James Orr: "This New Nation That’s Emerging Is Really No Nation At All"

James Orr (Photography by Dinendra Haria)

Noah Vickers

@noahvickers14

“A terrible beauty is being born. Let’s hope it’s more beautiful than terrible. But it’s happening, whether we like it or not,” Dr James Orr intones in polished syllables. He is referring to the end of what he calls the “long 20th century”, which he places between 1914 and 2016. He dubs that period “the twilight of liberalism”, arguing that a new epoch is now dawning.

Speaking to The House in the bar of a Mayfair hotel, Orr’s words occasionally have a note of the apocalypse about them. While he is entirely serious about the points he is making – and has clearly thought about them deeply – they are often delivered in the register of an epic drama, with the odd literary reference thrown in for good measure. 

His “terrible beauty” line, for example, is drawn from the WB Yeats poem Easter, 1916 – a reflection on Ireland’s Easter Rising against British rule. It is not the only revolt to which he alludes, as he warns that Europe could be on the brink of “a wave of national uprisings like we saw in 1848”, such is the level of “rage” in electorates across the West. Though “maybe that’s an exaggeration”, he admits.

Orr, 46, an associate professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge, has been appointed to chair the advisory board of an emerging think tank called the Centre for a Better Britain (CBB). 

Leaked documents published by The Sunday Times revealed that the nascent organisation is in “direct contact with Reform UK, including Nigel Farage”. It is also “building relationships with Robert Jenrick’s team”, while acknowledging that “the Tory party appears to be in terminal decline” amid “questions about Kemi Badenoch’s leadership”.

Like Reform, the CBB will be based in Millbank Tower. It is expected to formally launch at some point this month, led by Reform’s former chief operating officer Jonathan Brown, and funded by two of the party’s biggest donors, David Lilley and Mark Thompson. 

The latter are both metals traders who, according to Orr, are “friends of Nigel”, having gone “boozing with him when they were in the commodities business in the late 1980s and early 1990s”. As well as donating to the CBB, both will sit on its board. 

Yet despite these overt links with Reform, Orr stresses that the CBB is an independent think tank, which happens to be “probably more sympathetic to the aims of Reform than we are to any other party”. 

He even claims it is “actually not clear whether we’re on the left or on the right”, as the CBB’s overriding priority is to champion “the politics of national preference”. Orr has defined this less as an ideology in itself, and more as a prism or “organising matrix” through which political issues can be considered. The CBB will be guided by a “post-Brexit, pro-nation, pro-sovereignty, pro-Britain impulse and framework”, he has said.

As well as producing policies, the CBB is also expected to identify and train parliamentary candidates and future spads. Orr says this is unlikely to be formal training. 

“It’s certainly not going to be some kind of Reform gladiator training academy,” he laughs, emphasising that the CBB’s interests stretch across parties. 

“[We will work with] any promising young person who is dedicated to a politics of national preference. They could be in the Green Party, they could be in the Labour Party. There are pro-nation left-wingers, a few left.”

There is a sort of 'pick me' attitude in many of the SW1 think tanks 

He also suggests the CBB will be more “subterranean” than other Westminster think tanks, and will not be “all singing, all dancing” in terms of hosting high-profile events. 

“I don’t think we’re going to be seeking the limelight particularly,” he says. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done – not much of it needs to be public-facing. There is a sort of ‘pick me’ attitude in many of the SW1 think tanks.”

Orr has gradually become a prominent figure in right-wing, transatlantic circles over the last few years. In a recent appearance on the BBC podcast Radical, he was introduced by host Amol Rajan as the “intellectual architect of Britain’s new right”.

The academic was raised in Brussels, where he spoke French as well as English. He tells The House that his childhood gave him “a love for Europe and a hatred for the European Union”. 

One of his earliest political memories stems from when he was just 13 and his father explained to him that the Maastricht Treaty had been signed. He was horrified.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is monstrous. It cannot be the case that the Queen is a citizen of the European Union. The Queen is the Queen. How can she just be on my level?’ The idea that there was legal parity between me and Her Majesty struck me as so perverse that I immediately thought, ‘This can’t be right.’” 

He moved to the UK to attend boarding school and was in the year above Rishi Sunak at Winchester. Coming of age in the 1990s, famously dubbed “the end of history” by political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Orr says there was a sense that the right had won the argument on economics, and the left on culture and social liberalism.

“Everything was basically settled,” he says. “So settled, in fact – it was so clear that we’d found the answer – that we could basically go around the world invading other countries and imposing the correct answer, imposing the end of history, on them.”

It was at this stage, he argues, that “confidence in the nation state as the optimal political form was unravelling” – something he hopes the CBB can help to reverse in Britain.

Previous interviews with Orr have honed in on his friendship with JD Vance; the US Vice-President calls Orr his “British sherpa”. But he is also friends with billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel. 

