Fred De Fossard is Head of the British Prosperity Unit at the Legatum Institute.
What does the future of the right look like? This was the question at the centre of the Free Market Roadshow, held last Tuesday at the Legatum Institute.
Every year, the Austrian Economics Center runs a worldwide tour called the Free Market Roadshow. Since 2008, they have visited conservative and libertarian think tanks throughout Europe and North America to spread the good news of Friedrich Hayek, and evangelise the benefits of free markets, low taxes, and limited government.
This year the Legatum Institute, where I serve as Director of Parliamentary Affairs, hosted the final leg of the tour, which began in Brussels and stretched from the Balkans to the Baltic and across the Atlantic before concluding in the birthplace of modern commerce: London.
While there is something of a right-wing renaissance happening across the west, Britain is facing the opposite. Youngsters attending the roadshow in Europe might be excited by the new Dutch government’s punchy agenda, or the decline of the social democrat government in Germany; those in America can look forward to the resurgence of Pierre Poilievre’s Canadian Conservatives or the likely defenestration of Joe Biden Biden.
Here in the UK, however, the picture is rather different. The day after the Roadshow, the Prime Minister fired the starting gun on a general election where the Conservative Party is 20 points behind Labour in the opinion polls.
Free markets might be the greatest engine of human prosperity ever created, but they will have few advocates in British politics for the new few years, despite their inherent and evident benefits. Such a context makes the Free Market Roadshow, if anything, more important. After all, it was founded amidst the Financial Crisis, where waves of socialism swept the west, from the Greece to the United States.
Last week we were joined by Robert Jenrick MP, who articulated his economic vision, and expanded his arguments around immigration, which have been so important in attempting to shake Britain out of its low-wage, low-productivity, high-migration spiral.
In his address, he said that the path to Britain’s reindustrialisation and renewed prosperity was fundamentally a free market one: reform Net Zero to cut the industrial cost of energy, and deregulate our planning system so houses, businesses, factories, and infrastructure can be built efficiently and where there is most demand.
Sir John Redwood, a veteran MP and committed free marketeer and champion of Brexit, spoke of the failures of the Bank of England, and the unhappy settlement we have had between government and the Bank since 1998; he was followed by Sir Brandon Lewis MP, who argued that the single best way for the Conservative Party to restore its support among younger voters was to reform planning to encourage greater home ownership.
Of course, we have heard many of these ideas before. Readers will wonder why these MPs did not make them reality while they were in office, and many attendees challenged the MPs who spoke on these points.
After all, over the past decade the economy has become less free, housebuilding has declined, energy costs have risen thanks to taxes and regulation, and mass immigration has turbocharged demand for housing and public services. This has all happened with Conservative ministers in office, who often said they were deliver the opposite.
How can the Conservative Party, which seems at its weakest in its 200 year history, restore the principles which made it the nation’s party of government for so many years?
This is what the Roadshow intended to explore. Perhaps the most important session in this regard was “The future of conservatism: does national conservatism or liberal conservatism hold the answer?”.
Moderated by Thomas Borwick of College Green Group, Lord Hannan and Dr James Orr continued the lively debate that erupted at the London National Conservatism conference in 2023, in which prominent figures on the right of the Conservative Party butted horns about protectionism versus trade, deregulation versus state capacity, and how to reform the state.
This also built on the debate at last year’s conference; developing a national conservative political economy which generates prosperity and enriches the nation will be one of Legatum Institute’s priorities for the coming year.
While the right flank of British conservatism is largely united on matters of immigration, culture, education and welfare, the hunt for an answer to big economic questions will carry on for the months and years to come.
In the United States, this has become an acrimonious fight between National Conservatives and self-styled Freedom Conservatives. While the discussion is more amicable in Britain, the tribes of the British right have some soul searching to do on how best to campaign for and create a more prosperous and conservative Britain in the future.
This is what we hope to have achieved with the Roadshow. While speakers and panellists certainly paid tribute to Hayek, Smith, and the founders of the Institute of Economic Affairs, overall there was an abiding sense among attendees of the need to craft a conservative approach for the future.
This approach must embrace the wisdom that we know works – the invisible hand of the market, the reality of human nature, the primacy of the nation state – but it must also wrestle with and understand the reality we face today: multiculturalism, mass immigration, low birth rates, an undemocratic administrative state, declining trust in society, and a wildly uncertain world order.
These are thorny matters which require principled, conservative responses. We no longer live in the long-1990s, and believers in free markets and conservatism must adapt their ideas and solutions to win in the world we face for the coming years.
All sessions from the Roadshow can be viewed at the Legatum Institute YouTube page.
