The pivotal noughties speech that no British politician would dare deliver today

A new global order seemed set in stone – until it wasn’t

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Photo: Hannum7, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Let me take you back to the year 2005. Just two decades past, though it seems a lifetime ago. It’s late September, and we’re on the south coast. The world around us is one in which the precepts of the new global market and cosmopolitan liberalism have come to dominate. Transnationalism, technocracy and progressivism are in; the nation state, borders, and the old social conventions are out. The Anywheres are on the march; the Somewheres on the defensive. Politics and economics are moving, it would appear, inexorably in one direction.

Inside the Brighton Centre, a politician utterly wedded to this new global order – one of its prime movers, in fact – is addressing his party’s conference. In what came to be seen in the years that followed as a pivotal section of his speech, he told assembled delegates: