Radomir Tylecote has served as the Special Adviser to British MP Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg as Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency, then Business Secretary. He is now the Managing Director of the London, United Kingdom-based think tank the Prosperity Institute. He was one of the distinguished guests at the Budapest Global Dialogue 2025 this week, hosted by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. Mr Tylecote was also gracious enough to give an exclusive interview to our site.

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You have just had a panel discussion completed here at the Budapest Global Dialogue, and one of the first statements you said, which you kind of brushed over at the time, was that ‘Hungary has carved out for itself a very unique role within the European Union.’ Can you elaborate a little bit on it? What is that role, and do you see it as a favourable development?

Yeah, I am delighted to elaborate on that. I do see it as a favourable development. But I don’t personally agree with the entire, let’s say, Fidesz worldview. As I expressed in the panel, we have some differences. So, I think that there is a sense that political integration is a challenge and a problem to sovereignty, whereas the single market is broadly good. I understand why that makes sense for Hungary right now, but I think the single market is becoming more anticompetitive and more harmful to growth, particularly because of the deeply harmful Net Zero agenda that is now set in the European Union.

But that said, Hungary is doing something very important, and it has a different strategy from the UK’s Eurosceptic strategy. From the UK’s perspective, we tried; David Cameron attempted to some degree to create a different tier, a different gear, if you like, for the United Kingdom. He went to do this renegotiation in 2016 when he demanded certain things, like an opt-out of benefits for EU migrants, but it didn’t work. We just got a kind of a weak opt-out on child benefits. Special wording for the United Kingdom that says the concept of ‘ever closer Union’ doesn’t apply, that didn’t work either. He got a vague promise that there would be a future treaty that would have to be ratified by a majority of national parliaments. He wanted special rules for the financial sector, effectively didn’t work because the French blocked the special rules for the City of London.

So, we tried to do a two-tier Europe, and that’s one of the reasons why the United Kingdom had to leave, because it didn’t work. Brexit will be regarded by history as a triumph, and it was a very important thing for our country to do. However, over the last decade, it’s also been extremely hard and sucked in effectively all the effort of a generation of conservative activists to the exclusion and the cost of almost everything else. And that has meant our Europeanized bureaucracy has been able to harm our country in various ways, including through open-door migration from other places. My conclusion from that is that Hungary is wise not to be attempting Huxit because it would suck in everything else. So, Hungary is very smart to be carving out a particular niche for itself. Although I’ve said that I don’t think that a two-tier Europe is possible, Hungary is still right to be fighting battles on various fronts and just prioritizing what it can do.

For now, while the EU still exists, the most important priority where Hungary has been particularly impressive is ending mass immigration into Hungary and taking control of Hungary’s borders, even if the EU makes Budapest pay a fee for the privilege. So I think that’s why I’m impressed by the strategic direction of Hungary in its different context from the United Kingdom.

So, is Hungary the sort of ideological successor of David Cameron’s efforts to create this two-tier Europe? Is there any other country that is trying this pre-Brexit approach, or has it been completely abandoned in Brussels?

I think with respect, no, I don’t see it as a successor, because the Euroscepticism of, let’s say crudely, Hungarian conservatives, Fidesz, the Hungarian government, whatever you want to call it—their Euroscepticism is genuine. And Cameron’s Euroscepticism is not genuine. Cameron’s Euroscepticism was basically PR, as in public relations. And his attempt at renegotiation was basically PR.

So he attempted things that didn’t work, and I don’t know how much he and that generation really intended for them to work beyond being PR tools. That’s why what Hungary is doing is different because there appears to be a strategy, from what I understand, to pick winnable battles and to accept that it would be too great a challenge to leave the European Union, given that Hungary is physically surrounded by the European Union as a landlocked country. That would be, as we say, biting off more than Hungary could chew, but instead it picks specific battles and essentially tests the European Union’s will, and that is doable. And to remind the world of that, to put it in British Victorian terms, Hungary is a living nation, and it does object to infringements on its sovereignty. And it’s prepared to take risks and push the European Union. So no, I don’t see it as an ideological successor to Cameron. I see it as in some respects ideologically similar to British Euroscepticism, although necessarily taking a different path.

At the panel, you also talked about the lack of innovation within Europe. Why is there such a big gap between tech companies in the United States and Europe? All the big trillion-dollar companies are based in the United States: Amazon, Alphabet, which is Google, Meta, and Microsoft. How come in the past decades, there hasn’t been any tech company of this size ever emerging in Europe?

So it’s various things. One is centralization. Another is almost willful deindustrialization with the green agenda, and another is lobbying power. Let’s just talk about the various things that are happening here. It was often said, especially by an older generation of Europhiles, that the United States is one market; therefore, why shouldn’t Europe be one? I think the United States, among differences, has highly competitive local polities in the form of states. They compete on tax, for example. The European Union is not in the business of creating anything like the United States. It’s creating a uniquely opaque and centralized political system, the likes of which we’ve never quite seen. We’ve never seen a political entity like it, although there are some similarities to previous entities like the Holy Roman Empire, which is worth studying.

So what happened? Let’s go back to what we discussed in the panel. How are the laws? Philip Siegert, my co-panellist, has said that most of what Europe does is regulation. It’s true, I accept that. But how is any decision made? The European Parliament, the closest thing that Europe gets to a democratic entity, isn’t allowed to propose legislation, nor can it propose changes. It’s allowed to request that the Commission do so, and that was a concession from the Commission. So, legislation, new rules come from the Commission, then are discussed by the Committee of Parliament Representatives, which now agrees to 70 to 90 per cent of new European rules before they even reach the Council. At the council, the national veto is almost gone. It’s been replaced by QMV—qualified majority voting—which now decides the vast majority of new European rules. So, how do you revoke a bad law? You effectively can’t. That is another reason why we had to leave.

