Harrison Layden-Fritz: To renew Britain, the Tories must shatter the Blairite consensus

Harrison Layden-Fritz is a Conservative campaigner and political writer. A centre-right free marketeer, he is passionate about restoring opportunity for the next generation and the renewal of Conservatism.

Britain stands at a turning point.

For a generation we have allowed the state to expand and consume, until government spending now accounts for nearly half of our national output. If this trajectory is not reversed, our economy will be defined not by enterprise but by administration, with government as master and aspiration smothered.

For too long the Conservative Party has been operating in the shadow of the Blairite settlement.

Blairism left us with a bigger state, a weaker private sector and the tyranny of the blob: quangos, bureaucrats and regulators running Britain while accountability and enterprise withered. It entrenched dependency through the explosion of tax credits. It hollowed out ministerial authority by proliferating quangos. It bound the economy to an ever-expanding web of administration. And now Starmer and Reeves, cheered on by Gordon Brown and the rest of the old guard, would wrap the country in an even tighter blanket of big government, leaving Britain suffocated and stagnant.

Our undoing, and the greatest failure of the Conservatives’ fourteen years in power, is that we tried to manage a system that was never ours. Even Osborne’s much-vaunted austerity did not dismantle the Blairite state. It curtailed the growth of spending but did not fundamentally reduce it. The civil service workforce was cut in the early years, but has since grown to record levels. Welfare remained sprawling and unreformed. The machine of the state slowed, but it was never dismantled, and today it is back in full swing, its stranglehold plain to see in public sector strikes that bring whole sectors to a standstill.

This cannot continue. Root and branch reform is now essential.

The next election is not yet in sight, but this is precisely the moment when serious parties show their mettle. Kemi Badenoch was right not to dive headlong into a blizzard of premature policy commitments. But we must also not allow others to set the agenda. Any party that aspires to govern is defined not by slogans alone but by its capacity first to passionately critique and diagnose the national situation, and then to lead the debate with ideas that command attention and force others to rally or retreat.

The truth is unavoidable. The old orthodoxy has collapsed.

The neoliberal post-Cold War order promised prosperity but delivered dependency. The social contract between people and government is not fraying; it is broken. The next decade will belong to the party that writes a new contract. That must be the Conservative Party, because no one else is capable of doing it. Labour is shackled by its unions. The Lib Dems are chronically unserious. Reform is a flip-flopping protest movement. Only the Conservatives possess the depth of talent, the intellectual rigour and the steel to rise to this task.

But what does that mean in practice? It means rediscovering our soul as the party of renewal. Not the party of drift. Not the party of management. But the party willing to take risks, to be bold, to say what others fear and to act before it is too late.

It means committing, finally and decisively, to a smaller state and a bigger role for enterprise and the individual. It means rebuilding public services not as engines of bureaucracy and dependency, but as platforms for responsibility, reintegrating people into our economy, helping them return to work and ensuring that everyone plays their part in the success of our country. It means recognising that freedom and accountability, not bureaucracy and dependency, are the foundations of a strong society.

That means reform on a scale not seen in decades. We should seriously explore whether a hybrid NHS model might finally make the service sustainable for the long term, as seen in Australia or New Zealand.

We should consider a sovereign pension fund for the under-30s, modelled in part on Singapore’s Central Provident Fund, where workers build assets rather than relying on transfers. We cannot keep putting this off. We must create an intergenerationally fair system or condemn the young to pay indefinitely for the old. And if we truly want to restore people to work and participation rather than leaving them in permanent dependence, why not redesign welfare so that it ties support directly to retraining and skills? If our welfare system is to be sustainable, it must be an investment in our economy. That means picking people up and putting them back in the game, not writing them off.

These are not radical fantasies. They are the practical reforms that serious nations undertake when they want to prosper. Denmark and, to some extent, Germany link welfare to retraining and skills. Australia and New Zealand sustain their health systems with blended models. If we refuse even to debate such ideas, then we accept a future where the state advances unopposed and private endeavour becomes the outlier.

But renewal must go further still. We should be exploring how to revive our great cities and create regional hubs strong enough to rival Europe’s second capitals. To achieve that, we must craft a new culture, one where growth is not the whim of Westminster or conjured by short-lived schemes, but the product of regional powerhouses. That requires smashing stale orthodoxy and creating new policy stability centred on building centres of talent, skills and expertise that attract investment. Not fairyland programmes or freeport gimmicks. Not hollow slogans. Real renewal means devolving investment power to serious regional leaders, as we have seen in Manchester and Tees Valley, not for irrelevant experiments in identity politics but to allow mayors and communities to take the right decisions to grow their own economies. Only by breaking the grip of London can we truly unleash the potential of our United Kingdom.

We Conservatives have always been strongest when we have been boldest. Ours is a broad church, fuelled by dynamism, pragmatism and intellectual rigour. That spirit must be recovered. And that demands bravery: the bravery to be wrong, the resolve to challenge stale orthodoxy, the strength to argue fiercely about ideas rather than identities.

And there is something else we must recover: optimism. Politics was once about a vision for the future, not simply the management of the present. What do we want Britain to become? Our politics must reflect the natural aspiration of our people, or else many will feel alienated. That does not mean delusion or false promises. But it does mean parties offering a genuine alternative world view, not just another turn of the same wheel. Conservatives at our best have always offered optimism rooted in reality, whether Disraeli’s one nation or Thatcher’s property-owning democracy. We must do the same again.

Make no mistake: we are in a fight for the soul of this nation. Do we embrace our natural entrepreneurialism, the spirit that built an empire and remade the modern world? Or do we perpetually slide into soft socialism, envy and the grey mediocrity of the managed economy? The choice will shape the destiny of our children and grandchildren.

To do this, we must become the party of middle England once again. Not chasing fringes. Not pandering to the loudest. But representing the men and women who build this country every single day: the shopkeepers, the small business owners, the skilled tradesmen, the quiet wealth creators. It is their values, their aspirations and their common sense that must be the heartbeat of our politics.

This is no longer about the soft virtues of managerialism or the post-1997 consensus. Far from ending, our complicity is allowing that age to accelerate into overdrive, taking our economy and society over the cliff edge. The tipping point is closer than ever. Unless we confront the advance of the state with real reform, Britain will enter a new era of dependency from which it will be near impossible to return.

This is the moment to step forward; to seize the battle of ideas, to reclaim the mantle of renewal, and to prove once again that it is the Conservative Party that carries the future of Britain.