Lecture delivered at Hillsdale College, Michigan, on 7 September 2025
Ladies and Gentlemen, faculty, students, and friends of Hillsdale College.
This school was established as a bastion of classical education and constitutional principles.
Hillsdale College is a bulwark against the ‘wokification’ of higher education and a symbol of the counter-revolution that we need if we are to turn the tide on the forces ranged against us, which are intent on seeking to undermine so many of the values that we hold dear.
It was 250 years ago this very day that the British supply brig Unity was captured by the American schooner Hannah – a pivotal early naval action in the American Revolutionary War. It showed that even a small, improvised naval force could challenge British supply lines and it gave Washington the confidence to build the American navy.
In capturing the supply ship Unity, Washington’s forces were using an historic British liberty (albeit since rescinded) – the right to bear arms – to rebel against the British. And this rebellion was in defence of ancient British liberties: the right not to be subject to arbitrary taxes and seizures. Maybe these rebels ought to be identified as the original Brexiteers.
The powerful ideas for which the rebels were fighting – individual freedom, the rule of law and democracy – have produced two nations that have had the most colossal influence around the world over the centuries. In fact I believe that these ideas and the societies and nations that they have created are unsurpassed.
The model on which the success of both our nations has been built is the best model and we should not be ashamed of saying so; and its influence is there to see in the clothes people wear, the books they read, the music they listen to, the movies they watch, the language they speak… the list could go on. And so many countries have adopted so much of this legacy – of which parliamentary democracy, justice and free speech are fundamental tenets.
The United States of America – which is arguably today the most unadulterated iteration of ancient British liberties that would still be recognized by our Saxon forefathers – is still unchallenged as the global hegemon. Indeed, I have been known to quip that I think the United States was Britain’s greatest invention!
To me, it is the ideas and the culture and the people that embody the Special Relationship between our two countries. We understand each other; we view the world in the same way. At its heart is a shared belief in individual liberty, Christian values, the nation and free speech.
But these ideas – this culture and the people descended from the founders and creators of our nations – are in danger like never before.
In particular, Britain diverted into Europeanism and has adopted some of its associated pathologies – unaccountable institutions, bureaucracy and Roman law. This is essentially only being allowed able to do something if it is explicitly authorised as opposed to the common law tradition where you are free to do what you please unless explicitly banned from doing so. The Britain of today – plagued with censorship, excess taxation and arbitrary justice – is not the free country it once was.
Although the U.S. also expanded its state and adopted civil rights-motivated anti-meritocracy, its constitution has proved to be a great bulwark against the perversion of its essential liberties; and thus its bureaucracy never became as powerful or its freedoms as diminished as its British counterpart.
Today I will talk about how the great ideas we share emerged; how the revolution against them has been fomented; and the counter-revolution we must mount to defend them.
These ideas go right back to Saxon times in England where concepts of freedom, limitations of state power and the right to bear arms were widely understood – at least if you were a freeman. It was because of the antics of ‘two-tier’ Bad King John in imposing arbitrary justice, extortionate taxes and giving away land to foreign powers that the barons famously took action. They forced King John to sign Magna Carta in 1215 at Runnymede, after they had captured London and – just as importantly – the Treasury, which enabled them to take control of John’s payment system.
Magna Carta codified these liberties – establishing the rule of law, putting limitations on taxation and proclaiming that no one, not even a King, is above the law. These concepts of liberty would be broadened in the following decades and centuries.
So it was that English liberties continued to be expanded. The 1689 Bill of Rights further developed our freedoms and affirmed Parliamentary Democracy. And England pioneered freedom of the press as long ago as 1695 – not that you would know that today due to the pernicious activities of our media regulator Ofcom, with journalists being hounded at home by the police for questioning about their posts on social media and comedians being arrested at Heathrow Airport.
The U.S. Constitution of 1787 and Bill of Rights of 1791 both then in turn built directly on this legacy, which added further strength through the ideas and experiences of the Founding Fathers.
Of course our two constitutions are different. The British constitution is based on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and is not codified. The American constitution sets out the separation of powers between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches – and is pulled together in one single document.
Nevertheless, the underlying principles remain the same and it is these principles that have enabled Great Britain and the United States of America and other countries that have chosen to adopt them to thrive. These principles, and the economic and societal strength they gave our nations, defeated both communism and fascism in the twentieth century.
And it is notable that when our nations have strayed from these principles, it has resulted in decline and the empowerment of our enemies.
The same challenges – the same solutions
For as well as the good ideas that led our countries to greatness, we have also been plagued by a shared set of bad ideas. Rather than being a bond of strength, this is when the Special Relationship has become a conduit for failure.