What does that mean for our regulations that affect companies, that affect innovations? It means that by design or by accident, the companies that have access to this opaque system are big corporations. Especially good, especially effective, are the big German corporations. But it’s in their interests that European regulations are made. Why is that a problem? It means you get things like GDPR, the Data Protection Regulation. It means in finance, you get things like Method 2. These pull up the ladder from small innovator, challenger companies that, in the long run, generate most growth, because a huge proportion—we can debate how much—of economic growth for any developed country like ours comes from innovation. If you suppress the challenger firms through burdensome regulation, you’ll destroy innovation and you’ll destroy prosperity, and that is now what’s happening in Europe.

One of the fastest-growing sectors in employment in Europe is compliance. And big corporations can afford compliance. That’s why I said that we’ve forgotten in our lifetimes, especially in the lifetime of the baby boomers, that the prosperity we were living through is not normal. It’s not. It’s highly, highly unusual in human history. The vast majority of human history generated no prosperity at all. And it happened in part because we had a very fragile system in which big companies and big organizations could not be challenged by upstarts. In other words, a free society. So it’s not a coincidence that increasingly opaque and authoritarian European Union politically is destroying growth. We have to watch how that develops. In my view, Hungary needs to challenge the single market and the regulatory market on all fronts beyond immigration. But to answer your question, that’s a big reason why the EU isn’t producing these great new innovative tech firms, because it’s the wrong kind of seedbed. It’s poisonous to economic life.

It’s also behind on AI.

Profoundly.

I have talked to French lawyer Stéphane Bonichot, who is in IP protection and regulation, and he told me that all the EU can do is regulate. They gave up on innovation in the AI sector, that’s why they just go for regulation, regulation, regulation. Do you agree with that sentiment?

I do agree with that. And the worst of it is that Europe is also a regulatory empire. But many forms of trade agreements with the European Union require adherence to European laws. I am afraid our government, led by Keir Starmer back home, is now realigning British regulation with the European, which will again kill innovation.

Let’s talk about your institute. The Prosperity Institute, as I’ve just been informed, has recently undergone a name change. Why was that decision made?

Well, we wanted to express what we’re about. Legatum Institute is a lovely Latin word, but it’s a general name, and I think, as we’ve just discussed, what’s fundamentally at stake is what we call national prosperity. Because the building blocks, the things that work, are being eroded or being removed, and they include sovereign democratic nation states, they include the rule of law without discrimination. They include flourishing families and a healthy birth rate. Although we’re sometimes typified as traditionalist conservatives, we’re interested in the things that history has shown to work. We aim to focus on dealing with what we call the existential threats, and I’ve just gone through a few of those. We have real existential threats in the UK to our national prosperity.

Let’s look at one of them. Earlier this year, we found out that the Sentencing Council, which advises on sentences in courts after verdicts are passed, was recommending that non-whites and non-Christians receive more lenient sentences than white people and Christians. I mean, that’s extraordinary. So we’re in a situation now where, because of the wrong philosophical response to mass immigration, the structures of the British state are discriminating against white people and Christians. And consider what our historic nation is. Now, I don’t want discrimination against anyone. I don’t want discrimination against any religion. But we’re going to a dark place in the United Kingdom where the state has taken on quite totalitarian roles. And that’s one of the things that we had to fight.

Recently, the local council elections were held in the United Kingdom. It made international news, which I don’t think it often does. The two major parties came in third and fourth, I believe. And some people opined that this is an extinction threat to the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Do you agree?

Absolutely. Either or both of those parties could be gone in the next decade or so. This is the ‘uniparty’ as it is called on both sides of the aisle. There are different reasons for the decline of both of those parties.

The Conservative Party has failed to understand and grasp the so-called realignment through and after Brexit. The Labour Party has, in particular, ceased to be a national party at all and has become run by people who manifestly don’t believe in the nation state as a concept, least of all the United Kingdom. The tectonic realignment of British politics is, I think, comparable to a century past, where the Labour century began and the Liberal Party was effectively replaced by Labour. I think the Labour century is increasingly likely to be coming to an end.

‘Either or both of those parties could be gone in the next decade or so’

Can Reform benefit, can Reform become the natural party of government? My sense is that the Westminster system tends to create two major parties and a few small ones, somewhat like the United States. In Westminster, it is particularly the case because of the physicality of Westminster, because the benches are facing each other, for the government and the opposition.

You’ve also got the House of Lords.

Yeah. These dynamics are a very good thing for debate, by the way. I wouldn’t want to move to the continental system with respect to either the sense of consensus-seeking government or the hemispheric shape of governments, which I think is bad for all the governments to account for. However, because of that, my sense is that what Britain is liable to get over the next decade is this: Does this realignment really take shape in Parliament? Is it going to be something like a party of the nation and, on the other hand, a party of the cosmopolitan worldview? As for the party of the nation, I think, there’s a possibility that it would be a merger of Reform and what’s left of the Conservative Party, if you like, a reverse takeover by Reform of the Conservatives. And on the other hand, you may well see the Liberal Democrats absorbing what’s left of the Labour Party, which I think is in precipitous decline.

Who knows? We could go back to something like Tories and Whigs, like in our history. Conservatives should always be alert to ‘back to the future’ scenarios. And then you will have a few alarming fringe parties represented in Parliament. Another fruit of mass migration since the 1960s is that there is likely to be an Islamic party in Parliament, de facto if not by name. And then maybe some runt hard-left organization that will represent the more disgusting elements of left-wing politics, including the tacit antisemitism of the hard left. That’s how I feel our parliamentary politics is shaping up now. These are very exciting times, rife with opportunity, but also great risk.

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