Frankenstein Conservatism

So-called one-nation conservatism is a pragmatic, paternalist Tory tradition that views society as mutually dependent and emphasizes duties across classes and places. It supports enterprise but accepts a purposeful state to keep the social fabric intact — promising solid institutions, the rule of law, a basic welfare floor, investment in services and infrastructure, and environmental stewardship. Associated with nineteenth-century prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and the Conservatives of the post-1945 era, it favors gradual reform over culture-war theatrics and boasts of its pragmatism and commitment to norms.

Under Badenoch, this moral vocabulary is being extinguished. One-nation Conservatism once spoke of “duty” and a “shared future”; now, under Reform’s domination, it mutates into Frankenstein Conservatism — a creature stitched from Farage’s far-right extremism and Tory remnants, animated by culture-war hatred, anti-LGBTQ obsessions, and anti-Palestinian narratives that treat solidarity as subversion.

Still, Badenoch has also followed a steady backward path laid down over the past six years. Already at the turn of the 2020s, Boris Johnson had converted that inheritance into spectacle: the obsession with Brexit, calls to “level up” poorer areas as a populist slogan more than a program, and a pro-growth green push (the Ten Point Plan, offshore wind, gigafactories). Prime minister from 2022, Rishi Sunak then thinned it out into managerial retrenchment — fiscal hawkishness, fights with the European court, and cringey acts to please backbench MPs and the far-right hacks at the Daily Mail. Yet even when Sunak was in charge, he never promised to scrap net zero.

A closer look at Badenoch’s climate lines shows they’re built on nonsense and weaponized falsehoods. She has claimed “net zero by 2050 is impossible” and that the costs to families would be “catastrophic” — a line she’s repeated multiple times.

Independent analyses show the exact opposite: the Climate Change Committee has mapped viable pathways; Carbon Brief, a UK-based organization that analyses and explains climate data, and others show her cost claims misrepresent the evidence. Upfront investment —under 1 percent of GDP a year—mainly goes into clean power grids, home efficiency and heat pumps, EV infrastructure, and industrial upgrades; from the 2030s to the ’40s the transition yields system-wide savings, with lower exposure to fossil-fuel prices and lower bills. Her framing deliberately ignores that the recent energy crisis was driven by gas dependence, not by green policy. Her repeal promise upgrades the same old untruths to policy status — facts and figures be damned.

Will the Center Right Hold?

Elsewhere, right-wing forces oppose the pace and the means, not the legal destination (yet). At the EU level, the European Climate Law still fixes a 2050 neutrality target and a 55 percent cut  in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. In Germany, for all of Christian-Democrat chancellor Friedrich Merz’s weird posturing, his party hasn’t budged from its own 2045 target. Also in government, Sweden’s center-right Moderates have lowered biofuel mandates and trimmed other measures — moves which their own advisers say raise emissions risk — yet the 2045 neutrality target stands. France keeps 2050 in statute; the debates are about tempo and tools. Even in flash points like the Netherlands, where nitrogen rules have sparked farmer protests and court-ordered cuts, the battle is over compliance, not abolition. Denmark’s center right remains bound to a Climate Act with a 70 percent cut by 2030 on the way to neutrality.

In the United States, where Donald Trump has been steadily gutting the country’s climate agenda, clean-energy investment keeps breaking records. The Clean Investment Monitor tracks roughly $67–68 billion in quarterly US clean-energy and transport investment through 2025 (slight quarter-to-quarter wiggles, but above 2024 levels), while the International Energy Agency estimates US clean-energy investment topped $300 billion in 2024 — well ahead of 2020 — and BloombergNEF reports a new global record of about $2.1 trillion in 2024. In other words, the rhetoric hasn’t stopped capital, supply chain build-out, or project announcements; markets are still moving and climate policy remains highly popular among voters.

No Way Out

The vow to scrap net zero and unpick the Climate Change Act is not a tweak but an ideological anomaly: a repudiation of the intergenerational duty to climate action, in favor of a politics that tallies short-term costs and invents enemies. This is Faragism in Tory colors, inviting a state that punishes and a market that extracts.

We can see the Reform UK script road-tested in Durham. After the May 2025 local election, Farage’s party took control of the council — sixty-five seats and a clear majority over a weak opposition. Since then it’s been performance over policy: anti-climate stunts, meaningless rants, and culture-war theater in place of governance. Meanwhile, parts of the North are literally on fire.

With the two-party system dying, the current Tory leadership chases Farage’s Reform UK rather than contests it. If Badenoch falls, the line of succession leads further in this same strategic direction: inner-party leadership challengers like Robert Jenrick have already floated closer alignment with Reform UK and style themselves as its unembarrassed translators inside the Tory camp. The project is survival-by-fusion — absorb the far right’s program in order to keep a tiny share of its vote.

Like Labour, the Tories misread that terrain completely. There is a difference between crisis management and capitulation. Far-right voters typically choose the original, not the replica; the pursuit of that electorate by copying its rhetoric destroys parties from within, alienates core constituencies, and abandons the social majority to higher bills, weaker rights, and a much hotter, riskier country. Badenoch’s strategy is self-sabotage and will be remembered as such.