I particularly enjoyed the line about cherishing our social infrastructure. Libraries and museums (many free in the UK) insist that there’s more than one vantage point to view the world, more than one history hidden within a narrative, more than one voice that deserves to be heard. And then we get… more ideas!
I am a neoliberal who admires the legacy of Hayek-Thatcher from across the Atlantic, but I enjoyed this fresh center-left perspective on British politics.
Sadly, much like the MAGA right, the left seems prone to being captured by its radicals, from the firebrand trade union leaders during the Winter of Discontent to the “anti-racists” racists who seized control of both our country's elite institutions during the Great Awokening of 2014 to 2020.
Collectivism is a dead end and must be opposed by all thinking people. This essay is a good start!
A founding essay that takes ideas seriously. That is rarer than it should be, and Arguably begins with the right question: progressives need an overarching philosophy, not just a policy menu.
But I think the essay stops one floor short of where the logic is pointing. Every reform you propose — flexicurity, welfare reconstruction, electoral change, decentralisation, rejoining Europe — requires sustained implementation across multiple electoral cycles. Our current system cannot deliver that. One government builds; the next unwinds. The Labour investments of the 1960s were dismantled in the 1980s; the liberal reforms of the 1990s were eroded in the 2010s. No government, however philosophically coherent, can protect its efforts from the next one that decides to tear it down.
That is not an argument against a progressive programme. It is an argument for the constitutional infrastructure that would let one survive. State-funded elections, a codified constitution, proportional representation as part of something larger, a second chamber chosen by civic lottery rather than donor patronage. Without that, progressive ideas keep arriving, getting partially enacted, and then getting rolled back. The pattern is not accidental. It is what an uncodified system does.
The Keynes reference in your closing paragraph is well-chosen. But Keynes wrote in 1930 about societies that still had the capacity to choose ambition. The question for 2026 is whether Britain still has the structural capacity to do so — and whether any philosophy, however well argued, can land in a system designed to reset itself every five years.
Progressives need ideas that extend beyond simplistic messaging. Positioning growth as a means to fund and legitimise wealth redistribution elides the differences in kinds of growth. Moreover it risks reviving a Croslandite settlement that forgoes the role of the state in shaping market outcomes and risks maintaining Britain’s laggard status in the global green industrial race. Its time for an ideology that sets out what it means to be an active and agile state, responding at pace to crises of inequality and environment.
The appeal to John Maynard Keynes and moderation rings hollow if it asks people to ignore what they’ve actually been put through. It’s easy to warn against “extremes,” but much harder to acknowledge the real damage—families under strain, children growing up in instability, and communities carrying burdens that others don’t seem to feel at all.
Some have come through this with more power, more security—a deeper “hole” filled in their favor—while others are left dealing with the fallout. To those on the losing side, calls for patience or unity can sound less like leadership and more like dismissal. Even worse is the sense that narratives have been shaped without honest discussion: accusations raised, reputations affected, but no real accountability or open reckoning.
If simply raising alternatives or questioning the path forward triggered backlash before, then it’s fair to ask whether this was ever a genuine conversation to begin with. You can’t claim progress or a “win” if people feel silenced, misrepresented, or humiliated along the way.
A future worth “reclaiming” has to start with honesty about the present—who paid the price, who benefited, and why. Without that, it’s not a shared future at all; it’s just a reframing of the same imbalance.
So closing with this, when things are done decent and in order it should all work out. YOU CAN’T BUILD A SOLID FOUNDATION BUILT ON LIES.
I will treat your words as if you are in fact talking from a place of true bipartisanship and belief, not one of cynical vote-laundering. With this in mind you apply far too much idealistic thinking to a re-approachment with the EU, time and again they have displayed a vindictive desire to punish the British nation and the British people. They punish the nation through openly hostile geopolitical stances, over half the EU does not even recognise our sovereignty over the Falklands, but through deliberate attempts to make the lives of British tourists and migrants personally miserable, forcing them through customs checks that are not in fact applied equally to all non-EU states as FBPE’ers like to claim. You may claim that the EU bureaucracy recognises the Falklands as British, and that the opinions of its member states is not irrelevant, but if that is the case then either the EU’s bureaucracy is entirely disconnected from the will of its constituent nations, or the EU will adopt this anti-Falklands stance officially in the near future.
