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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
'I want to provide a call to action for fellow conservatives who believe in our nation and our way of life and who share my frustration at what has been going wrong with our politics and governance. I want others to heed the warnings of what I saw happening and learn the lessons of the battle I lost.' Over the course of a decade as a minister, Liz Truss sought to champion limited government and individual freedom in the face of the left-wing political agenda that frames the debate in so many institutions. Ousted by the establishment but still fighting for conservatism, Truss argues here that the rise of authoritarianism and the adoption of fashionable ideas propagated by the global left give us barely a decade to preserve the economic and cultural freedoms and institutions that the West holds so dear. Peppered with newsworthy anecdotes from Truss's time in public life – such as her memorable last meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, her confrontations with the regimes in Moscow and Beijing, her encounters with the Trump administration and her dismay at the political class's attempt to betray Brexit – Ten Years to Save the West is an urgent and impassioned call to conservatives about the radical changes that are needed for us to save the West. Ignore her warning at your peril.
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i“Liz Truss is right about one big thing – the old establishment economic models are failing. That’s bad news for the entire Western world. And she is right that the last thing any of us now needs is more socialism, more taxes and more regulation. We need to reject that tiresome refrain of the global left and instead pursue an agenda that unleashes enterprise and boosts economic growth. I commend this invigorating tract!”
boris johnson, uk prime minister 2019–2022
“This is an outstanding book – fascinating, honest and brutally, tragically true. This courageous woman, who rose from a humble background to the very top by her own hard work and by asking the right questions, refused to join the establishment groupthink, which brought about her downfall. History will be kinder to her than the media was.”
matt ridley, science writer, journalist and businessman
“Ten Years to Save the West is a powerful, brutally honest account of why it is so damned difficult to implement the Conservative policies Britain voted for. Liz Truss speaks from bitter experience, but her refusal to accept the defeatist consensus of an arrogant and over-mighty bureaucracy is inspiring and engaging. However personally bruised she may be, this is an undaunted call to arms by a woman who clearly cares passionately about her country – the people’s politician.”
allison pearson, bestselling author and daily telegraph columnist
“There are those who watch and those who do. Those who commentate and those who get their hands dirty. The cold and timid critics and those actually in the arena. Liz Truss was in the fiercest arena of all, fighting for free-market principles against entrenched interests, fashionable pundits and hostile officials. In the end, her opponents got the better of her. Now she has had time to mull over what went wrong and what conservatives need to do differently. So, when she of all people tells us how the West can overcome its enemies, foreign and domestic, we should listen.”
daniel hannan, lord hannan of kingsclere, former member of the european parliament
“A fascinating and terrifying insight into the machinations of orthodox power. Both sweeping in its scope and disarmingly human, Ten Years to Save the West fires the starting gun on the centre-right’s return to the long-abandoned battle pitch of ideas. This eloquent and informed appeal for a new conservative reformist movement – one that is both determinedly ambitious and, with astute humility, learns from our past mistakes – is a must-read on both sides of the Atlantic. Liz Truss makes a rare and urgent case for the rehabilitation of Enlightenment progressivism and the restoration of the West’s self-confidence in a dangerous geopolitical age.”
sherelle jacobs, daily telegraph columnist
ii“Anyone paying attention knows that we are in the midst of an existential fight for our values and way of life. Liz Truss has been on the front lines of that fight, standing firm against dictators abroad and woke establishment tyranny at home. The odds are stacked against us, but Truss knows what’s worth fighting for, and she reminds us in this remarkable book.”
ted cruz, united states senator
“By the time former heads of government get around to writing their memoirs, they usually look exclusively backwards, focused only on legacy. This is not the case with former Prime Minister Liz Truss, and we are very fortunate that this is so. Truss is a true movement conservative who has served at the highest levels on the world stage, and in Ten Years to Save the West she diagnoses clearly and vividly the problems she found there. Western conservatism is under attack from inside and out, and this book is required reading for those all over the world who want to defend it. Truss will be a leader in this fight for years to come, and her book pulls no punches in describing the stakes of today and the challenges of tomorrow.”