We need only look back to 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement and the absurd scenes of British footballers and Labour politicians – including the now Prime Minister – bending the knee for the cameras following events that occurred after a criminal was apprehended by the police 4,000 miles away in Minneapolis.
Then there’s the abhorrent so-called trans ideology that has led to teenagers’ bodies being mutilated and women’s spaces and sports being violated. And the out-of-control mass migration of people – including rapists and other criminals – across the southern border into the United States or on boats across the English Channel. And the eco-zealotry of the environmental movement with its Net Zero ideology that has crushed industry and put the brakes on economic growth.
What all these bad ideas have in common is that they are neo-Marxist. They are about taking power away from individuals, families and the nation state and pushing agendas that no one ever voted for as power is accrued and exercised by arbitrary state bodies. It’s another power grab of our ancient liberties by unaccountable, unelected and self-interested authorities. It is the very antithesis of the ideas of America’s Founding Fathers.
The deep state
These battles are not new. Since the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688 and since the establishment of the Republic on this side of the Atlantic, there have always been forces fighting for bureaucratic hegemony, central control and globalist ideas. What you call the deep state – and what we in Britain call ‘the blob’ – has been a constant threat to our liberty.
In Britain the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854 formally established the permanent civil service. The post-war socialist government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee expanded the bureaucracy in the late 1940s, as well as bringing masses of industry under state control.
In the U.S. the permanent civil service was established in 1883; President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a plethora of new agencies during his time in office. And President Carter created the Senior Executive Service in the late 1970s.
In both our countries, the direction of travel for well over one hundred years has been the same: more and more power increasingly being accrued by unelected agents of the state.
And when it comes to the development of a labyrinthine bureaucracy, there’s no question that its most powerful part is the Central Bank.
The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to help pay for the war against France. It was nationalized in 1946 by Attlee. The independence of national central banks for European Union member states was then stipulated in the Maastricht Treaty which was ratified by the UK in 1993. The Bank was subsequently made ‘independent’ in 1997 within days of Labour winning office, while it was Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne, who lengthened the Governor’s term to eight years.
Despite many of the Founding Fathers objecting to a central bank – Jefferson said that “I believe banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies” – the Federal Reserve was established in 1913 under an opaque and byzantine ownership structure.
I am a great sceptic of so-called ‘independent’ institutions. A better word is unaccountable. And as the great conservative thinker John O’Sullivan points out: any institution that is not explicitly right-wing at its inception will become left-wing over time.
Globalism
Like the deep state, globalist ideology has a long history. Correlli Barnett’s book, The Collapse of British Power, charts how high-minded British politicians a century ago in the early twentieth century ignored the interests of the British people and instead focused on bolstering hifalutin international bodies like the League of Nations. This foreshadows the malign impact of organizations like the United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights and the World Health Organization.
In recent days in Britain, we have witnessed the grotesque scenario of the Home Office – the government department which is meant to secure our borders and keep citizens safe – actively arguing that the rights of illegal migrants trump those of the citizens of Epping. Epping is a town on the outskirts of London, once represented in Parliament by Sir Winston Churchill, whose local hotel has entirely been handed over to house such migrants. I am pleased to say the people of Epping, in particular the women and the mothers, are fighting back against the threat to their children of being sexually assaulted.
In some cases the idea of globalism has turned into active hatred of Britain. In his 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, George Orwell attacks British leftist intellectuals who are prone to despising their own country’s institutions while idealizing foreign ones. He wrote:
“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”
There has long been a strong strand of moral relativism among the British elite claiming that all cultures are equal and we cannot prioritise our own. This persisted during the Cold War with useful idiots on the left claiming that the way of life in the USSR was just as valid as that in the West.
The latest anti-British movement that these self-hating leftists have latched onto is Islamism. Protesting in the streets in favour of Hamas and aiding and abetting the takeover of some British towns and localities by alien culture. The largely Pakistani rape gangs that have been in existence in towns across England for several decades have seen tens of thousands of white British girls raped and tortured, yet their depraved activities have been covered up and excused by too many in positions of authority. The full truth has still not emerged.
Similar tendencies have emerged in the American leftist elite – especially in universities. I saw this first hand with the Biden administration when I served as Foreign Secretary. They operated as part of the international blob, desperate to curry favour with the EU and leftist European elites. Billions of USAID cash was siphoned into leftist projects which undermined our values, backing everything from transgender ideology to the Tony Blair Institute. The streets of the nation’s capital were defaced with leftist propaganda.
The leftist weaponization of the State
Although the deep state and the leftist forces were already powerful by the 1990s, it was the subsequent era where we saw the left weaponize the law and the deep state against their political opponents and create national and international patronage networks. Presidents Clinton and Obama and Prime Minister Blair followed similar pathways by promoting DEI, climate alarmism and human rights legislation, as well as adding further layers of unaccountable bureaucracy. In this modern era our countries’ leftist elites are connected even more than they ever were.
