As Yet Illiberal

06 Oct, 2026

Can a state be Liberal and Illiberal at the same time? Can a Liberal nation commit itself to securing rights and liberties for all, and make active steps to promote that, while tolerating within itself a seemingly immovable block of discrimination and disenfranchisement?

I mean, yes, obviously. The most famous country to ever do it is the United States of America, founded upon the ideals of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness", and which has always bitterly struggled against them. Chattel slavery, segregation, Dred Scott v. Sandford, women's disenfranchisement, homosexual criminalisation. Women were first allowed federally to apply for credit independent of a man in 1974: 29 years after the largest war ever fought, extensively propagandised and fought explicitly as a contest between Liberal and Authoritarian forces, wrapped up. Indeed, in that war, the US Military maintained racist segregation between its components. To this day, the battle over the rights of women to exist with equal legitimacy as men, or for the right of a Black or Indian or East Asian person to be treated with equal worth to a white one, is fought in the public sphere with slurs and insults and the legislative sphere with transparently exclusionary efforts.

The US is a notionally Liberal country that in its practice often fails to live up to its ideals. This is, for the record, a good thing: or at least a better thing than almost anything that has come before. A country with ideals loftier than its capacity to realise them, taking halting steps towards a just goal, is a sufficiently more worthy country than one proudly executing on its own stated cruelty. As such, while illiberalism has always been rampant in the US, and is especially ascendent in the last few years, I still have no issue with describing it as a Liberal Nation.

Can a country exist the other way around? A country with no cultural pledge to Liberalism, that has nevertheless granted liberation and freedom and enfranchisement to a great deal of its people for other motives?

After all, while some feel the desire of freedom as a burning in their heart, there are also a great many things to recommend in a Liberal nation from a purely strategic point of view. Free trade and a system open to foreign investment bring startling wealth creation. The promise of equality lures skilled immigrants. Integration with a broad education system increases the odds that the Next Big Thing will arise in your own country, while easy tourist visas make your tourism income go gangbusters and your cultural influence massive. Liberal democracies have extremely little reason to attack each other, ushering in the Long Peace. You don't have to like elections with broad buy-in and consent, you just have to prefer it over succession disputes and civil war. You don't have to like Liberalism to hate civil war.

And so, England¹. More Liberal than 99% of the polities to have existed in the span of human history. You can live wherever you can afford: no person has the legal right to hold another as property. Unlike our neighbour France, we lack sumptuary laws beyond those of public decency. Parents can exert few rights over you past adulthood as a matter of law once you reach 18. Almost anyone can hold property or be allowed to work any class of job. You can be a man, and marry one! It is a privilege to live in the UK in the 21st century, compared to most humans elsewhere in the world, or effectively all humans throughout history.

Is it Liberal, though? Nah. As a culture, government, and place, nah. Our culture is immensely patrimonial, strengthening in degree the higher your class. Our chumocracy is well known, well detailed, well rehearsed, and utterly opposed to any possible principle of openness and merit; the universities, schools, and private members' clubs that are the machines for manufacturing this incestuous political class are respected and detested in equal measure, but when someone (or their family) comes near to ascending to these ranks, any strength of emotion is transmuted into reverence. The City of London has far too much power over the well-being of the state, but exercises even more power than that over the transfixed minds of our governors.

"Should" and "should not" dominate culture, to the degree that you can be a highly successful comedian or commentator solely with cheeky dips into "should not" without any other recommending qualities. "Should" is not defined by the application of principles to situations, but instead by in-groups and out-groups, where certain people, such as Ricky Gervais or JK Rowling or Literally Any Royal, are seen as utterly sacrosanct, as are their ideas and assumptions, particularly pertaining to immigrants or the size of the state. As a result, our media and politicians have tacitly accepted a far-right approach to immigration, transgender rights, and the right to free protest with a pathetic amount of pushback. However, as George Orwell astutely noted, the plainly idiotic beliefs and unquestioned assumptions of the elite flow down smoothly into the regular man. Some people stand up for principle over personal, but never ever enough. Our government's sudden moral snap against Israel[^israel] is not motivated by a Liberal system which enfranchises all concerns and synthesises a rational answer, but is instead motivated by the fact that we so happen to have some more moral people in the hot seat at this particular and random point in time.