mike lee, united states senator
“Agree or disagree with Liz’s politics, she asks the right questions with an intellectual boldness rarely seen in modern politics. This book is a call to action against a resurgent authoritarian axis threatening freedom around the world and a reminder to keep faith with the values that have led to the greatest rise in prosperity in human history.”
garry kasparov, world chess champion 1985–2000 and activist for freedom and human rights in russia and the world
“Liz Truss is that rare figure in the political arena today – a genuine leader of principle and conviction, who is willing to stand up and fight for policies that actually advance freedom and defend national sovereignty and self-determination. Ten Years to Save the West is vital and urgent reading for policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic. The West faces an era of dangerous – even irreversible – decline unless it is willing to take action now to defend the very ideals that have driven its greatness. Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Liz is a true friend of the American people, and her spirited message in this book should be heeded on Capitol Hill and in the White House.”
kevin roberts, president of the heritage foundation
iii
v
To Hugh, Frances and Liberty, who are my lodestars.vi
Contents
Introduction
I was impatient to get going. Plans had been made. I knew what needed to be done, but the weather was against us. From the window of the Royal Air Force jet, all I could see were the heavy clouds beneath us as we circled over Scotland. Thick fog had rolled in around the airport in Aberdeen, preventing planes from landing, so for the moment I was stranded in mid-air. As a woman in a hurry, the delay was frustrating. My mind was already turning over the huge number of things I needed to do back in London once I took over as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But before all that, I had an appointment with Her Majesty the Queen, and we were now at risk of being late or not getting there at all. At last, a gap in the clouds appeared, and the pilot managed to get us down on the ground. Another bumpy landing.
Boris Johnson, my predecessor, had flown up ahead of me on a different plane to see the Queen and officially tender his resignation as Prime Minister. His idea that we should fly together had been vetoed by the Cabinet Office. I assume it was too much of a security risk to have the outgoing and incoming Prime Ministers on the same plane.2
On arrival in Aberdeen, the plan was for me, my husband Hugh and my principal private secretary Nick Catsaras to transfer to a helicopter for a short flight to Balmoral Castle, said to be the Queen’s favourite residence. The fog made this impossible so instead we set out by road, adding yet more time to our journey. Our small convoy eventually arrived at the castle, where we were welcomed by the Queen’s private secretary Edward Young and shown inside. Then, alone, I was shown into Her Majesty’s drawing room.
The Queen, at the age of ninety-six, seemed to have grown frailer over the previous year, but she evidently was determined to carry out her constitutional duty of appointing the Prime Minister in person, as she had for each of my thirteen predecessors. I was told in advance that she had made a special effort to be standing to greet me, and she gave no hint of discomfort. She was as resolute, determined and charming as ever. Although I’d seen her at various Privy Council meetings and events, this was only my second one-on-one audience with her. On the previous occasion, after I had been removed from a different job in the government, she had remarked that being a woman in politics was tough.
After I had accepted Her Majesty’s invitation to form a new government, we spent around twenty minutes discussing politics. She was completely attuned to everything that was happening, as well as being typically sharp and witty. Towards the end of our discussion, she warned me that being Prime Minister is incredibly ageing. She also gave me two words of advice: ‘Pace yourself.’ Maybe I should have listened.
Once we’d finished our conversation, Hugh joined us for a few minutes. She asked about our daughters and made some jokey observations about our new living quarters at Downing Street. We left with Her Majesty telling me she looked forward to our speaking 3again next week. I had no idea this meeting would be both our last and her final formal engagement as monarch.
I left Balmoral as Prime Minister, and we began the trip back to London. Once again, the weather frustrated our plans as torrential rain poured down. I was amazed by the number of people who showed up to film the car and watch my every move. I was due to give my first speech outside 10 Downing Street before going inside but an indoor option was prepared instead as the skies darkened. Convinced that fate was on my side and the weather would clear, I insisted on circling round in the car.
Eventually, the moment came.
