20 January 2025

Why Trump 2.0 will transform British conservatism

By

Inauguration Day is here again, and what a difference four years makes.

Trump is back, and Trump’s version of conservatism looks like it has a future in a way that once seemed unimaginable.

On Inauguration Day four years ago, I had just moved to America. Back then, it was Britain’s conservatism that looked like the success story.

Under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives had recently secured their largest election win since Margaret Thatcher. The beneficiaries of Brexit, they had been handed a massive mandate to govern the country differently.

American conservatism, by contrast, was in a mess.

After a turbulent first term in the White House, Trump had lost to Joe Biden. Worse, for all the controversy he had provoked, Trump seemed to have relatively little to show for it. Then came January 6, the low point for American conservatism, when a rabble barged into the Capitol in Washington.

Fast forward four years, and things are 180 degrees different.

On July 4 last year, Britain’s Conservatives went down to their worst ever defeat. On November 5, America’s Republicans under Trump won the highest share of the popular vote in 20 years.

It’s not just the fortunes of the parties that has flipped.

The idea that anyone might have anything positive to learn about how to govern a country from Britain’s Conservatives seems absurd. Gifted the opportunity to govern post-Brexit Britain differently, Boris Johnson instead doubled down on every failed orthodoxy of the past 30 years. From climate change and criminal justice to multiculturalism and monetary policy, British conservatives took an essentially Blairite script and made it their own.

Trump, long viewed by establishment conservatives as an aberration, doubled down in a different direction. Unapologetically anti-mass immigration and ‘woke’ ideology, Trump’s raw conservatism carried first the primary voters, then a majority across America.

Meanwhile a similarly unfiltered, uninhibited conservatism, often dismissed contemptuously as mere ‘populism’, made Javier Milei President in Argentina and Georgia Meloni Prime Minister of Italy. It even put Nigel Farage in the House of Commons in my old seat of Clacton.

There are a number of key ways in which Britain’s Conservatives need to become more Trumpy, or risk irrelevance. 

First, Trump points to the fact that British conservatism needs to become a radically anti-establishment movement committed to a step change in the way the country is run. The failure of the Conservative Party to tap into widespread anti-politics sentiment means there is now a very real danger they may be eclipsed by Reform.

When Trump was first elected in 2016, he came to office as yet another in a long line of conservatives promising less government. Ill-prepared for the intransigence of the administrative state which routinely manoeuvred against him, Trump 1.0 failed to ‘drain the swamp’. Government continued to grow.

As the 45th President, Trump learnt the hard way the extent to which public policy in DC is determined by an unelected cabal, irrespective of who voters put in the White House. 

What makes him such a threat to the administrative state as the 47th President is that he has had four years to figure out what to do about it. Expect to see more than the removal from office of intransigent officials. I expect we shall see a number of federal departments and agencies shut down.

In Britain, permanent officials have subverted the democratic process to an even greater extent than in America. 

The civil service has drafted a Civil Service code and a Ministerial Code, notably under Gus O’Donnell (now Lord O’Donnell, of course), that empowers officials, enabling them to effectively ignore ministerial direction.

Worse, Britain’s supposedly impartial civil servants can and have engineered the removal from office of those the public elected: harrying Dominic Raab as Foreign Secretary, ousting Boris Johnson as Prime Minister over the issue of whether he attended an office birthday party and orchestrating a coup against Liz Truss.

If Britain’s Conservatives want to exercise power again, they need to go into full Trump mode in their approach to the civil service. In opposition, they need a plan to defenestrate Sir Humphrey and the legion of judicial activists (if necessary, invoking Orders In Council, over Acts of Parliament). If they don’t, they will lack credibility with a public that has woken up to the fact the country is run by inept officials.

Like almost every President since Reagan, Trump as the 45th President displayed blithe disregard for the growth of America’s national debt. This could be about to change.

Elon Musk, who has been put in charge of the Department Of Government Efficiency, or DOGE (more of a taskforce than a department), recognises that the US government is accumulating debt at an unsustainable rate. Unless action is taken, debt will erode American prosperity, posing a bigger threat to America’s status as a superpower than Russia or China.

DOGE seems to have adopted a two-strand strategy to reduce the deficit; first proposals to scale back spending, with reforms on everything from procurement policy to perhaps even entitlement programmes. Strand two would be a radical process of deregulation, removing red tape in order to stimulate more growth. More growth and less spending would, in time, eliminate the deficit.

As Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch should consider something similar. 

For as long as anyone can remember, those that made foreign policy in London or Washington have been essentially supranationalists. That is to say, they believe authority is derived from international treaties, and that the international order is maintained by supranational agreements and organisations.

Trump, by contrast, is a national sovereigntist, and authority comes, in his eyes, from nation states. There is now a real danger that this puts Britain on a collision course with the Trump administration.

Persistent efforts by civil servants inside the British Foreign Office to hand over the Chagos Islands to China’s ally, Mauritius, in order to meet some spurious obligation to some international court, are not just anathema to the Trumpists. They are likely to be regarded as hostile to US interests. 

British Conservatives must not only abandon supranationalism in favour of national sovereigntism. The true conservative position should be to treat those Foreign Office officials behind the proposed Chagos island deal as latter-day versions of Burgess and Maclean. 

Even more consequential than the election of Donald Trump as the 47th President is the so-called ‘vibe shift’ that put him there.

For generations, the silenced majority of people in America, Britain and almost every Western state have been deceived and lied to by a left-leaning media. 

Current events were reported entirely through the prism of the media’s preferred narratives. On crime, education, immigration and multiculturalism, inconvenient stories that did not match a preconceived media narrative were ignored. Events that reinforced the narrative were amplified. In Britain, the media produced more stories about the death of George Floyd, 4,000 miles away in America, than they did about rape gangs in dozens of towns a few miles away.

The media narratives so often, we can now see, were fiction.

Men, the media insisted until only a few months ago, could become women. Genders, they tried to make us believe, were fluid. Even today, we are endlessly told that unequal socioeconomic outcomes are due to unequal opportunities rather than unequal distribution of aptitude.

When Elon Musk bought X / Twitter, he saved free speech and in doing so saved us from the media narratives and falsehoods we have been constantly fed.

The ability of the old media to sustain fake narratives has quite suddenly and dramatically collapsed. The truth that starts to emerge is going to be far more conservative than even many conservatives in Britain or America yet realise. 

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Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, one of America’s leading state-based think tanks. He was previously the Member of Parliament for Clacton for 12 years.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.