This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
A spectre is haunting Britain — the spectre of complacency. The world order is shaking itself apart around us as Putin assaults Ukraine and Trump grasps at Greenland, whilst Europe moves inexorably towards right-wing populism. But this has inspired no change of heart or day of reckoning amongst the massed ranks of British centrism.
Indeed, when Robert Jenrick was forcibly ejected from the Conservative party, the former justice secretary David Gauke suggested that with the “salience of immigration falling” this was an “opportunity” to pivot back to the economy, and “away from populism”.
The Gaukes of this world could do with a dose of cold reality, and there is no chillier wake-up call for centrists in denial than Stephen Davies’s The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is Here to Stay. Over the course of 180 pages, Davies forensically dismantles the notion that, as he cogently summarises it, “the success of populist movements was due to manipulation of gullible electorates by malign and self-interested external forces”. Rather than a fad, or some sinister Russiagate-style plot, the rise of populism reflects something far more fundamental — a realignment.
According to Davies, “We are moving on from a world in which the aligning issue is how large a role government should play in the economy and redistributing resources.” In its place, we are embracing a politics polarised along lines of “identity and the nature of governance; the choice now is nationalism versus cosmopolitanism and globalism”.
This thesis is of course not new, and Davies gives credit to a number of post-liberal commentators in Britain and America who have long been predicting and observing this shift. What Davies brings to the topic, as a classical liberal rather than a fellow traveller, is a sharpness and objectivity that may help cut through to the audience that most needs to hear this argument: fellow liberals.
Davies integrates a number of arguments to form a cohesive and clear picture of what is going on. The neoliberal shift to a globalised economy has created a network of “world cities”, which benefit massively from the free flow of labour and capital. The citizens of this network form a cosmopolitan identity, often rooted in progressive norms and an elite education, rather than national or regional cultures.
In relation to these “world cities” and their inhabitants, the rest of the world is rendered a periphery.
This revolutionary change, Davies suggests, is similar to other structural shifts in our history that produced lasting political realignments: the old binary between market and socialist politics emerged from the social changes of the 1960s, themselves driven by female labour force participation, technology such as the pill, and cheap energy. Today, the power of communications technology has wrought a similar realignment, rendering that old binary seemingly irrelevant.
Whilst we can see that there is a clear working-class interest in opposing globalisation, Davies argues that national identity is a more effective vehicle for mobilisation, and that any opposition to globalisation is going to have to involve immigration restriction. Realignment neatly bisects the old coalitions. Those who remain committed to class politics will end up aligned with populism and those unwilling to compromise socially liberal and internationalist ideals will be effectively aligned to a progressive cosmopolitanism.
What follows from this? “The ultimate aim is to create a world of mercantilist trading blocs”, and in the place of the free market, to “combine nationalism and globalism with economic interventionism”. According to Davies, “to be a Thatcherite today is like being a Gladstonian liberal in the 1920s — charming and admirable but ineffectual and unrealistic”.
The book will make uncomfortable reading for many British commentators, and not just because of its existential attack on contemporary centrism. This emerging neo-mercantalist order is likely to be dominated by continental scale economies, with Davies teasing the fascinating and disconcerting possibility of a nationalist populist EU pushing for closer economic integration.
The logic of Brexit, he suggests, might one day be reversed as cosmopolitans are eager to embrace freetrading globalism, even as nationalists push for membership of a culturally chauvinistic and economically protectionist European alliance.
Whatever the plausibility of this particular scenario, it is based on an increasingly unanswerable analysis of where the world is moving. What makes this book such important reading is the strongly marshalled argument it makes for the structural and systemic origins of populism. In British politics, we are perpetually up to our necks in distracting personality-based trivia about who’s defecting, who’s backstabbing, and who said what to whom at their dodgy boarding school in the 1970s.
The fond notion that populism can be “seen off” by winning a tactical victory against Reform, discrediting Nigel Farage as an individual, or regulating what people say should be put firmly to bed. Davies is excellent on this attitude, taking to particular task the attempt to create a cordon sanitaire that excludes populism.
In any democracy, trying to ban a movement with widespread inherent appeal tied to emergent interest groups is “a recipe for political unrest or even revolution”. Get rid of one leader, and “another will replace them”.
For British policymakers in general, this book should serve as a vital guide not just to where politics is headed, but also to a new world order, one that is not destined to go away and leave Britain alone. Dishearteningly few individuals in the British media or political landscape have yet to wake up to this novel reality, and even many in Reform itself don’t fully grasp the changed landscape.
The book does sometimes lapse into a certain amount of determinism. At times, it can sound like these massive shifts are simply the result of impersonal forces, rather than being driven by human passions and rational responses to changing challenges.
Even within our current paradigm, France’s relative national self-reliance and protectionism or Japan’s low-migration, high-automation economic model are evidence that meaningful choices can be made within any context — if you are clear in your priorities and willing to make trade-offs.
This tendency towards abstraction can lead some to overlook more contingent factors in global shifts. Such an impersonal and virtual process, unlike agent-driven managerial capitalism, can sometimes give the impression that history itself follows the same pure logic of material inputs, prices and structural shifts.
Populism can be seen as a reaction not against blind forces, but rather specific ideas, ideologies and policies, many of them coming from America. The fall of Bretton Woods, the unleashing of an under-regulated tech sector and the forcible opening up of markets are integral to building our current globalised model. They were matters of American policy and ideology, rather than just technological or social change.
But these are small points of criticism about a substantive and important work of analysis — and one that should make its way to every centrist bookshelf post-haste.
