Guest talk delivered to Carlisle Reform Party Members Meeting, at Carlisle United Football Club, Carlisle, United Kingdom, 14th April 2026:

THE SHORT ANSWER to this important question is: A free society, where you and I can be ‘at home’. Two words we skip past very easily, freedom and home. But both are central to the project known as ‘British’. For Britishness must be a shared endeavour to secure the values of a free society. Where you and I can be ‘at home’.

“[Britain] laid the foundations of law, liberty, free speech, and individual rights virtually everywhere the Union Jack has ever flown,” offered Donald Trump, on the 17^th September 2025, during his state visit to Britain. A man of discernment after all?

The question then for government is how it discharges its responsibilities to enable a free society.

Roger Scruton writes: “Marxist history means rewriting history with class at the top of the agenda… Class is an attractive idea for left-wing historians because it denotes a thing that divides us…

Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty – these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us.”

The post-war consensus of a mixed economy created a confused social model, a hybrid of Marxist and conservative visions. This ended and we started on the road to Thatcher’s, then Blair-Brown’s, governance by unrestrained global markets.

As John Gray says: “Liberalism has once again become a creature eating its own tail…

(I should point out that in America liberal means socialist, and in the UK it means free markets.)

…liberals (socialists) denouncing the West as the most destructive force in history… [whilst insisting] Western values… human rights, personal autonomy… must be projected to the last corners of the Earth.” A religious belief that socialism and free markets have our best interests at heart. The Thatcher/Blair consensus is ending now with pressure to move towards economic nationalism. That is, to withdraw from dependence on cheap imports.

But back to the ideas of freedom and home.  

Home is where life is lived. Home is the place we learn our ‘obligations and duties’. We enter any space to discover we are naturally obliged: Loyalty, hospitality, family, and community. Once we spot our obligations, we feel the weight of our duty to take care of each other.

A teenager in the West has infinite choices, and experiences angst as a result. They become an adult by recognising their obligations and duties. By sacrificing our infinite teenage choices, choosing one partner, for life, committing to work, and serving each other we grow up into maturity.

But what an unrestrained global market says is you can have infinite choices forever, and need to make few commitments, as capital, that is money or any resource capable of making more resource, will set you free from obligations and duties. This is known as extreme liberalism. Or the cult of choice.

And Western institutions have aided and abetted infantilising modern liberal democratic citizens to be childlike consumers in the candy store of choice. The ‘We Generation’ has been replaced by the ‘Me Generation’. It is little wonder other societies struggle to respect the West and its ‘way of life’ as it has turned out under extreme liberalism.

David Goodhart’s writing spots the frailty of the Blair-Brown government’s market vision. To send 50% of our young people to university he says is emotionally illiterate. It is an investment in the head, not the heart. The point of education is to turn out courageous people with a vision for building their settlement. Not to become selfish and isolated, unrooted.

The Western model is rooted in privileging the heart above the head, and our faithfulness to home and family. We have lost our way. The path back is mapped out for us. It starts with a heart to tell the truth. An obligation. And then the duty to accept the brutal losses that telling the truth will bring. To think with our hearts.

Learning to fail through telling the truth is where early maturity turns into powerful leadership. Once we’ve absorbed the losses of truth, where else does it lead? To trust. And trust is the basis of civil society, or what we call free association. The great growth of British business, charity and civil society, the model that transformed the modern world, is rooted in the concept of trust.

As we have found over the centuries freedom is costly and fragile. For nearly fifty years our sovereign freedom was handed over to a bureaucratic monster, the European Union. Now, Keir Starmer wants us to realign to EU regulations. The iron cage of Brussels bureaucracy is being wielded again by a visionless anti-democratic administrative class.

And Britishness is disinterested, not uninterested, but disinterested, in what you call yourself, how you dress. Becoming or transitioning is a human necessity. We all do it. Banning the burqa is not British. It is petty legalism. Only a tragic society regulates clothing. The politics of resentment and grievance divides. As America has found.

