookshop is holding open a spot in its diary for a talk by Vice President Vance on his next book. Thomas Skinner is certain of it.