Right move: will Britain benefit from the global conservative turn?

The world appears to be turning on its axis – and moving hard to the right. The New World is tilting hardest. In Argentina, Javier Milei is taking a chainsaw to bureaucracy. In the US, Donald Trump is poised to deport migrants, deregulate the economy and drill, baby, drill. Canada’s tendresse for the maple-syrupy liberal Justin Trudeau has chilled into a bitter determination to oust him in favour of the anti-woke, pro-growth ‘true conservative’ Pierre Poilievre. 

And where the New World has led, the Old is following. Giorgia Meloni is now Europe’s most consequential leader – upholder of some pretty traditional values with a strikingly hard policy on migration. Germany goes to the polls next month, with the next chancellor likely to be CDU’s Friedrich Merz, a man to the right of his party predecessor Angela Merkel. Challenging hard in second place is the far right AfD, buoyed by Elon Musk’s endorsement, and potentially eclipsing the current Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD.

One country, however, seems to be the exception to this rule. Our own. While other democracies play their part in the Great Moving Right Show, Britain under Keir Starmer appears to be putting on a revival of the old classic Socialism in One Country. 

But if we look beyond Westminster, study the currents of public opinion and pay close attention to the data, then we can see that Britain is not moving to the left in line with its government. The British public are instead moving consistently right – on different issues at different paces, yes – but still, decisively, away from Labour.

Over the past year or so, the public have shifted from giving 38 per cent of their vote to the collective right to nearer 50 per cent. This change has happened even as there has been a near-constant struggle for supremacy on the right between the Conservatives and Reform.