But Britishness is interested in the unrestrained “capitalism [that] concentrates wealth and power in even smaller sections of society, university professors, media figures, lawyers, charity workers, community activists and officers in non-government organisations…”, as John Gray writes. This power means vulnerable human identity conforms to this narrow elite’s shaky self-serving desire to be ‘society’s guardians’. 

In 1974 Prime Minister Ted Heath, another plodding technocrat, during another energy crisis, famously asked in so many words: ‘Who governs Britain?’. Not you! Came the reply. In a television broadcast to the nation on 7th February, 1974, shortly after announcing that February’s general election, he said something which is real again: “The issue before you is a simple one. As a country, we face grave problems at home and abroad. Do you want a strong government which has clear authority for the future to take the decisions which will be needed?”

In other words people do not want government by EU committee or unrestrained markets. The British people want their parliament to govern. Where the words: I am a British citizen, civis Britannicus sum, really does mean something.

If you go back only a hundred years it was possible to live beyond the reach of government. No CCTV, or even passports. The historian A.J.P. Taylor in his Oxford English History said: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman… All this was changed by the impact of the Great War… The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time”.

And now the Labour government wishes to track you through digital ID surveillance. Are they mad? I think so.

If we look across the pond we see some large red flags. The US is tearing itself apart, between ‘conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives’. It has an unbending two-party system.  Theirs, like most modern liberal democracies, has coded its constitution as sovereign, where here in the UK, parliament reigns supreme, with its multi-party system.

By not chiseling a codified constitution into vulnerable school children’s brains it allows us to swim out into the sea of our long history. The Magna Carta (1215), the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Acts of Union (1707) all soak into parliamentary debate plus our bones, and pub quizzes.

We retain priests and princes in our landscape, for good and ill, as they filter and divert us before any rush to a supreme court to wield the law as an axe above the heads of parliamentarians. The Blair-Brown government’s efforts to install a continental system of government by technical expert committee and a politicised civil service has strained communities who have felt their franchise weakened. In other words European style managerialism, perfectly illustrated by our current Prime Minister, is one of the many threats to The Good Society.

MP and father of conservative politics, Edmund Burke, describes in his speech to the electors of Bristol in 1774 what has become the classic statement of the relationship between Members of Parliament and their constituents:

“To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men… [but] Parliament is not a Congress of Ambassadors from different and hostile interests… Parliament is a deliberative Assembly of one Nation, with one Interest… the general Good, resulting from the general Reason of the whole.”

In other words, and this sounds odd to our ears, an MP is to give his or her best judgement on what is good and right for the whole nation. Opinions are subordinate to ‘the good’.

America this week is feeling the limits of its power. Where the British Empire exported modern liberal democracy by staying and building physical infrastructure, such as railways, banking systems, schools; I can go on, so will, rule of law, trading systems, democratic governance, ports and harbours, telegraph and communication, urban infrastructure, administrative buildings, water management. I will stop. America has shown it cannot install regime change by blowing things up. We the British built from the ground up. Building from the ground up is the only governance mentality that sustains. Rooted. Building that which is meant to last. Home!

And, it turns out Thatcher was no conservative. She had read the free market economist Friedrich Hayek as her guiding light. A common story told is Thatcher thumped down a copy of Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty on the table at a 1975 Cabinet Meeting, claiming to her colleagues: “This is what we believe!”. The fable continues that she was not a great reader, and did not get to the end of this book, as the postscript is entitled  “Why I am Not a Conservative”.

America’s soft power has been much greater than Britain’s hard power. Coca-Colanisation brought down the Berlin Wall. The cult of choice as an output of modern liberal democracy has been irresistible. America exported British modernity after the Second World War, but in the last 19 years we have seen democratic recession, a debt crisis and Western systems as frail. In particular Western legitimacy, that is the power to influence through building trust and the faithful application of a rules-based order, has been eroded by what American writer Normal Mailer would say is: Plastic capitalism, ‘where even the molecules in its plastic furniture are persecuted’.

But as America falters and is no longer a model society, the British system looks increasingly grounded in a deep and enduring parliamentary system that developed after the Protestant Reformation. And a civil war, which was a revolution that took place 150 years before the French got round to theirs.