As with most ‘centre-left’ attempts to revitalise the decaying husk of informed political debate in the West you where possible dodge any and all debate topics that are currently under actual heated contention.
Migration, the deciding factor behind Britain leaving the EU, is given a single lukewarm sentence that we have all heard before about how its ‘necessary’ and thus in your mind ‘not up for debate’. Starting your so-called founding essay with a deliberately vague non-interaction with an issue that is consistently presented as either the first or second most pressing amongst the general public shows very little promise indeed for your hoped for discourse reset.
Social problems in general seem almost entirely absent from this founding essay, you seem to believe that social realities and social health lies directly downstream from economic health, that if you simply throw enough bread and circuses at the Proles they will all get along in cosmopolitan harmony. You are entitled to this belief but it is a highly elitist one, and it relies on continued economic growth and prosperity, which history shows is far from guaranteed. And no, your part about ‘human flourishing’ does not in the slightest count as a true social platform.
To completely ignore the realities of the Culture War, for yes that is what we are under, call it an imported Americanism all you wish but that does not change the fact that, for worse, we are currently engaged in an ever spiralling societal death-war over certain social policies and laws, displays either cynical pragmatism in a deliberate attempt to play to both sides and suddenly reveal your true loyalties should you gain power, which entirely undermines the attempted ‘heart’ of your essay, or simple ignorance.
But I will not make the mistake most commonly committed by Rightists in only focusing on your social issues, or lack of them.
Your part about the Danish welfare model of flexicurity is woefully under-explored, do you mean for us to adopt it entirely? Or for Flexicurity With British Characteristics? You are, in essence, proposing a complete restructuring of how our labour market works in a single paragraph that just points at a foreign nation and says ‘their system is better than ours’. What of the fact our Union Density is 40% lower than that of Denmark? What of the politicisation of said unions?
You also project your ‘reforms’ to the triple lock as something that will break said lock, but an actual interaction with your linked study shows that the three locks are still in place, and are simply made less generous. It even states there is no recourse for the pension-dividend to decrease! You are simply applying the brakes to a train that is careening off of a cliff, you won’t get to the cliff as quickly, but you’re still heading for it. You also utilise a rejection of means-testing benefits simply because it faced public backlash, something that reads as strange considering your general vague desire of increasing taxation.
Your paragraph about student loans is also entirely negative, you do not propose solutions only condemnations, no proposition that such loans should be free of usurious interest rates, no suggestion the system should be entirely subsumed by the government with a set but fair interest rate, not even a suggestion that higher education should be entirely free!
Here is the closest you come to addressing actual social issues, the wish for solidarity is as ever heartwarming, but saying things ‘should’ be one way when they aren’t is not good enough. How are you going to bridge the generational divide and end Age Conflict? What is your proof that the young care about what happens to the old and the old care about what happens to the young? Applying humanistic principles without analysis makes you look idealistic in the worst way possible.
You say that we must raise income taxes to dig us out of our fiscal hole, that is not true, we have to raise state revenue, of which income taxes is a singular, if important, part. You later point out London’s abysmal tax retention rate as something that must be fixed, yet you do not mention how much of Britain’s ‘true’ national tax income is simply never collected, increasing taxes won’t solve that it will achieve the opposite. Rather than increasing the burden on the young and lower-middle classes through flat increases why not first reform the system so that the taxes that are already imposed are actually being extracted? How ‘shared’ of a sacrifice is it if a person on minimum wage faces the same tax increase as a millionaire?
I extend tepid agreement to your points about furthering cooperation with Europe, I was too young to vote on Brexit, but I would likely put myself in the bucket of ‘Remain at the time, Stay Out now’. But as I stated at the beginning of this response Europe has not tried to be friend of Britain in the slightest, they will punish and mutilate us economically should we attempt to reintegrate with them through sheer vindictive spite. I admit ignorance to that ‘Frère Jacques’ incident until you spoke of it, with my age again being to blame, but to frame it as part of a general ‘classism’ is suspect. Do you mean the propagation of a Class War of the British Proletariat versus the Brussels Intelligentsia?
