I have just read Michael Ashcroft’s article, published today – the 31^st December 2025 – on ConservativeHome. He argues that Britain is undergoing an unprecedented demographic and economic crisis driven by a mass exodus of young people and productive capital. He presents Office for National Statistics figures showing record levels of emigration, with nearly 700,000 long-term departures in the year to June 2025, including more than a quarter of a million British nationals. He emphasises that the heaviest losses are among those aged sixteen to thirty-four, the people who would otherwise provide labour, entrepreneurship, tax revenue, and future families. He links this exodus to falling birth rates, rising capital flight among millionaires and business owners, and a perception that Britain has become economically hostile and politically insecure compared with countries such as the United States, Australia, Singapore, and parts of Eastern Europe.

Ashcroft attributes these developments primarily to the actions of the present Labour government. He portrays Labour as ideologically driven, fiscally reckless, and openly hostile to wealth creation. He lists higher taxes, the abolition of non-domiciled status, changes to inheritance taxation, VAT on school fees, and rising public borrowing as evidence that Labour is chasing away those who contribute most to the public finances. He concludes that Britain is becoming uninvestable and socially degraded, and that without bold reform the country will slide to the margins of global economic life. Reform UK is dismissed as inadequate, and Labour is presented as the immediate and principal author of national decline.

That summary is fair, and the factual claims are accepted here as accurate. Britain really is losing its young. Capital really is fleeing. The economy really is stagnating. Labour really is malicious in intent, incompetent in execution, and corrupt in instinct. None of this is in dispute. What demands denunciation is the purpose of the article itself, which is to frame these developments as though they were the consequence of a sudden rupture in 2024, rather than the predictable culmination of a longer process in which the Conservative Party played the central role.

Labour governs by envy and bureaucratic plunder. It always has. It views the productive citizen not as the core of a nation, but as a resource to be milked until resistance becomes impossible. When Labour raises taxes, expands welfare, and moralises against success, it does so deliberately and with a sense of grievance. Ashcroft is right to say that Labour will do further harm, and it will. It cannot do otherwise, because its worldview treats economic life as a moral drama in which punishment is mistaken for justice.

What makes the present situation different from earlier Labour interludes is that the damage has arrived immediately. There has been no gradual erosion, no delayed reckoning. That is because the work was already done. The Conservative governments between 2010 and 2024 dismantled what remained of Britain’s economic resilience and social cohesion. By the time Labour took office, there was nothing left to mismanage without bringing on an immediate and visible collapse.

It normally takes a Labour government a whole Parliament to exhaust the inherited capital of a functioning state. Ignore the chaotic Heath interlude – the Wilson and Callaghan governments required a decade to bring Britain to the Winter of Discontent. The Blair government needed two terms to break the constitution and entrench managerial rule. This time, Labour found the cupboards bare. Taxes were already high. Regulation was already suffocating. Immigration was already destabilising. Energy policy was already ruinous. Public services were already failing. Debt was already vast. The Conservative Party had governed continuously for fourteen years and had used that time to empower the bureaucracy and normalise authoritarian rule, all while claiming to defend liberty and enterprise.

Ashcroft’s article treats capital flight as though it were a reaction to recent Labour policies alone. In reality, serious capital has been leaving Britain for years. The energetic and entrepreneurial watched successive Conservative governments raise taxes, inflate asset prices, politicise institutions, and criminalise dissent. Labour’s arrival did not create the impulse to leave. It removed the last remaining excuse to stay.

The same applies to the youth exodus. Young people are not voting with their feet against socialism in the abstract. They are leaving a country that offers them high rents, low wages, insecure employment, cultural hostility, and constant surveillance. The Conservatives presided over the destruction of affordable housing, the casualisation of labour, and the transformation of education into an ideological sorting machine. Labour merely inherits the result and accelerates the process.

Ashcroft is correct that Reform UK has no answers that will work. It is a refuge for displaced Conservatives, not a challenge to the system that produced this crisis. It does not confront the power of finance, the regulatory state, or the surveillance apparatus. It provides indignation without offering structural change. On that point, Ashcroft is undeniably right.

What he will not say is that the Conservative Party has nothing to offer either. Its record disqualifies it from serious consideration. It governed during the period in which Britain was hollowed out into its present shape. It imposed lockdowns, expanded censorship, politicised policing, and embedded cultural radicalism throughout public life. It did not merely fail to resist decline. It administered decline with greater efficiency because it neutralised opposition while doing so.

This is why the present moment feels so raw. Labour’s brutality is obvious, but it wounds because it exposes the full measure of Conservative betrayal. The youth exodus, the capital flight, and the demographic collapse are not Labour inventions. They are the harvest of policies pursued under Conservative rule and justified with Conservative rhetoric.

Ashcroft writes as though Britain needs a change of direction. What Britain faces is the consequence of having had no real choice for a generation. Labour will worsen conditions, because that is its nature. The Conservatives cannot repair the damage, because they caused it. Reform offers noise without force. The political class as a whole has exhausted its legitimacy.

Young Britons are leaving because the country no longer offers a future commensurate with their effort or loyalty. That judgement is rational. Our present misfortune is not that Labour is now doing what Labour always does. The misfortune is that it can do so immediately, because those who claimed to oppose it already destroyed the ground on which resistance once stood.