Riccardo Cantadori: What conservative principles can offer a divided Britain

Riccardo Cantadori is an Italian writer focused on economics, finance, and international relations. He believes in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

Despite their differing outlooks, conservatives, progressives, the undecided, extremists and moderates can all agree on one thing: something is amiss when the relationship between a large part of the population and the political class is shaped by suspicion and hostility.

In a poll published in February, Ipsos found that “over two-thirds of Britons do not have confidence that the UK Government is running the country with integrity”, while 47 per cent say ministers “tell the truth not very often or never”, and 49 per cent think the same of MPs in general. Britain is part of a broader trend of political estrangement, as shown in Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer, where governments fall into the “distrust range” in 14 of the 28 countries surveyed. In a democratic system, where political authority is legitimised by the will of the people, this should be regarded as one of the most pressing problems in public life. Yet growing distrust of politics is often dismissed with glib and superficial explanations.

Political engagement is frequently portrayed as nothing more than a clash of interests. We are told that citizens are mobilised by straightforward economic incentives such as subsidies, higher wages or lower taxes. There is some truth in that view, but it leaves out something essential. People become truly engaged in politics above all when they feel they are being called upon to defend an identity. That is why politics can never be fully understood in the same terms as the market. Those who become genuinely absorbed in public life rarely do so with the detachment of someone weighing up an investment. They are drawn in because they sense that something larger is at stake, something bound up with their idea of who they are and of the community to which they belong.

In recent years, the woke left understood the importance of appealing to a sense of belonging, yet it made a mistake that set the stage for its decline. It sought to affirm the pride of certain social groups, but in doing so it set them against a silent majority which, at best, felt ignored and, at worst, found itself openly accused. Take the famous slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’, one of the symbols of woke ideology at its height in 2020. It appealed to solidarity within parts of the black community by drawing on a shared sense of belonging, but it also carried the suggestion that most white people did not care enough about black lives.

That accusation deepened division rather than fostering cohesion.

Alongside this came the attempt to develop (or rather impose from above) “a new Orwellian-style language, which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fuelling it”, as Pope Leo XIV stated in a speech delivered in January. In such a context, politics must look for new sources of cohesion in which broader communities can recognise themselves, and it must give greater weight to what people share than to what sets them apart.

Indeed, every human institution, from states and churches to companies and universities, presents itself as a means of connecting the fundamental values embedded in the personal and collective history of its members with shared aspirations for the future.
To that end, the humanities must once again become central to political analysis. Literature, history and moral philosophy are far better at grasping the passions, fears and ambitions of a people than the many forms of analysis that reduce the electorate to a mere bundle of preferences.

The Florentine political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli understood this clearly. In the Discourses on Livy published posthumously in 1531, he argued that every political body, if it is to endure, must periodically “return to first principles”, because those values contain the original vitality that first gave the society its strength.

A wise statesman therefore knows that, in the end, he has one overriding mission: to preserve society by accommodating the changes that inevitably unfold over time, while ensuring that the people he represents (or hopes to represent) preserve their sense of identity. In other words, the wise politician addresses the questions of his age with a view to passing a society’s fundamental values on to future generations, allowing for adjustments that do not compromise its deepest character.

The risk, of course, is that such an appeal to identity hardens into nostalgia. The philosopher Roger Scruton spent a lifetime reflecting on this objection, which is often raised against those who identify as conservatives. His conclusion can be summed up as follows: the point is not to recreate a lost world, but to ensure that what was best in it survives under new conditions.

After all, anyone who believes that there are fundamental values worth preserving and handing down will also agree that no society can remain great and prosper if it is forever casting doubt on its own sense of itself.