The end of the liberal settlement: Ben Habib and the return of majority politics

“There ain’t no bloody far right in the United Kingdom.” That was Ben Habib, addressing a packed room of sympathisers in a recent speech that tore into the liberal institutions now governing British life. What followed was not just another populist lament, but something more fundamental: a root-and-branch rejection of the post-Blair settlement. For Habib, the crisis facing Britain isn’t cultural drift or economic mismanagement—it’s regime capture.

The conventional script says British politics is a tug-of-war between left and right. Habib wants that scrapped. The real cleavage, he argues, is between the people and an unelected liberal managerial class. Liberalism—once a force for emancipation—has become, in his telling, an ideological cartel. It elevates individual rights to the point of tyranny, weaponises bureaucracy, and hollows out democratic self-rule.

At the centre of his critique is the Human Rights Act, which he views as a constitutional coup. By importing the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, Tony Blair did more than enshrine rights; he dissolved the legal foundation of British citizenship. Habib casts this as a deliberate effort to flatten distinctions between citizen and non-citizen, ultimately severing the link between national belonging and legal protection.

From there, a broader system emerged: mass immigration without assimilation, cultural pluralism without cohesion, and a criminal justice system that privileges criminals' rights over victims' security. The result? What Habib calls "cultural silos" rather than social integration - a patchwork of identities held together not by shared values, but by bureaucratic enforcement and elite guilt.

The apparatus enforcing this shift, according to Habib, is DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Far from fostering harmony, DEI institutionalises grievance, privileges identity over merit, and imposes what he describes as a form of state-sanctioned racism against the majority. The old liberal ideal of equality before the law has been replaced by a new dogma: equity as reparations.

What makes Habib’s argument notable is not just its content but its scope. This isn’t a narrow culture war salvo. It’s a diagnosis of a post-democratic regime. One where elected officials are neutered by quangos, supranational bodies, and legal mechanisms that insulate the system from public pressure. When fiscal policy must be approved by the Office for Budget Responsibility, and when criminal justice is outsourced to the European Court of Human Rights, what remains of parliamentary sovereignty?

His break with Reform UK underscores the urgency of his critique. Farage, he claims, channels discontent but capitulates to the very structures he denounces. Reform is media populism with no institutional strategy. In response, Habib has launched the Great British Political Action Committee (PAC), a vehicle aimed at uniting the right and restoring ideological seriousness to the political landscape. His vision is to build a new platform grounded in democratic accountability and cultural self-belief - not another personality vehicle, but a genuine realignment.

His warning is stark: by 2029, Britain will either have reclaimed democratic self-rule or sleepwalked into managed decline. Liberalism, untethered from the nation, has become a creed hostile to its own host. Restoring democracy, in Habib's eyes, will require more than electoral change. It demands institutional confrontation.

Whether you agree with Habib or not, his thesis cuts through the noise. Britain’s crisis is not just economic. It is existential. Who rules? In whose name? And on what mandate? If mainstream politics won’t ask those questions, others will.