I’m centre-right myself (and am certainly not Reform).
Two things that formed me were India and China’s market reforms in the 1980s and after. (One I’d lived in, one I would go on to know very well).
Seeing hundreds of millions of people escape absolute poverty and famine and begin their climb towards comfort or prosperity taught me the power of capitalism to do real, life-transforming good on a massive scale. It also underlined how slogans that sound well-meaning from govt often justify systems that hold people in misery.
Later I learned that trade, industry and the Industrial Revolution had done similar on a global scale. Could there have been a socialist industrial revolution? Possibly, but the repeated record of socialist-planned innovation drives suggest they can work for a few decades but rarely more, and that such prosperity it brings is allocated top down, is often meager and corrupt.
History has given us many more experiments over the years. East Germany, West Germany. North Korea, South Korea. Many Asian states whose people started to see prosperity once they moved away from socialism.
Recently Argentina: poverty rate down from 52% to 36% since Milei. Household income up 26%. Inflation down from 200% to 2%.
Do you support those reforms? If not, what do you have to say to those, by now, billions who are no longer destitute because of them? Is your take on 70s British politics (or whatever first shaped your views) more important than their lives and comfort?
Standing in the charnel houses of Cambodia really brings home that the right has no monopoly on fascistic violence either.
Many, many people are right wing precisely because they “give a fuck” about other people.