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It has been another extraordinary week in politics. Nigel Farage resigned as Ukip leader, Labour MPs are still trying – but failing – to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn, and the Conservatives are in the midst of a leadership contest. But while most Tory MPs are asking who should come next, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson argue in this week’s magazine that the question should be what should come next. Britain needs a new form of Conservatism – and the Tory party needs to become the new workers’ party. So what makes this post-Brexit time special, and why should the Conservatives be considering new policies? In this week’s Spectator Podcast, Isabel Hardman is joined by Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth, as well as Spectator columnist Matthew Parris.
On the podcast, which you can listen to using the player above, Fraser explains why a more egalitarian conservatism is vital today:
‘The Tories were very good, during the Coalition era, of taking people from welfare and into work. But what they haven’t been very good at is making work people. So there can be a real recognition that globalisation – certainly of the sort I was cheering on without any hesitation in the late 90s and early 2000s – has worked very well for people at the top. Not so well for people at the bottom.’
Matthew Parris has a rather different attitude to post-Brexit Britain. Writing in this week’s magazine, he says that Brexit has made him feel ashamed to be British. Yet this new approach to conservative politics does not give him any optimism; in fact, he says, we could have adopted this approach while remaining a part of the EU, and the policies mentioned are certainly not new. On the podcast, he tells Isabel:
‘Even on a hot July day, I was thrown back by the blast of hot air that hit me from the leading article… We could have done all those things before Brexit, and some of them are incompatible with some of the others. And what they definitely are not is an answer to the populist, nativist cry of rage which was the Leave campaign.’
Whichever approach is adopted, it will need to be implemented by the Conservative Party under new leadership. James Forsyth tells us how the current leadership candidates stand when espousing these values of new conservatism:
‘In terms of the radicalism of the moment, I think Michael Gove is more there than anybody else. In terms of who these voters would find as a reassuring figure, Theresa May is more there… But if Britain is going to make a success of a post-Brexit world, there’s got to be more radicalism, not less.’
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