In Britain one thousand years of history of the British legal system were trashed in one fell swoop by Tony Blair through the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. He stripped the Lord Chancellor of historic powers and handed them over to technocrats who were mainly recruited from the judiciary itself. When I was appointed to the position of Lord Chancellor in 2016, I was able to see for myself exactly how powerless the position had become. I challenged the Lord Chief Justice over poor appointment decisions. And I refused to condemn the free press when they criticized the judiciary. I soon found myself the subject of a smear campaign and ultimately was forced from the job following that pressure from the judicial blob.
It was also on Tony Blair’s watch that the Bank of England was made unaccountable and the Civil Service Code put into law on a statutory footing. He embedded human rights, Net Zero and wokery into the British state by creating a tangled web of laws and institutions that ever since have enabled cadres of activist left-wing lawyers to run rings round successive governments.
The tentacles of the leftist state have also reached deeper into the corporate world and the mainstream media. Companies understood that if they were to be favored they had to go along with edicts backing trans ideology from groups like Stonewall and economically suicidal Net Zero policies – even if they were in the energy industry. Meanwhile we saw leading figures from the political right like Nigel Farage being debanked.
The mainstream media has also become part of this sorry state of affairs. The hounding and cancellation of people has become a modern re-creation of the Salem witch trials. All too often it is becoming evident that the truth is being suppressed, as are stories that are antithetical to the regime.
Although the likes of Hillary Clinton have called for measures that curb free speech, the First Amendment has been a bulwark. However in Britain, pressure from the left has created a free speech crisis. Last year we saw a mother and carer, Lucy Connolly, jailed for 31 months for a post on X that she deleted several hours after posting.
2022
It is wrong however to say that this appalling situation is merely the fault of the left – the fact is too many on the right in Britain have failed to fight for our freedoms.
I was elected as a Conservative MP and had served as a government minister in the Conservative governments since 2012. I had grown increasingly frustrated with the direction of travel – publicly attacking the ludicrous environment policies of the government such as banning plastic straws in 2017 and reversing crazy transgender self-ID policies in 2020.
However by 2022, after twelve years in power, it was clear that most Conservative MPs had gone along with this orthodoxy rather than taking it on. Essentially Conservative ministers had capitulated to the blob – bending the knee for Black Lives Matter, backing transgender ideology, legislating for Net Zero carbon by 2050.
Taxes were at a 70-year high, energy costs were astronomical and immigration was out of control. It stemmed from the original sin of failing to reverse Tony Blair’s leftist capture of the institutions.
That is why when Prime Minister Boris Johnson was – in my view wrongly – defenestrated, I put myself forward on a platform to restore conservative principles – smaller government, lower taxes, recognizing biological sex, supporting fracking and so on.
I knew that it would be tough: I’d already been removed from one job by the leftist establishment and I knew that they would fight hard. My husband warned me it would all end in tears. But I couldn’t not try.
I won the Conservative Party leadership election in 2022 because the party base wanted change and were fed up with the Conservatives In Name Only in the government. Unfortunately a significant number of my fellow MPs remained unsupportive of what I was trying to do.
We immediately put forward a Mini-Budget which cancelled tax rises, introduced supply-side measures like fracking and advocated spending restraint. I thought it was important to act quickly or we would have been swallowed up by the blob.
Yet the night before the Mini-Budget, the Bank of England announced the sale of £40 billion of government gilts. Although the Budget was well received by business on the day, after the weekend that followed, there were ructions in the market. It turned out this was because the Bank of England had mis-regulated pensions and many funds were exposed to a rise in interest rates. In a report in May 2024 the Bank admitted that two thirds of the market spike had been down to its failings.
But at the time they sought to blame me and the Mini-Budget. There were orchestrated briefings from bureaucrats, their corporate allies and the international network, even including the IMF and President Biden himself, who criticized what we were doing during a visit to an ice cream parlor in Oregon. There was also a group of Conservative MPs who were intent on unseating me to install the man I had beaten in the leadership election. I was forced to reverse the policies and ultimately hounded out of office through the direct threat of a UK debt crisis by the Bank of England Governor.
What I learnt was how left-wing and powerful the deep state in Britain had become and how they were prepared to unseat a democratically elected Prime Minister. The mainstream media and corporate sector were taking talking points from them. I was also struck by the extent to which the left were internationally networked.
It is notable that the debt is larger, bond yields are higher and the fiscal packages that have been announced are bigger under the current Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves than was the case during my tenure as Prime Minister. Yet the Bank of England has backed her with monetary policy and the media are virtually silent about the dismal results of the economic path the current government is pursuing and the crisis they face down the line.