I admit great disinterest in your calls for electoral or legislative reform, primarily because the modern centrist adherence to ‘democracy’ is wholly conditional. For no current figure, yourself included, truly believes in ‘democracy’, there is always a group you believe should be disenfranchised, populists, communists, fascists, etc. Those of your faction believe in a managed technocracy where democratic institutions, and by extension the people themselves, exist purely to rubber stamp your agendas. The moment the electorate rejects your cosmopolitan orthodoxies, such as through populist parties or Brexit, your immediate instinct is to disenfranchise them, circumventing the ballot box through judicial activism, and the administrative state. Your very essay calls for the reinforcement of unelected 'special advisers' to enforce political direction. Don’t disguise your desire for a more efficient liberal oligarchy as a crusade for democratic legitimacy. I have no personal problem with viewing the public as something to be paternalistically managed, but if you are doing so at least have the decency to be honest about it.
Your closing appeal to Keynes and your earlier romanticisation of the ‘veil of ignorance’ is the best summation of the pervasive evasiveness present throughout your essay. Keynes could afford optimism in 1930 as he was projecting onto a blank canvas of technological possibility. You, by contrast, are painting over a cracked wall. You gesture at the diseases but only cure their symptoms, never straying far from pre-Brexit managerial comforts. A slightly less generous triple lock, slightly warmer relations with the EU, a Danish labour policy imported entirely without analysis of whether British trade unions and trade law would even support it, and an attempt to ignore the Culture War and societal pressures in general.
It is a pure maintenance manual for the British state, a founding essay for a new journal of ideas should have answered the hardest questions first: what are you personally willing to sacrifice? Instead the ‘sacrifice’ is yet again spread so thin that only the young and the poor are actually impacted by it.
I particularly enjoyed the line about cherishing our social infrastructure. Libraries and museums (many free in the UK) insist that there’s more than one vantage point to view the world, more than one history hidden within a narrative, more than one voice that deserves to be heard. And then we get… more ideas!
I am a neoliberal who admires the legacy of Hayek-Thatcher from across the Atlantic, but I enjoyed this fresh center-left perspective on British politics.
Sadly, much like the MAGA right, the left seems prone to being captured by its radicals, from the firebrand trade union leaders during the Winter of Discontent to the “anti-racists” racists who seized control of both our country's elite institutions during the Great Awokening of 2014 to 2020.
Collectivism is a dead end and must be opposed by all thinking people. This essay is a good start!
A founding essay that takes ideas seriously. That is rarer than it should be, and Arguably begins with the right question: progressives need an overarching philosophy, not just a policy menu.
But I think the essay stops one floor short of where the logic is pointing. Every reform you propose — flexicurity, welfare reconstruction, electoral change, decentralisation, rejoining Europe — requires sustained implementation across multiple electoral cycles. Our current system cannot deliver that. One government builds; the next unwinds. The Labour investments of the 1960s were dismantled in the 1980s; the liberal reforms of the 1990s were eroded in the 2010s. No government, however philosophically coherent, can protect its efforts from the next one that decides to tear it down.
That is not an argument against a progressive programme. It is an argument for the constitutional infrastructure that would let one survive. State-funded elections, a codified constitution, proportional representation as part of something larger, a second chamber chosen by civic lottery rather than donor patronage. Without that, progressive ideas keep arriving, getting partially enacted, and then getting rolled back. The pattern is not accidental. It is what an uncodified system does.
The Keynes reference in your closing paragraph is well-chosen. But Keynes wrote in 1930 about societies that still had the capacity to choose ambition. The question for 2026 is whether Britain still has the structural capacity to do so — and whether any philosophy, however well argued, can land in a system designed to reset itself every five years.