And good lord, the media! From reading the papers alone you would never know that the mainstream normie position on climate, LGBT rights, and immigration is significantly more to the left than the state's, but Fleet Street is so steadfast in its beliefs that its easier to imagine them as living in a separate reality, or are maybe suffering mass delusion. The Guardian is occasionally left-wing, but all papers are only capable of critiquing power structures from a place of oppositionally defiant disorder, instead of principles: they act like tantrumming children who do not hate to be told the wrong thing, but simply hate to be told at all. Liberal framing of issues is utterly negligent, even as the right-wing Telegraph acknowledges in the small print that our obsession with welfare-queen immigrants is unfounded in fact and founded only in anger and fear. They have shifted towards Nigel Farage's version of reality on effectively all issues, seemingly without noticing, and certainly never reckoning with the role they have to play in it. See the reactions to Ann Widdicombe's death[^ann], respecting her "stick-it" spirit and awesome approach to politics, without a single letter spilled as to the contents of her politics, her homophobic litanies, her disdain for people in poverty. It was classic "oh, you know the opinions": but respect for style over substance is an abdication of Liberal journalistic responsibility. A five year old should be wowed by style, not an editor-in-chief. One frequently wonders if they fulfil their function of providing information purely by accident.

In the reactions to the ULEZ bomber, this is laid bare. It is credulously reported as a show of two-tier policing, instead of the just jailing of a terrorist. There are no good or bad actions, only good or bad sides. This is an ideal utterly incompatible, and utterly inferior, to Liberalism, to a world where one must be good through your own actions instead of being ordained externally.

Liberalism as an ideology or a viewpoint to be advocated for is utterly absent from our politics beyond the occasional political snip. It is difficult to prove a negative, so "just trust me bro", but the recent conference season provides a good ecology to study. Andy Burnham's big speech made big reference to enemies without, and worthy details about pension financing and utility ownership, but this was made largely as an appeal to practicality and wealth movement, making the case for the state in general as opposed to any kind of state in particular[^burnham]. The government's attempt to overhaul our world-leading primary and secondary education seems to be motivated far more by a distaste for the fact that it was introduced by the easily-hateable Michael Gove instead of being weighed on its merits, which is a poor omen. And not a peep on our horrifying and utterly undemocratic retreat on transgender rights, despite the anger it has plainly produced in both the nation and the Labour base.

Reform is plainly and proudly Illiberal, openly pocketing foreign bribes and constantly engaging in racist and bigoted culture wars to no other end than denigrating certain subjects of the government so that they may be considered legally and societally inferior. The Tories are much the same but with a long tail to criticise too. Kemi Badenoch's fury at Robert Jenrick, her own former minister, is plainly motivated by personal betrayal over and above any principles to a horrifically disqualifying degree; Partygate showed that the ideal of self-restraint or self-sacrifice is utterly offensive and abhorrent to the average Conservative. The media's utter refusal to point any of these blindingly obvious facts out, instead preferring to invent a non-existence Kemissaince through vibes alone, is another good example as to how bereft of principles they are, even villainous ones[^kemissaince]. The Tory platform continues to be "the state, but less": it is not a viewpoint, but the right hand convinced that it will somehow survive the suicide of the whole body. The Greens have split themselves between conservative gardeners, single-issue wealth tax advocates, and Labour refugees: whatever your agreement with those (in my opinion, worthy) pillars, they do not advance a coherent view of society, and if they did, the party's adoption of the "Zionism is Racism" motion, antisemitic enough to draw the ire of its own Jewish and anti-Israel leader, shows that whatever heart beats in the Greens, it is utterly uninterested in the Liberal world (not to mention its longstanding opposition to NATO and friendliness to Russian equivocators).

I can't comment on the SNP or Plaid Cymru or Northern Ireland's diabolical duo, but hey, I said England!