I put to you that we are an achieved society because of a complex and difficult history. And we might argue that our tolerant, largely peaceable and functioning settlements, like Carlisle, were only possible through centuries of development. On our foreign summer hols, struggling to find somewhere to go to the loo, or narrowly avoiding dropping to our death from a jerrybuilt beachfront path, we often return to functioning towns and cities and note the care that built them. Albeit slowly and at excess cost. So, any impulse to overthrow our settlement by those on the far-left appears reckless.

Where the English Civil War sought to settle a domestic dispute between parliament and the king, the French overturned their entire system, based on ideological zeal for a transformed Europe. They have had 12-15 different forms of regime since then, the British just one. For the eighty years after the French Revolution a different regime appeared approximately every nine years.

The French capitulated in the face of the German advance in 1940, because, in one view, it was a ‘fatally divided and demoralised’ as a nation. Aside from ‘bad intelligence and bad tactics’ on the battlefield ‘France [was] much more divided than Britain in the mid-1930s’.

What creates ‘patriotic solidarity’ has deep roots not in nationalism or ideology, but in the settlement, in our dwelling place. In our home. And, in this odd and anaemic term: Civil society. That is the bonds and behaviour that enable people to say: Here, I am at home. Where ‘Continental Europe is based on an idea of nationhood’ we here are ‘bound together by our residence in a particular place’.

The European Union was an extension of that ideological French zeal. In the Gothic structures of cathedrals across Europe these buildings trace beauty and nature down to the created world, its clusters of columns mimicking a forest, which is particular, located, a place. A carved leaf here, a knowing gargoyle there. Where national governance systems look to utopian idealism, we found our reason in the roots of a natured and created world, where truth sits stubbornly replicating its beauty. British judges search the facts of each individual case, as we believe in common law. Common to all. Not grand constitutional law.

What does our slow change system achieve? Largely the ability to absorb pressures from upheavals such as industrialisation and protest and loss of empire. Where French regimes fell under these pressures, the British introduced reforms. But importantly slow change gives legitimacy to its institutions, achieving trust and cooperation from citizens.

It is this growing, if not sudden, realisation that we have something not just remarkable, but exceptional, and Britain’s political furniture must move to protect it. 

We took the head off Charles I somewhat by accident, but our fervour for parliamentary democracy over despotism maps all the way back to the New Testament. For the only freedom the world has is traceable back to the foundations of the Christian story.  

No amount of BBC communitarianism or narrative that romanticises the Greek and Roman pagan world will eliminate the fact that there was no freedom in the classical world. Nothing. Not a jot. The abomination that was slavery was defeated by a Protestant conscience weighing heavy on British foreign ministers at night, as they contemplated their eternities.

Catholicism was a political movement then just as Islam is today. But the challenge of Islam to us of course is to ask: So, what do we here in the West believe? If it is pale wishy washy multiculturalism then the totalising force that is Islam will find it wanting. The good society is one then, that knows what it believes. And it cannot be an imitation of past achievements. We are a society that gathers around a Protestant governance system.

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher puts it: “The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society… By “antagonism” I mean the unsocial sociability of men…”.

Kant saw our Western inheritance as a freedom, reason and a truth that is found in nature. Antagonistic, competitive and collaborative. Finding a natural ecosystem, the tree grows in balance with the squirrel and the river. Not like socialism, standing shoulder to shoulder in fake solidarity, where, as George Orwell puts it, we are slave to a single party and ideology. That is a return to the tribe.

Our system over the centuries was to stand face to face, as unsocially sociable, as Kant puts it. Cousin marriage is less about biological variation, but where we place our loyalties. To home or tribe.

This means the alien can come to our home, with their family, and we are free to be antagonistic. To insult each other as we stand face to face and act naturally [with a smile, in loving kindness, and a view to partnership through friendship: Koinonia]. Like our nature dictates. Armed with the load bearing belief system of the Latin West: Forgiveness and repentance. I will challenge you, and if I am wrong I will seek your forgiveness.

