Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Remaking Conservatism conference in London. The event was organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank created by Margaret Thatcher 50 years ago, a time when conservatism was also in the process of being remade. I am told the mood among conservatives then was as dour then as it is today. Britain, then as now, seemed doomed to fail, and, to the dismay of the Conservative Party, voters opted to hand Labour the task of managing decline.
Speaking at a different panel, the historian Niall Ferguson argued at one point that British Conservatives have to emulate the anarcho-capitalist Argentine president Javier Milei: break the back of the bureaucratic state and unleash the forces of market capitalism. George Osborne, sitting next to Ferguson, demurred politely that perhaps there are some differences between Britain and Argentina, to which the historian replied, with much enthusiasm, that “we are now much closer to Argentina than to America”. The audience applauded.
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