‘Tech bros’ like Thiel have held a key influence over the direction of right-wing politics in the US. In the UK, Reform has not been immune to this, for example by naming its local council ‘Doge’ unit after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which in turn is named after an internet meme and cryptocurrency.

Yet many of Reform’s voters are not especially ‘online’ or necessarily fans of big tech. Polling suggests that a large chunk are over 65 years old. At the same time, some of the party’s younger supporters will be working in industries where their jobs are at risk from artificial intelligence or other forms of automation. 

Does Orr see any tension between the ‘very online right’ and the less online right? 

He admits that “old school conservatives have always been suspicious of the liquifying power of technology, to liquify everything that conservatives want to conserve”. Yet he suggests “the risks to the labour market of AI tend to be overstated”.

[The Victorians] didn’t see any incompatibility between a tech bro and a trad bro

He points out too that there was “a sense of outrage that went deep into the core of the Reform vote” over the Online Safety Act, because it was seen as an attempt to police free speech – an issue which resonates with the party’s supporters as a matter of principle.

Orr believes that a successful national conservative movement should be able to integrate tradition with technology – something he says Vance has done by being both a “tech bro” and a “trad bro”. 

To further illustrate this idea, he points to the engineering and beauty of Victorian railway stations like St Pancras – buildings that possess the scale and aesthetics of cathedrals, while at same time housing a revolutionary mode of travel.    

“It’s that combination of not repudiating the past, but honouring the past in a way that also harnesses cutting-edge technology,” says Orr. “[The Victorians] didn’t see any incompatibility between a tech bro and a trad bro.”

Today, Orr fears that British culture – and English culture within that – is under threat. In the past, he argues it was possible to assimilate groups of immigrants into Britain because the numbers were “totally manageable”. He gives as examples the Huguenots in the 16th century, Pakistanis and Indians following the 1947 partition, and Vietnamese refugees in the early 1980s.

“The numbers now are without any kind of precedent,” says Orr. “The disproportionate impact on those who can bear it least – working-class communities in the East End of London, Epping, Romford, Essex... These are not places that fancy journalists and politicians and eggheads in Cambridge have to worry about. We’re not touched by the blessings of diversity, so we can still get away with the lie that diversity does bring any blessings.”

But aside from immigration itself, he is also convinced that an even greater threat is posed by a “doctrine of cultural self-repudiation within our progressive elites”.

“I wander around the streets of Cambridge, I wander around the streets of Oxford, I never see a St George’s Flag. I never see a Union Jack. I’ll see a Saltire, occasionally, because that represents secession and it represents the dissolution of Britain. I’ll see European Union flags and I’ll see rainbow flags everywhere.

“These are basically transnational, rootless, cosmopolitan ideologies that wholly repudiate the kind of national spirit, or spirit of collective endeavour, that could hold a nation of many ethnicities together.”

Orr further argues that the “Treasury dogma” of putting GDP above all other measures of success, and the pursuit of economic growth through “the Ponzi scheme of mass migration”, puts Britain is at risk of becoming “a mere economic zone” rather than a nation. 

“This new nation that’s emerging is really no nation at all,” he says. “It’s almost a laboratory for hyper-liberalism, hyper-progressivism, engaging in the endgame of this disastrous experiment that has been multi-culturalism.” 

Whether consciously or not, he echoes here the language of Keir Starmer, who has accused the Conservatives of running an “open borders experiment” during their time in office and has said his government is “shutting down the lab”.

It could be argued that striking a balance between immigration and economic growth is a trade-off, one of the so-called “tough decisions” that are the responsibility of any government. Farage, if he enters Downing Street in 2029, would face those same tough decisions. 

Orr predicts that by the time of the next election, “rage” over immigration will have grown such that there will “probably be an appetite within the nation to say, look, even if it means some low growth”, action on that issue should be prioritised. 

Four years is a long time. What does Reform need to do to maintain its momentum and win a majority? 

“My sense is they could probably just sit back and do absolutely nothing for the next four years,” says Orr. “Now, they’re not. What are they doing at the moment? They are midway through a six-week ‘Lawless Britain’ campaign at a time when the Tories are off in Tuscany and the government is nowhere to be seen… So they’ve got this extraordinary campaigning energy.”

Orr, who says he is not interested in running to be an MP himself, warns that the Conservatives could be in a similar predicament to the Liberals in the 1920s, though he also notes they are “the most successful election-winning machine in political history – it’s very hard to see it completely disappearing forever”.

To understand Reform, meanwhile, Orr points to the concept of ‘anti-fragility’, an idea developed by essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. 

“Anti-fragility is the idea that when something comes into contact with resistance, or conflict, it actually gets stronger,” he explains, almost as if giving one of his supervisions at Cambridge. 

“So, when you go to the gym and you do a work-out… you get stronger. Or in Greek mythology, the Hydra, when you cut off one head, two will grow back. 

“I think Nigel Farage and the Reform party are one of the most anti-fragile forces in western politics.” 

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