Has a sense of reality finally insinuated itself into the pages of the New Statesman? The venerable English weekly, founded in 1913, has always had a decidedly—often, indeed, militantly—left-of-center cast to it. Imagine our surprise, then, when on Valentine’s Day the New Statesman published an essay on liberalism that would not have been out of place in the pages of The New Criterion. Written by Melanie Phillips, a columnist for the London Sunday Times, the essay is partly a heartfelt repudiation of various liberal pieties, partly a wake-up call to her colleagues on the somnolent Left.

Phillips’s essay is titled “Why I am Really a Progressive.” But one needn’t read far to understand that by “progressive” she means the opposite of what left-wing liberals in Britain and the U.S. mean by the term. Phillips begins with a gentle send-up of the utopian p ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase