The Conservatives I No Longer Recognise
Written 08.10.2026
POLITICSCULTURETRADITIONPOST-IMPERIAL
Stefan-Niko Tanskalainen
10/7/20269 min read
The Conservatives I No Longer Recognise
I would describe myself as a Thatcherite.
Not because I believe that Britain can simply return to the 1980s, but because I still believe in the political principles behind Thatcherism: sovereignty, economic freedom, individual responsibility, political courage and the willingness to change the structure of a system rather than merely manage its consequences.
This is precisely why I increasingly struggle to recognise the modern Conservative Party.
The modern Conservatives have retained the language of conservatism while abandoning much of its political instinct.
They have become managerial.
In many respects, they have become Blairites with Conservative symbols.
And this is why I increasingly find Reform UK closer to my political instincts than the Conservative Party.
The Conservatives became Blairites
Tony Blair understood something that the modern Conservatives have absorbed almost completely: politics could be transformed into the management of consensus.
Take the centre ground.
Avoid unnecessary confrontation.
Accept the institutional framework already in place.
Change the rhetoric while preserving much of the structure.
This was successful for Labour because Blair understood that Britain had changed.
The problem is that the Conservatives increasingly adopted the same method without asking whether the underlying political settlement still worked.
The result is a party that often seems to manage Britain's decline rather than challenge its causes.
Brexit exposed this perfectly.
The Conservatives won the referendum's political aftermath and then failed to understand what the victory meant.
Brexit was supposed to be a political project
Brexit was not merely a technical decision about trade agreements.
It was a rejection of the assumption that Britain's political future should be increasingly determined through a European institutional framework.
The Conservatives understood this well enough to campaign on "Get Brexit Done".
But after Brexit was delivered, they never developed a convincing post-Brexit political model.
They treated sovereignty as an administrative achievement rather than as a political opportunity.
That failure now has an extraordinary consequence.
Britain has reached a point where Labour can seriously discuss reversing the strategic direction of Brexit.
The political establishment is once again discussing closer integration with the European Union, while the Conservative Party struggles to explain what Brexit was supposed to achieve in the first place.
That is not a failure of the electorate.
It is a failure of Conservative leadership.
If leaving the European Union was the defining political project of the Conservative government, then the party should have been prepared to defend the political consequences of leaving.
Instead, it spent years explaining why Brexit was more complicated than expected.
That is precisely the difference between Thatcherism and Blairism.
A Thatcherite asks:
What structure do we want?
A Blairite asks:
How can we manage the structure we already have?
The modern Conservative Party increasingly asks the second question.
Why Reform has filled the vacuum
This is why Reform UK has become such a serious political force.
I do not regard Reform as automatically correct.
But Reform understands something that the Conservatives have forgotten: voters do not necessarily want a more efficient version of the existing political settlement.
Sometimes they want the settlement changed.
Nigel Farage represents this instinct particularly clearly.
His political career was built around the idea that Britain's relationship with Europe was not simply a technical matter but a question of sovereignty.
The Conservatives eventually adopted that position because the electorate forced them to.
But once they had achieved the referendum result, they did not possess the political imagination to build the next stage.
Farage therefore remains politically relevant because he represents the unresolved part of Brexit.
The Conservatives are trying to defeat Reform electorally.
They should first ask why Reform exists.
The problem with Kemi Badenoch
This also explains why I am sceptical that Kemi Badenoch can restore the Conservative Party to its traditional political position.
My argument is not about race.
Nor is it an argument that ancestry determines political competence.
The problem is cultural representation.
A political party needs to be able to communicate instinctively with the electorate it claims to represent.
Badenoch's biography belongs to a newer, more globalised Britain. She was born in London to Nigerian parents and spent part of her childhood in Nigeria before returning to Britain.
Nigel Farage represents something different.
He is a product of an older British political culture and of a London that existed before the city became so profoundly internationalised.
That distinction matters.
Not because one Britain is morally superior to another.
But because political movements depend on recognition.
A large part of the traditional Conservative electorate wants to see its own historical experience reflected in its political representatives.
Farage can provide that recognition more naturally than the current Conservative leadership.
This is why the Conservatives' problem is deeper than party branding.
They have lost cultural continuity with part of their own electorate.
Britain missed the opportunity after Brexit
The Conservative Party could have used Brexit for something much more ambitious than simply reducing immigration.
It could have used it to redefine who Britain wanted to attract, who it wanted to bring back, and what kind of society it wanted to preserve.
This was a historic opportunity for a policy of repatriation.
Britain has millions of people of British origin living abroad. It also has communities around the world with historical, cultural and family connections to Britain. After Brexit, the Conservatives could have built a political project around bringing some of these people back — not simply as workers filling vacancies, but as people returning to participate in the continuation of British society.
That would have been a very different approach to migration.
The question would not simply have been:
How many people should Britain allow to enter?
It would have been:
Who should Britain actively want to come and strengthen the society that already exists?
This distinction is crucial.
A country does not preserve its traditions by putting them behind glass.
Traditions survive because people continue to live them, raise families within them, build institutions around them and bring them into the next generation.
Britain could therefore have pursued a policy that combined controlled immigration with active repatriation: encouraging Britons abroad to return, attracting people with genuine historical and cultural connections to Britain, and giving priority to those who wanted not merely to work in Britain but to become part of its long-term social fabric.
That would not have required Britain to become ethnically closed.
Quite the opposite.
A confident national culture can absorb people from different backgrounds precisely because it knows what it wants to preserve.
The Conservatives failed to articulate this.
They reduced the migration debate to numbers while failing to ask the much more important question of cultural continuity.
And that was particularly unfortunate after Brexit.
Because Brexit created a political opportunity to say something positive about Britain:
Britain is open to the world, but it is not culturally indifferent.