The assaults on conservatives and the backing of leftists and their ideas is plain to see across the Western world: the constant attacks and the attempts to undermine President Trump during his first term and the lawfare that was pursued against him; the attempts to interfere with the results of the Polish presidential election; the banning of Marine le Pen from running for office in France; the declaration in Germany of the AfD as an extremist organisation.
Those of us on the right are fighting in a rigged system and the left are now the well-connected establishment network in the West. This is a direct threat to our way of life and the ideas that made our countries great: Christian values, free speech, the nation state. Unless we fight back, the West is going to be swallowed by the blob.
Ten years to Save the West
I wrote last year in Ten Years to Save the West that we only had a limited time to fix this. That was one year ago and the clock is ticking. So now I reckon we only have nine years and counting.
But one big thing has happened on the positive side of the ledger.
Since then Donald Trump has been elected back to the Presidency and since taking office again he has vigorously pursued policies to stem the malaise into which America and the West has fallen. There are signs that the tide is starting to turn.
His election has given fresh hope and momentum to all of us in Britain and Europe fighting the same battles: a flurry of executive orders confirming men are men and women are women; drill baby drill; a big beautiful bill which cuts taxes, regulations and spending.
He is also taking on the deep state, challenging the failed economic consensus and the hitherto untouchable Federal Reserve.
This is about restoring the U.S. constitution as envisaged by the Founding Fathers. Next year will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And I hope it might also be the spur for Britain to start reclaiming our ancient liberties. This means restoring our constitution of parliamentary sovereignty and getting rid of the Blairite institutions and legal framework from the Human Rights Act to the Equality Act and the Constitutional Reform Act.
Britain is in a worse state than the U.S. – but it is not irreversible
People keep asking me: is it over, is Britain lost?
I admit that the situation is bad. It is worse for us than it is the U.S. Our deep state is deeper and our blob is bigger. We followed a forty-year diversion into Europeanism which led to more unaccountable institutions and terrible laws, most of which still remain on our statute book even after we left the European Union. We have a smaller entrepreneur class than the U.S. due to high taxation, regulation and a huge welfare state. I believe entrepreneurs are a vital part of the counter-revolution.
We have a big problem with Islamism. Islamists have exercised too much power in the British system. The immigration process, through chain immigration and students’ dependents, has allowed the perpetuation of tribal practices like cousin marriage and what the Home Office euphemistically calls ‘honour-based abuse’ that are diametrically opposed to our values. I spoke earlier about the failure to eradicate the rape gangs plaguing towns across the country. The worst thing is the complicity of too many of Britain’s state authorities including the police, the Home Office and local councils.
But I take heart from the fightback regular people in our country are mounting. Operation Raise the Colours is prompting British patriots publicly to raise the Union Jack flag and the St George’s Cross of England. People, including a group of mums called the Pink Ladies, are protesting outside hotels that have been taken over by illegal migrants.
The Labour Government is incredibly unpopular. Sir Keir Starmer is a modern King John figure seen as arbitrary, weak, untrustworthy and acting against the interests of the people.
The U.S. is in trouble if Britain falls
The U.S. should not stand idly by and allow Britain to fall. The British economy teeters on the edge of a precipice — a relentless doom loop of low growth, crippling taxes, fleeing businesses, vanishing revenues and spiralling debt. The debt trap that I tried to escape.
Our gilts trade at a premium, a stark warning of dwindling confidence. Nearly fifty years ago, Britain was forced to beg the IMF for a rescue package. That humiliation looms again, but this time, the IMF may be too stretched — or perhaps too busy with France — to save us.
To my American friends who cherish Britain’s history, this is not mere nostalgia. If Britain and Europe were to collapse, it wouldn’t just be a tragedy — it would be a global catastrophe, shaking the foundations of the free world. What would a Europe controlled by the enemy look like? The stakes are existential.
America, the gauntlet is yours. Can you rally to support those in Britain who still believe in our nation’s greatness? Imagine a new, better Special Relationship: closer economic ties to grow both of our economies, unleashing Britain’s oil and gas reserves as part of energy dominance, restoring free speech, and replacing bureaucratic diktat with parliamentary sovereignty.
We need to use private sector dynamism to drive this change – to aid the British people who are desperate about what has happened to the country and want to see our ancient liberties restored.
In 2026, as America celebrates 250 years of independence, what greater tribute could there be than the U.S. helping Britain rediscover what made us Great?
Let us stand shoulder to shoulder, not as relics of the past, but as champions of an energetic, free and prosperous future — united across the Atlantic by courage, liberty and an unyielding belief in our shared destiny.
