Jack Peters is a Researcher at Onward
Four days after the last General Election, Suella Braverman claimed “.” Mass migration, net-zero legislation, and a punishingly high tax burden were not in the best interest of either country or party. But attributing these failures to liberalism is an irritating Americanism that stops us understanding exactly what happened.
The Scottish Enlightenment gave Britain a liberal tradition rooted in empiricism, not utopian design. Adam Smith and David Hume left a set of timeless principles: the economy cannot be designed from the top down, free trade and free markets enable prosperity, and a free society rests on shared rules, conventions, and norms. These liberal principles are the ones most frequently retreated from in government.
The Plan for Growth, The Growth Plan, A Budget for Growth. The only thing missing was actual growth; GDP per head was nearly £11,000 lower than if pre-2008 growth trends had continued. Tax cuts sounded nice until they meant further spending cuts. Deficit reduction had to be prioritised and Covid spending strained the public finances but neither excuses leaving office with the highest tax burden since 1949.
We were never radical enough on planning. Blockers organise more easily than the diffuse beneficiaries of new homes, and we did nothing to rebalance that. Too often, we caved in to short-term interests and offered local communities too few reasons to say yes, through street votes or land readjustment (as Onward has advocated).
Net zero by 2050 was nodded through the Commons without a division, despite Chancellor Philip Hammond’s warning that it would cost “well in excess of a trillion pounds”. This is an example of what I call the nasty party complex. It was right to accept the reality of climate change, and end three-line whips on moral issues such as gay adoption. But compassion quickly slipped into illiberal policy, enabling the rise of progressive authoritarianism. Another case was state-sanctioned equality, diversity, and inclusion that divided people into insider and outsider groups, eroding personal identity in favour of an Olympics of oppression.
Mass migration meant millions of people arrived in Britain with little grasp of the norms and conventions that make our society function. Some of them will come to cherish those norms more than those of us who know no different, but assimilation is a lengthy process.
Post-liberals would argue this was the natural conclusion of market capitalism; there certainly are classically liberal economists who would agree. But Smith and the empirical tradition of liberalism did not mistake man for . Human capacity for sympathy is strongest among people who share the same habits and expectations. That’s why assimilation takes time.
At the 2025 ARC Conference Kemi Badenoch said that “it’s not liberal values that are the problem, it’s weakness.” She was right. We were too willing to defer to everything except our values: short-term electoral incentives, technocrats, polls, the Islington dinner party we weren’t invited to anyway.
This is where comes in. On the economy, it recovers the principles Adam Smith set out 250 years ago in The Wealth of Nations. The state will get back to its core functions, security, justice, and public goods, and do them well. £36 billion of cuts will be made to the welfare system (£4.5 billion coming from Onward’s Through the Roof report on housing benefit). This enables easy taxes: the abolition of stamp duty, smoothing out of the punitive £100k childcare cliff edge, and halving employers NI for 21-24 year olds. Government of system, by net zero and the public sector equality duty will be repealed.
A sceptical reader would be right to say that this newfound steel is yet to be tested, but there are reasons to be quietly optimistic. Badenoch is genuinely interested in ideas and working out policy from first principles, rejecting fashionable (illiberal) ideas on the right such as protectionism and heavy-handed industrial strategy. She also has sticking power, as demonstrated by her first year. Delivering this agenda will require trade-offs that create short-term losers. A leader who would rather be a celebrity is more likely to chicken out.
To move beyond stabilisation into the next phase of renewal, the party faces two tests: one electoral, one of policy.
First, the party must reach beyond its comfortable southern base. That is the mission which guided the founding of Onward, and should guide the next stages of policy renewal. The party should double down on a radical pro-growth, pro-ownership agenda to reach aspirational voters and HENRYs, even if that means facing up to trade-offs on the triple lock.
Second, AI is likely to be the most powerful general purpose technology we have ever encountered. Data centres are going to be too important to let them go the way of housing. Building computers is how Britain secures access to frontier models, and access is what drives diffusion across the whole economy. Policy should take local people’s concerns seriously, by creating benefits for them, not by imposing blanket bans.
Margaret Thatcher famously said that “the Scots invented Thatcherism long before I was thought of.” The Conservative Party treats Thatcher like a comfort blanket, turning back to her battles and aesthetics in times of crisis. But Thatcher didn’t win by imitating anyone. She won as she built a novel policy platform based on the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment and had the guts to stick it out. The only good thing about opposition is that we have had time to rediscover those values. Now we must hold firm.