Britain’s New Right: Could Reform Replace the Tories? (Dr James Orr)
Radical with Amol Rajan
BBC
4.5 • 919 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ever since Labour won a landslide victory at the general election, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives have been fighting for the soul of the political right in Britain.
Now a new right-wing think tank is putting together a suite of potential policies for a future Reform government.
Dr James Orr, an associate professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University and friend of US Vice President JD Vance, chairs the advisory board of that new think tank - the Centre for a Better Britain (CBB).
Amol asks him whether the CBB is modelled on American organisations like the Heritage Foundation, which wrote a policy wish list called ‘Project 2025’ that set out a vision for how Donald Trump might govern during his second term in the White House.
They also discuss who is funding the CBB, the politics of national preference, and how James was radicalised by Brexit and the culture wars.
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Amol Rajan is a presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. He is also the host of University Challenge on BBC One. Before that, Amol was media editor at the BBC and editor at The Independent. Radical with Amol Rajan is a Today Podcast.
It was made by Lewis Vickers with Izzy Rowley. Digital production was by Gabriel Purcell-Davis. Technical production was by Rohan Madison. The editor is Sam Bonham. The executive producer is Owenna Griffiths.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:04.7 | Hello, it's Amol here. |
| 0:06.2 | Welcome to Radical. |
| 0:07.5 | These are conversations about the deep global trends changing our world and the radical ideas that you need in order to win the future. |
| 0:15.9 | We've often discussed on this podcast already that the era of two-party politics, which characterised |
| 0:21.1 | Britain in the 20th century, is long since dead, and politics seems fundamentally fractured, |
| 0:26.9 | particularly perhaps on the right in Britain. And debates about what the future of right-wing |
| 0:31.3 | politics could and should look like in our country have been raging since the general |
| 0:36.6 | election, which saw the Tories |
| 0:38.2 | retreating to the opposition benches to try to find a way forward. And this week, I want to give |
| 0:44.0 | you the chance to see behind the curtain of British politics and encounter the man who a lot |
| 0:49.6 | of people are calling the intellectual architect of Britain's new right. |
| 0:55.4 | James Orr is a Cambridge theologian and philosopher who is a friend of the US |
| 1:00.3 | Vice President J.D. Vance and several other very, very influential people in transatlantic politics. |
| 1:06.1 | People like Peter Thiel, the legendary tech investor and billionaire. |
| 1:10.2 | He's also over here, chairman of the |
| 1:12.8 | advisory board for a new right-wing think tank called the Centre for a Better Britain. And he goes |
| 1:18.3 | further in this interview in detailing the ambition, the funding and the worldview, especially |
| 1:24.3 | around a politics of national preference for that think tank than I think |
| 1:27.9 | he's been anywhere else. So on this week's episode, Dr James Lord tells me how he thinks |
| 1:32.9 | the new right can win an election again and whether or not Nigel Farage's Reform Party |
| 1:38.9 | is the answer. |
... |
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