I went straight from the car to speak at the lectern in front of my new home, telling the country: ‘Together we can ride out the storm.’ Having delivered this optimistic forecast and posed with Hugh for the obligatory photographs, I went inside to begin work. There was a lot to do: I had the Cabinet to appoint, my first Prime Minister’s Questions the next day to prepare for and a major announcement on our support for people’s energy bills the day after that. We had prepared a plan for the first 100 days in office – and there was no time to lose. There was also no time to stop and reflect. Some people have asked how it felt to win the leadership election of the Conservative Party and thus become Prime Minister and step over the threshold of No. 10. What was going through my mind? The truth is, the whole experience, from the moment Boris resigned, had felt like a roller coaster, during which I was constantly in performance mode. I was moving from event to event, meeting to meeting, knowing that at this early stage I had to get everything right.
What actually came next, of course, was a profound shock that would reverberate around the world.
The civil service and royal officials had been quietly making plans 4for the Queen’s funeral and the accession of the new monarch for decades. ‘Operation London Bridge’, as these plans were called, had been worked out in immense detail and tweaked over the years by successive governments in readiness for just this moment. But on a human level, we were utterly unprepared. As I had just seen for myself, the Queen had remained robust, mentally sharp and determined to do her duty. There simply wasn’t any sense that the end would come as quickly as it did.
The first real indication I had of the gravity of the situation was on Wednesday night, the day after I had become Prime Minister. Having appointed my new Cabinet, my new ministers were set to be formally sworn into office, with the Queen joining remotely by video link from Balmoral. As we assembled in the Cabinet Office just before 6.00 p.m. for the meeting, word reached us that Her Majesty would not be available, as she had been advised to rest. That was when the machine kicked into action. My black mourning dress was fetched from my house in Greenwich. Frantic phone calls took place with Buckingham Palace. I started to think about what on earth I was going to say if the unthinkable happened.
The following morning, I was given an update that there were ongoing concerns for Her Majesty’s health and contingency plans were starting to be stepped up, but with no further comment from the palace and no clear idea how quickly things would develop, we had to press ahead with the day’s business. I went mid-morning to Parliament, where we were scheduled to have a debate at 11.40 a.m.
The House of Commons was full of the usual political squabbling. I was set to speak about my government’s plans to tackle energy prices, though I had begun to think about a completely different speech that it would be my duty to give. Not long after I sat down following my speech, Nadhim Zahawi, the Chancellor of the Duchy 5of Lancaster, entered the Chamber and came to sit next to me. I had spoken to him earlier about his role in coordinating some of the necessary arrangements if and when Operation London Bridge kicked in, so this was clearly not a good sign. He told me we had received news that things were very grave indeed. The palace was about to issue a statement to the media that the Queen was ‘under medical supervision’ and her doctors were ‘concerned for Her Majesty’s health’.
Up to this moment, I had believed concerns might mount over a period of days and weeks, a drama unfolding in slow motion, but I now realised with dread that the news could come in a matter of hours. Members of the royal family were rushing to Balmoral, and the media had recognised the significance of that. I left the House of Commons and headed back to Downing Street.
Later that afternoon, we received the solemn news. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had died peacefully at Balmoral at the age of ninety-six. Despite the preparations that had taken place over the previous twenty-four hours, the confirmation came as a profound shock. After the frenzy of the leadership election and on only my second full day as Prime Minister, it seemed utterly unreal. Amid profound sadness, I found myself thinking: Why me? Why now?
Leading the nation in mourning after the death of our beloved monarch of seventy years was not something I had ever expected to do. I had come into office determined to focus on the British economy, which was heading for a downturn, and to take the tough decisions necessary to stimulate growth and put the country back on the right track. These were challenges I instinctively relished. But coping with the death of the Queen was something altogether different. I had experienced a fair amount of state ceremony and protocol during my time in politics, but in truth, it was a long 6way from my natural comfort zone. Some Prime Ministers might have been better suited to the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary in this historic moment, but I just felt a profound sense of sadness.
Queen Elizabeth II had been a constant in the lives of British people for seventy years. There were few in the country who could remember a time without her. Everything from postage stamps to banknotes were a perpetual reminder of her presence. She had touched the lives of millions. Her calm reassurance and stability had given succour during hard times for the nation. Even until the last, people could appreciate her sense of duty above all else. No other British monarch had been on the throne so long.