In major politics, that leaves the Liberal Democrats, a proudly open about its advocacy for exactly the kind of Liberal virtues that have enriched our country and defined the last century. However, their principles have been diluted by the concessions they made in the Coalition. The LibDems are saddled with a bad record and are chronically unable to message: the fact that their politics are so alien to our cultural fabric is relegated to speech footnotes. A great many LibDem voters are famously conservatives at heart who would detest the logical endpoint of Liberal rhetoric but cannot bring themselves to vote for the frequently-repulsive right wing; they are the butt of the joke when people refuse to vote Labour. Within Ed Davey's iteration of the party, they accommodate a great many Illiberal ideals, being utterly beholden to technocracy and unable to make a case for immigration so blindingly obvious that our own right wing press has started to make them. This is saddled with incredulous financial policies utterly uncomprehending of the fact that Liberals are capable of making pro-taxation arguments, instead praying at the altar of "this will be paid for by sufficient future growth" that every party has been praying at for my entire politically conscious lifetime.

In a time where the centre right is collapsing both in the UK and across the world, splitting into far-right and left-refugee factions, the fact that our already-established third party is unable to take command of the narrative is an indictment of the weak current of Liberalism in this country, so weak that even its own champions seem unable to grow it[^libdems].

Therefore, while England has a great many Liberal traits that I am eternally thankful for, and that I wish our culture could appreciate more, it is in a great many ways like most other human polities: As Yet Illiberal.

No one can promise that mass Liberal awakening, a re-do of 1848 in England, would fix our difficult and real economic problems. But while Liberalism isn't a silver bullet, it is the only gun that can consistently and eventually pull the trigger. It does one better than promising solutions: it is a machine for building, testing, and implementing possible answers, catapulting the ones that work into mass success, and limiting the harms of the attempts that fail. Liberal nations didn't merely scrape a victory in WW2: they utterly trounced the Nazis on the battlefields and the Soviet Union in the spreadsheets. Liberalism is the weapon of the modern age.

If it can be allowed the flourish. However, many in England cannot abide a Liberal government, and that is at least partly because the English are yet to desire freedom, as opposed to mere wealth, for ourselves. Per Orwell, our regrettable and repressive government is shaped by our regrettable and repressive common man.

Our English instinct is against widening the franchise, against widening our catchment area and pro-appealing to the interests of the upper class. Our culture doesn't do this, because too few of us individually do this: we can help a friend in the village while hating the worker in the city, or vice versa. It is YIMBY City, it is TERF Island, and the train is not stopping. None of us are individually powerful enough to influence that: but not enough of us even try to advocate for a government that recognises itself as the instrument of all people, instead of a regrettable bulbous growth of offices and bin-collectors

We need to advocate for Liberalism as strongly as we can. We must sacrifice our hangups and our naff attachments, treat our nation as a nation of equals even if not everyone within it agrees. We have precious few pockets of genuine Liberal thought in our order and our laws: the constant stream of Illiberalism that we must navigate isn't even the emperor wearing Liberalism's clothes. In many ways, the emperor just claims that he is, and too few even bother to check. We can and at minimum must stay true to ourselves, and our principles: in England, this may well mean inventing a new Liberalism from scratch before people believe even harder that we are a fraction of our way to our goal, one capable of advocating for itself in the face of right-wing populism.

At minimum, we must be sovereign over our own minds. Be kind, and fair, and just to each other, even when the rest of the world is under the misapprehension that this is somehow wrong. They cannot conquer forever. Remember who you are, Liberal.

[^israel] slight, slight, slight snap.

[^ann] which I must point out were released hours before the public or papers learned that she was murdered. Her killer is cowardly and craven, and her death was wrong: our media would have acted just as blindly and reprehensibly had she died of natural causes. That isn't a hypothetical: that is how they acted before anyone knew better.

[^burnham] This is not to say that I think Andy Burnham is anti-Liberal: but key Liberal ideals such as inherent dignity of all Britons are largely absent, instead revolving more around a narrative of government technocratically tweaking the balance of power. I think his ideas are more-or-less good, and I'd take a good idea with a spirit that differs from mine over a bad idea any day. I would not extend this charity to the Parliamentary Labour Party as a whole, which has proven extremely negotiable on the worth of some liberties.

[^kemissaince] You just have to honestly report the god damn numbers, guys!

[^libdems] I know that the LibDems currently have their greatest electoral representation at the moment. I think this is adequately explained by the utter retreat of the Tory voting base: percentage-wise they are flailing like anyone else. The fact that there are a lot of LibDem MPs has yet to make anyone, elite or man-on-the-street, yet think that they might have a point.