The Danube Institute hosted an event dedicated to the great nation of the United Kingdom, titled ‘Renewing UK Politics: Conservative Challenges and the Road to Prosperity’. The panel featured two people from the London, UK-based conservative think tank Prosperity Institute, Senior Researcher Guy Dampier and Managing Director Dr Radomir Tylecote; as well as Visiting Fellow Doug Stokes from the Danube Institute. To balance out the panel in terms of the two institutes, Danube’s Executive Director István Kiss took on the role of the moderator.
Before giving the floor to the guests, Mr Kiss specified that free speech and Brexit would be the two major topics of the evening. As for the former topic, he cited Ayan Hirsi Ali’s article for The Spectator titled ‘The Death of Free Speech in Britain’ from August 2024, as the piece that alerted him to the issue.
Dr Tylecote concurred that there is in fact a major issue with the lack of free speech in the United Kingdom these days, despite the fact that he believes his home country and the United States have traditionally been the two most accommodating places in the world for free expression. Now, however, he believes that the United States is ahead in that regard of the UK. He believes that part of the problem is self-censorship, in places such as university campuses. For example, the lecture he gave arguing in favour of Brexit in Romania was deemed too controversial for the University of Cambridge.
When mass migration started to flow in the 1990s into Britain, the political leadership reverted back to their ‘imperial management style’, as he explained, and modified the criminal code against free speech principles in order to accommodate the sensitivities of immigrants of different ethnicities. Dr Tylecote cited so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’ that are tracked by the police as the most egregious examples of violations of free speech in the UK.
Mr Dampier pointed out that the Macpherson Report, produced after the murder of a black British citizen named Stephen Adrian Lawrence in a racially motivated attack in 1993, was what introduced the idea of ‘perceived prejudice’ to British law enforcement. From that point onward, racial prejudice did not have to be proven as a motive, it could be assumed based on certain facts of a case. The broader principle behind it was that a victim or perpetrator’s group identity became a paramount issue in criminal proceedings. By the 2010s, this led to a crisis as serious as the grooming gangs from Muslim-majority countries victimizing mostly young white girls in Britain—a scandal which Mr Dampier made a documentary film about—, which could not be dealt with properly for years because of its racial implications.
Mr Stokes lamented the fact that, despite the Conservative Party being in power for over a decade, they did not do enough to protect UK citizens’ free speech rights. He believes that the origins of these troubles can be traced back to the Equality Act of 2010, passed during the administration of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As he explained, the Act mandated the public sector to ‘promote harmony between the people of protected categories’. Mr Stokes also opined that the reason the Tory governments could not implement more free speech protection was because the bureaucrats of the ‘deep state’ of the UK were working against them.
On the topic of migration, Mr Dmapier said that had never been a top priority for the Conservative Party while they were in power, which he regards as one of their biggest failures. He believes that this was the case in part due to certain industries lobbying for cheaper labour. He brought up the case of a truck driver shortage in the early 2020s, which, after the original proposal of importing migrant truck drivers was abandoned, was solved by hiring domestic workers for higher wages and investing in better working conditions for them by the companies.
The other major topic of the evening, Brexit came up next. Dr Tylecote called it ‘the biggest statement of the return of the nation-state in geopolitics’. However, he also admitted that the United Kingdom had the ‘first movers’ disadvantage’ in leaving the European Union, thus the liberal elite reacted especially hostile to them in response. He also revealed that his organization, the Prosperity Institue produced an alternative proposition to the Chequers plan, which would have dictated that the UK follow EU regulations despite leaving the Union. Their alternative proposal was one of the reasons why the Chequers plan was eventually never implemented.
The prospects of future UK elections were also discussed.
‘Brexit was the biggest statement of the return of the nation-state in geopolitics’
Mr Stokes believes that the Conservative Party is not well served by having Kemi Badenoch as their leader, and her resignation would provide them better electoral chances. One of the reasons for that is that Badenoch and the right-wing populist Reform Party leader Nigel Farage are known to have not a great relationship with each other, thus her leadership makes a possible Conservative–Reform coalition less likely. Mr Dampier pointed out that while the Labour Party won in a major landslide in the 2024 election, they actually got fewer raw votes than in 2019, when they lost in a landslide. This, the speaker believes, demonstrates that there is a large right-leaning voter base in the UK that stayed out of the most recent election, who could be mobilized in the future.
Dr Tylecote has told the audience that in his opinion, the British public did not become more populist in recent decades, rather, the ruling elite became more globalist, which led to the rise of Farage and his political parties over the years.
Could the Reform party overtake the Conservatives and become the primary political force on the right in the UK, similarly to how Labour overtook the Liberals on the left in the 1990s? Mr Stokes is sceptical of that, arguing that the Reform Party is a ‘one-man show’ run by Farage. Meanwhile, Dr Tylecote pointed out that Reform is actually gaining support in areas where Labour used to perform well.
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