The home is something quite unique to our Western inheritance. The Latin Western church gradually shifted the idea of family from the pagan tribe to the Christian family. The ‘we’ of society came to form around the church. Yes, Christ died for all, but his church was to be rooted in the concept of the family as its base unit of transformation. Up close and personal.

For European social policy, from the 1950s, the family was the site of torment, so should be easily escapable. Of course it is a place of torment, but for the British it is the place we stay in and build. Home. Our place of formation.

Historian Tom Holland writes: “The Church, in its determination to place married couples… at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins… Husbands, wives, children: it was these, in the heartlands of the Latin West, that were increasingly coming to count as family”. Previously your slaves, dependents, and hangers-on counted as family.

Now, your husband’s or wife’s parents were sanctioned by the Church’s new canon law, to be your mother and father ‘in-law’. The power of feudal Europe, with its clans trying to stitch power together via cousin marriage was broken, by the Church.

Margaret Thatcher, in her infamous interview in Woman’s Own magazine in 1987, stated: “There is no such thing as society”. What was she saying? It was interpreted at the time that she was heartless. A cold capitalist. The press mischievously ignored her other words: “There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first”.

She was saying that society as a whole has no agency. You cannot go to ‘society’. Paradoxically, this was a grimmer statement than the first. She was a cold capitalist. The double income household, where government has more people to tax, and property owners, whose properties require two salaries to afford, has not meant families are better off.

I am not so foolish to propose women stay at home. But the option for both parents to go out to work was billed as liberation, but is now a necessity. Burnout, excessive commuting hours, childcare costs, monstrous mortgage payments, have helped generate what some call a Polycrisis. Overworked parents have lost their leisure time. Time that would have been invested in community voluntary work, building community cohesion. Home.

Thatcher turned out to be a neoliberal. A believer in cold capitalism. That people are purely motivated, as Karl Marx believed, by material gain. More attuned to Marx’s shaping of a liberal Europeanness than she knew herself. The EU was a project of globalisation. A socialist and internationalist project. As Blair put it to the Chicago Economic Club at the time of the Kosovo War: “We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not”.

A curious trio then. Marx, Thatcher, Blair. Marx saw a large state. Thatcher and Blair, an even larger state. Britain has been under pressure from European social policy since the fifties to adopt the European social contract. Better known as meritocracy.

In revolutionary Europe and America, a rights meritocracy has created an unsustainable inheritocracy. Owners of capital can buy their way into the top universities and professional careers.  Property values have rocketed, and with it a new mass class of millionaires. Others who could not secure property are now the new Precariat. Property is out of reach unless you graduate into a graduate career, or have parents who are ‘meritocracy winners’. After five to ten years following graduation some 30% of graduates are still in non-graduate jobs.

Institutions, clubs, guilds, churches, like Carlisle United Football Club, are agents of civil society, so too political parties. And what is civil society? It is free association. The ability to gather, as we are here, untroubled largely by spying neighbours or agents of the state.

So The Good Society is the sum of the intuitions of those who gather as belonging to a particular place. To belong of course is to stay and build.

Again, as David Goodhart writes, this is then the Somewhere people. Heart people. We belong in this place. The heart thinks better than the head.

The good society thinks with its collective hearts. My wife and I have, like many, have welcomed Iranian and Afghan immigrants into our home. Fed them. Listened to their stories. And got to know them. And shared our Christian faith with them. Do we believe, like Marx, that they are purely motivated by material gain? That they cannot be converted through the good news of the Christian gospel by demonstrating Christian leadership values.

We should of course return efficiently and quickly all those who do not wish to build a safe home. And home here in the good society is built on unchanging values of freedom. Britain has a role in the world again. For its parliament and people to build a good society that is the envy of the world. We have a remarkable opportunity to lead by example. No longer powerful but influential. We should embrace post-Brexit autonomy, strong leadership in communities, applying the law, reject progressive ideologies as a liberal fantasy, and recognise economic reality of new technologies, the environment and financial factors.