By John Penrose. Original article written for Conservative Home Here.
Churchill is supposed to have said that America can usually be relied on to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else first, but it’s a phrase that applies just as strongly to today’s Conservative Party as well.
In 14 years of Government we did plenty of important things, like taking on Gordon Brown’s ‘something for nothing’ society and delivering Brexit. But any Government faces huge, buffeting sidewinds that can blow it off course and ours was no different: the LibDem coalition inevitably meant compromises; we lost time with divisions over Brexit; we were hit with a once-in-a-century pandemic; and there was the first war in Europe for 80 years with soaring energy prices too.
Perhaps understandably, all that firefighting meant we lost sight of something important. The workaday Conservative mission of delivering supply-side reforms to upgrade and modernise our economy, our public services and our infrastructure so our nation works a little bit better and more efficiently every year.
Thatcher and Major’s Government’s did it and turned Britain from the ‘sick man of Europe’ into an entrepreneurial dynamo. And we still managed a few important reforms in the last 14 years in spite of all those sidewinds, like the ‘one-in-two-out’ scheme which temporarily stemmed the rising tide of red tape, and Iain Duncan-Smith’s welfare reforms.
But they weren’t nearly enough. By the time of last year’s election, voters could see that too many things weren’t working properly: the NHS, the trains, the costs of energy and fuel, border control, housing costs, childcare and lots more besides.
No-one else will solve these problems for Britain.
Starmer’s Government is a hopeless disaster which still doesn’t ‘get’ wealth creation or economic growth, and gives huge pay rises to public sector unions without any reforms to deliver better value for taxpayers in return. Reform’s saloon-bar policies are all about breaking rather than building; exasperated outbursts about scrapping, axing or leaving things because they can’t work out how to modernise essential services we all need. And LibDems are back in their pre-coalition comfort zone of middle-class protest whenever we Conservatives are off our game.
Worse, there are new and even-bigger political side-winds about to hit us too. The demographic timebomb of an ageing society means our welfare state will go bust without serious reforms. An AI-driven industrial revolution will destroy lots of today’s jobs, meaning many – perhaps most – of us will need to retrain with new skills. There are growing international security risks from autocrats, theocrats and terrorists which need stronger defences. And we’ve got to decarbonise without killing our economy and our jobs in the process.
Each of these challenges would be serious enough on its own, but they’re all going to hit us at once. And there’s no money for big Government programmes to solve them either: the pandemic and the energy crisis have left us with already-high taxes and Government borrowing, so there isn’t much financial firepower left. The only way any Government can face these new challenges successfully is by making everything else work better, so we can reinvest the savings in the new services and lower taxes which our country will need.
Fortunately there’s a longstanding and familiar strand of Conservativism which can provide the answers to these problems.
The small-state Conservative tradition which provided the fuel for Thatcher’s supply-side reforms says that bigger citizens need smaller Governments. If we equip everyone with the skills and values to lead proudly independent lives, the demand for big and expensive Government programmes will be less. Britain can have a strong but small Government: strong to keep everybody safe, but small because even well-run bureaucracies and quangos get fat and make mistakes unless they’re kept in check.
So there’s a gap in Britain’s political market, and our supply-side reforming, small-state tradition of Conservativism ought to be the natural source of solutions that Britain needs. But we’re starting from a low base, because it’s an area which had less attention during the last 14 years we were in power. So we need practical, low-cost supply-side reforms to fix all those things that aren’t working properly at the moment: the NHS, the trains, the costs of energy and fuel, border control, housing costs, childcare.
We will need to be radical. Supply-side reforms take on the vested interests which allow rip-offs and poor-quality services to persist for years, or which guard the glass ceilings and narrow gates that hold people back from achieving their full potential. They treat and heal the underlying causes of problems permanently, rather than bandaging the symptoms for an expensive and temporary fix. If you’re in doubt, try asking why our benefits system costs taxpayers billions, but poverty is still with us after 70 years of the welfare state?
In other words, small-state, supply-side-reforming Conservatives don’t need or want higher taxes and extra Government spending. We need political capital to take on and reform those vested interests instead. Grumpy outbursts about bureaucrats or ‘the blob’ won’t do it. We will leave that to the red-faced angry people in Reform.
Our job is to fix the machine, not just rage against it.
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