Britain welcomes people, but it also expects them to participate in the continuation of the country they have chosen.
Britain does not need to erase its traditions in order to accommodate newcomers.
Nor does it need to close itself to preserve them.
It needs enough confidence in its own culture that newcomers can actually join it.
This is what I mean by the Conservative Party's missed opportunity.
It could have built a post-Brexit coalition around sovereignty, repatriation, cultural continuity and economic openness.
Instead, it offered a succession of numerical immigration targets without a convincing answer to what Britain was trying to preserve.
That vacuum was inevitably going to be filled by someone else.
And Reform UK has understood this much more clearly than the Conservatives.
The language question
I notice this problem particularly strongly because of my own connection to the Celtic world.
The Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland had their own languages and political traditions.
Yet over a relatively short historical period, many of those languages were pushed towards the margins under English political and cultural dominance.
This history demonstrates something important.
Political power does not merely control territory.
It can influence which languages survive, which identities become prestigious and which cultures become peripheral.
The Soviet experience provides an interesting counterexample.
The Soviet Union was obviously not a liberal democracy, and its nationalities policy changed considerably over time.
But during the early Soviet period, korenizatsiya actively promoted local languages and national cultures. In Ukraine, Ukrainisation was promoted during the 1920s.
Later Soviet policy changed, and Russian became increasingly dominant.
The important lesson is not that the Soviet Union should be romanticised.
The lesson is that linguistic diversity can be either incorporated into a political system or transformed into a political conflict.
Britain should understand this better than most countries.
Yet when it comes to Ukraine and Russia, British political discourse has increasingly done the opposite.
It has simplified the linguistic question.
The Russian question
The same simplification has taken place with Russia.
I do not believe that Russia's actions should be excused.
But I strongly reject the idea that Russian politics can be understood by reducing Russia to a single category: aggression.
For years, Western policy increasingly treated Russia as something to be managed through its former Soviet periphery.
The political interests of countries such as Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states were understandably important to Western governments.
But the strategic consequence was that Russia itself was increasingly treated as though its own political and security calculations could simply be disregarded.
That was a mistake.
It was possible to support Ukrainian sovereignty without pretending that Russia did not have a strategic relationship with the region.
It was possible to oppose Russian influence without pretending that Russian security thinking did not exist.
Instead, Western policy increasingly turned a complicated historical relationship into a binary political narrative.
And when Russia eventually responded through aggressive military action, the complexity disappeared almost completely.
Russia became the villain.
Ukraine became the victim.
The preceding history became almost irrelevant.
That is not serious statecraft.
It is narrative management.
The British role
Britain has played an especially important role in this process.
British foreign policy has traditionally possessed something that many countries lack: the ability to think in terms of institutions, balance of power and long-term state interests.
But contemporary British politics often substitutes moral language for strategic thinking.
Russia is condemned.
Ukraine is supported.
The West is united.
The problem is that none of these statements constitutes a strategy for ending the conflict.
A Thatcherite approach would ask a different question:
What political structure would make the conflict unnecessary?
That is a much more difficult question.
But it is also the only question that matters if the objective is peace rather than permanent mobilisation.
Britain should build the solution
This is where I differ fundamentally from the Blairite instinct.
The answer is not to endlessly manage the conflict.
It is not to keep adding another sanctions package, another weapons package, another summit and another declaration.
At some point, somebody has to propose a new institutional structure.
Britain is uniquely positioned to do this.
One of the ideas I have proposed is radically simple: move the institutional centre of the United Nations to London.
That sounds almost absurd only because we have become accustomed to treating international institutions as immovable objects.
They are not.
The United Nations was created as an institutional response to a particular historical catastrophe.
Its institutional geography can also be reconsidered when the existing architecture fails to produce political results.
London could become a permanent political centre for negotiations between states that currently have no effective framework for resolving their disputes.
That would be a profoundly Thatcherite act.
Not because Thatcher would necessarily have proposed exactly this solution.
But because the principle is the same:
Do not simply manage a broken system. Change the system.
Britain does not need to choose between Washington and Moscow.
It does not need to become Brussels' subordinate.
And it does not need to become Russia's defender.
It can instead attempt something much more ambitious:
to become the place where competing powers are forced back into a political framework.
That is what a sovereign power should do.
This is what the Conservatives have forgotten
This brings me back to the Conservative Party.
The Conservatives once understood that Britain could change the political environment rather than simply adapt to it.
That was the essence of Thatcherism.
Thatcher did not accept that Britain's economic model was simply something to be managed.
She changed it.
The modern Conservatives have increasingly done the opposite.
They accept the institutional framework and negotiate around its edges.
They accept the political culture and modify its rhetoric.
They accept the international system and complain about its consequences.
That is Blairism.
And it is why I increasingly find Reform more politically relevant than the Conservatives.
Not because Reform has solved every problem.
Not because Farage is necessarily the answer to every question.
But because Reform is occupying a political space that the Conservatives abandoned.
The choice facing the Conservatives
The Conservative Party therefore has a choice.
It can continue to attack Reform.
It can continue to describe Farage as the problem.
It can continue to promise moderate management.
Or it can rediscover the reason people once voted Conservative.
That means taking sovereignty seriously.
It means treating Brexit as a beginning rather than an administrative inconvenience.
It means creating a real philosophy of British citizenship.
It means understanding that cultural continuity matters.
It means conducting foreign policy through strategy rather than slogans.
And it means being willing to change institutions when institutions no longer produce political stability.
I do not think Britain needs another party that promises to manage decline more efficiently.
Britain needs a political movement willing to say that the structure itself can be changed.
That is what I understood Thatcherism to mean.
And that is precisely why I no longer recognise the modern Conservative Party as Thatcherite.