For decades now Trevor Phillips has been one of the most astute and unusually self-aware members of the liberal establishment, becoming in recent years one of its sternest critics. That trajectory began with his call in 2004, when he was chairman for the Commission for Racial Equality, for the term ‘multiculturalism’ to be scrapped for being divisive. His columns in the Times these days can be unsparing in their dissection of the shortcomings and failures of left-liberal ideology.

Conservatives, old-school liberals and Red Wall Labour voters have either known of this anti-metropolitan sentiment or felt it themselves

Phillips’ perceptiveness owes a great deal to the fact that he speaks as a veteran semi-insider. And it’s in keeping with his unique vantage point that we read, in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, more words of candour regarding his own tribe.

‘Liberal cosmopolitan London and its suburbs – Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge – have only recently become aware of how much the rest of the country hates us,’ he says. ‘We are in a tiny minority who have been the beneficiaries of globalisation because we’re clever, we’re mobile and we have skills that are useful. Much of the country is not in that place.’

Phillips is being a little harsh on himself, given his track record, or even a little disingenuous in his use of ‘us’, given his twenty-year history of apostasy. Most of the detractors of ‘liberal cosmopolitan London’ would not count him as one of their number, and perhaps would be surprised to hear Phillips still describe himself so.

Yet his words will ring resoundingly true to many conservatives and classic liberals who for years have been uttering and writing the same sentiments. The idea that a liberal metropolitan elite has become detached from the rest of the country, from the middle classes and the working classes, and whose self-regarding, selfish politics and policies have alienated and brought harm to the rest of the country, will be familiar to very many.

They will certainly resonate with anyone who’s been following the literature on the subject, to anyone who read Values, Voice and Virtue (2023) by Matt Goodwin, or more seminally, The Road to Somewhere (2017) by David Goodhart. That book, published after that watershed year of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s first election to the White House, spoke of a fault line separating both British and American society: between a global, liberal Anywhere and local, conservative Somewhere class. That divide remains firmly in place. Indeed, as Phillips says, hatred between the two has calcified – certainly at the behest of the latter.

There has for years been a real belief and anger that policies enacted by a London cosmopolitan class, especially in regard to immigration and multiculturalism, policies which have either materially-enriched only a wealthy liberal class, or make them feel good about themselves, have wrought catastrophe on this nation. That anger has not gone away. Turn on GB News today and you will still hear the fury being vented.

Conservatives, old-school liberals and Red Wall Labour voters have either known of this anti-metropolitan sentiment or felt it themselves. To decry the ‘out of touch liberal metropolitan elite’ has been one of Nigel Farage’s rhetorical ticks for time immemorial – and one that has served him well, because so many people feel this detachment.

While that metropolitan elite have been apt, in turn, to accuse those on the right of being racists, the truth is that populist ire is seldom directed against immigrants – or the trans community, or any favourite mascot minority of the liberal elite. The anger has and still remains directed at them.

Goodwin’s latest book, Suicide of a Nation, is aimed entirely at ‘a ruling class that is willing to destroy its own country in the name of showing compassion to others’. Ben Jones, in his more conventionally conservative book, Island of Strangers, also published this year, likewise writes witheringly of ‘progressive elites’ and their destructive legacy. Even those on the centre are redirecting their sights. Adrian Wooldridge began his book Centrists of the World Unite! by acknowledging the ‘arrogance and cocooning’ of this coterie, and how many ‘liberal policies have brought havoc in their wake’.

Ten years ago, Hillary Clinton gave her infamous speech lamenting the ‘deplorables’, an oration that only galvanised a global populist revolt. Today that dislike towards a cosmopolitan ruling class is more than reciprocated and finds its voice among many classes and in many ways, towards an out of touch elite beholden to ‘luxury beliefs’ and consumed by ‘suicidal empathy’.

Hate is not a healthy emotion, it is true. But the people it’s still directed at need to realise that it exists, not least, as Trevor Phillips says, because they are indeed a ‘tiny minority’. It’s the majority, everyone else, who have paid the high price for their luxury beliefs, for policies that have brought this country seemingly to the point of disintegration.