Progressives need ideas that extend beyond simplistic messaging. Positioning growth as a means to fund and legitimise wealth redistribution elides the differences in kinds of growth. Moreover it risks reviving a Croslandite settlement that forgoes the role of the state in shaping market outcomes and risks maintaining Britain’s laggard status in the global green industrial race. Its time for an ideology that sets out what it means to be an active and agile state, responding at pace to crises of inequality and environment.
⸻
The appeal to John Maynard Keynes and moderation rings hollow if it asks people to ignore what they’ve actually been put through. It’s easy to warn against “extremes,” but much harder to acknowledge the real damage—families under strain, children growing up in instability, and communities carrying burdens that others don’t seem to feel at all.
Some have come through this with more power, more security—a deeper “hole” filled in their favor—while others are left dealing with the fallout. To those on the losing side, calls for patience or unity can sound less like leadership and more like dismissal. Even worse is the sense that narratives have been shaped without honest discussion: accusations raised, reputations affected, but no real accountability or open reckoning.
If simply raising alternatives or questioning the path forward triggered backlash before, then it’s fair to ask whether this was ever a genuine conversation to begin with. You can’t claim progress or a “win” if people feel silenced, misrepresented, or humiliated along the way.
A future worth “reclaiming” has to start with honesty about the present—who paid the price, who benefited, and why. Without that, it’s not a shared future at all; it’s just a reframing of the same imbalance.
So closing with this, when things are done decent and in order it should all work out. YOU CAN’T BUILD A SOLID FOUNDATION BUILT ON LIES.
I will treat your words as if you are in fact talking from a place of true bipartisanship and belief, not one of cynical vote-laundering. With this in mind you apply far too much idealistic thinking to a re-approachment with the EU, time and again they have displayed a vindictive desire to punish the British nation and the British people. They punish the nation through openly hostile geopolitical stances, over half the EU does not even recognise our sovereignty over the Falklands, but through deliberate attempts to make the lives of British tourists and migrants personally miserable, forcing them through customs checks that are not in fact applied equally to all non-EU states as FBPE’ers like to claim. You may claim that the EU bureaucracy recognises the Falklands as British, and that the opinions of its member states is not irrelevant, but if that is the case then either the EU’s bureaucracy is entirely disconnected from the will of its constituent nations, or the EU will adopt this anti-Falklands stance officially in the near future.
As with most ‘centre-left’ attempts to revitalise the decaying husk of informed political debate in the West you where possible dodge any and all debate topics that are currently under actual heated contention.
Migration, the deciding factor behind Britain leaving the EU, is given a single lukewarm sentence that we have all heard before about how its ‘necessary’ and thus in your mind ‘not up for debate’. Starting your so-called founding essay with a deliberately vague non-interaction with an issue that is consistently presented as either the first or second most pressing amongst the general public shows very little promise indeed for your hoped for discourse reset.
Social problems in general seem almost entirely absent from this founding essay, you seem to believe that social realities and social health lies directly downstream from economic health, that if you simply throw enough bread and circuses at the Proles they will all get along in cosmopolitan harmony. You are entitled to this belief but it is a highly elitist one, and it relies on continued economic growth and prosperity, which history shows is far from guaranteed. And no, your part about ‘human flourishing’ does not in the slightest count as a true social platform.
To completely ignore the realities of the Culture War, for yes that is what we are under, call it an imported Americanism all you wish but that does not change the fact that, for worse, we are currently engaged in an ever spiralling societal death-war over certain social policies and laws, displays either cynical pragmatism in a deliberate attempt to play to both sides and suddenly reveal your true loyalties should you gain power, which entirely undermines the attempted ‘heart’ of your essay, or simple ignorance.
But I will not make the mistake most commonly committed by Rightists in only focusing on your social issues, or lack of them.
Your part about the Danish welfare model of flexicurity is woefully under-explored, do you mean for us to adopt it entirely? Or for Flexicurity With British Characteristics? You are, in essence, proposing a complete restructuring of how our labour market works in a single paragraph that just points at a foreign nation and says ‘their system is better than ours’. What of the fact our Union Density is 40% lower than that of Denmark? What of the politicisation of said unions?
You also project your ‘reforms’ to the triple lock as something that will break said lock, but an actual interaction with your linked study shows that the three locks are still in place, and are simply made less generous. It even states there is no recourse for the pension-dividend to decrease! You are simply applying the brakes to a train that is careening off of a cliff, you won’t get to the cliff as quickly, but you’re still heading for it. You also utilise a rejection of means-testing benefits simply because it faced public backlash, something that reads as strange considering your general vague desire of increasing taxation.
Your paragraph about student loans is also entirely negative, you do not propose solutions only condemnations, no proposition that such loans should be free of usurious interest rates, no suggestion the system should be entirely subsumed by the government with a set but fair interest rate, not even a suggestion that higher education should be entirely free!
Here is the closest you come to addressing actual social issues, the wish for solidarity is as ever heartwarming, but saying things ‘should’ be one way when they aren’t is not good enough. How are you going to bridge the generational divide and end Age Conflict? What is your proof that the young care about what happens to the old and the old care about what happens to the young? Applying humanistic principles without analysis makes you look idealistic in the worst way possible.
You say that we must raise income taxes to dig us out of our fiscal hole, that is not true, we have to raise state revenue, of which income taxes is a singular, if important, part. You later point out London’s abysmal tax retention rate as something that must be fixed, yet you do not mention how much of Britain’s ‘true’ national tax income is simply never collected, increasing taxes won’t solve that it will achieve the opposite. Rather than increasing the burden on the young and lower-middle classes through flat increases why not first reform the system so that the taxes that are already imposed are actually being extracted? How ‘shared’ of a sacrifice is it if a person on minimum wage faces the same tax increase as a millionaire?
I extend tepid agreement to your points about furthering cooperation with Europe, I was too young to vote on Brexit, but I would likely put myself in the bucket of ‘Remain at the time, Stay Out now’. But as I stated at the beginning of this response Europe has not tried to be friend of Britain in the slightest, they will punish and mutilate us economically should we attempt to reintegrate with them through sheer vindictive spite. I admit ignorance to that ‘Frère Jacques’ incident until you spoke of it, with my age again being to blame, but to frame it as part of a general ‘classism’ is suspect. Do you mean the propagation of a Class War of the British Proletariat versus the Brussels Intelligentsia?
I admit great disinterest in your calls for electoral or legislative reform, primarily because the modern centrist adherence to ‘democracy’ is wholly conditional. For no current figure, yourself included, truly believes in ‘democracy’, there is always a group you believe should be disenfranchised, populists, communists, fascists, etc. Those of your faction believe in a managed technocracy where democratic institutions, and by extension the people themselves, exist purely to rubber stamp your agendas. The moment the electorate rejects your cosmopolitan orthodoxies, such as through populist parties or Brexit, your immediate instinct is to disenfranchise them, circumventing the ballot box through judicial activism, and the administrative state. Your very essay calls for the reinforcement of unelected 'special advisers' to enforce political direction. Don’t disguise your desire for a more efficient liberal oligarchy as a crusade for democratic legitimacy. I have no personal problem with viewing the public as something to be paternalistically managed, but if you are doing so at least have the decency to be honest about it.
Your closing appeal to Keynes and your earlier romanticisation of the ‘veil of ignorance’ is the best summation of the pervasive evasiveness present throughout your essay. Keynes could afford optimism in 1930 as he was projecting onto a blank canvas of technological possibility. You, by contrast, are painting over a cracked wall. You gesture at the diseases but only cure their symptoms, never straying far from pre-Brexit managerial comforts. A slightly less generous triple lock, slightly warmer relations with the EU, a Danish labour policy imported entirely without analysis of whether British trade unions and trade law would even support it, and an attempt to ignore the Culture War and societal pressures in general.
It is a pure maintenance manual for the British state, a founding essay for a new journal of ideas should have answered the hardest questions first: what are you personally willing to sacrifice? Instead the ‘sacrifice’ is yet again spread so thin that only the young and the poor are actually impacted by it.