At 6.30 p.m., the news was announced to the world, and shortly afterwards, having changed into my black dress, I spoke in Downing Street. My statement tried to express the sense of loss I knew the whole country and the world were feeling. Queen Elizabeth II was, I said, ‘the rock on which modern Britain was built’. I expressed how much of an inspiration Her Majesty had been to me, as she had been to so many who grew up knowing no other monarch. Finally, I urged the whole country to give its loyalty and goodwill to our new sovereign, King Charles III. I ended with words that had not been heard in public for over seventy years: ‘God save the King.’
The following day, I had my first audience with His Majesty at Buckingham Palace. On a human level, he was obviously deeply affected by the passing of his mother and touched by the public reaction to the news. I also felt a slightly bizarre camaraderie between us, with both of us starting out in our new roles and navigating unfamiliar territory. The big difference, of course, was that he had a lifetime’s preparation, with decades of public service already under his belt. He certainly provided a reassuring presence to the nation 7during those early days of his reign, in the wake of the Queen’s passing.
The next ten days were a sombre succession of ceremonies and public engagements as Hugh and I travelled with King Charles and Queen Camilla to memorial services around the UK. Politics was put on hold as we focused on a successful transition and handling what was a massive global event.
My first weekend as Prime Minister was spent with my family, watching on television as the Queen’s coffin was brought from Balmoral in procession towards Edinburgh. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the emotion of it all and I broke down into floods of tears on the sofa. Once again, the grief was mixed with a feeling of awe over the sheer weight of the event and the fact that it was happening on my watch. On the eve of the funeral, the King hosted a reception at Buckingham Palace for the many visiting heads of state and government who had come to London. It was an unprecedented gathering of world leaders, with hundreds of Presidents, Prime Ministers and diplomats filling the state apartments. As I went from room to room greeting them, it was as though the United Nations General Assembly had come to town. It was a striking demonstration of the great respect the late Queen had commanded across the world. I thought of the huge changes that had taken place over the seventy years of her reign.
When Elizabeth II first took the throne, the UK was just ceasing to be an imperial power. The US had taken on the mantle of leading the West, and Britain was still dealing with the impact of the Second World War on its economy, foreign policy and sense of identity. Over the course of the Queen’s reign, there were profound changes on all these fronts. At home, the scale of the government’s role in the economy had grown, then been tempered, before starting to 8grow again. Overseas, decolonisation had continued, the Cold War had ended and Britain’s relationship with Europe had undergone fundamental changes.
In recent years, after a period of post-Cold War stability, we have seen the rise of China and renewed aggression from Russia, Iran and their proxies. These regimes are now trying to challenge American leadership. This is wholly different to the situation when the Queen came to the throne. When sterling was replaced by the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, we knew we were passing the baton to another free democratic nation, one that shared our values. Now there is a real risk of ceding leadership to totalitarian China.
At the Buckingham Palace reception, most of the G7 leaders were gathered in the first room. As I looked around – seeing leaders like US President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron – I asked myself several questions. Has the fact that the global left has been in charge emboldened our adversaries? Does the West have the leadership required to face down these challenges and prevail? And why am I the only conservative in the room?
• • •
This book is not a traditional political memoir. I do not see it as simply a chance to tell the detailed inside story of my time in government and justify every decision I made while I was there. There are huge problems in the world today and major challenges for those of us who believe in freedom at home and abroad. Yet, our political discourse is often fundamentally unserious, obsessing over trivialities and more concerned with personalities than with ideas. It is often the media that gets blamed for that, but the bigger 9problem is with the many politicians who buy into that agenda and willingly play the game. The result is a political establishment driven by short-term popularity, drifting on the prevailing winds of fashionable commentary. The real, deep-rooted issues in our society and our world are considered too intractable to be tackled.
I got into politics because I believe in the battle of ideas and in pursuing the policies that will make things better. I have strong views about the bold changes required to ensure that freedom and democracy win. I am not one of those who think the job of politicians is to manage whatever consensus they find when they take office and go with the flow. I think it is the job of political leaders to lead. That means challenging the consensus and making very clear what you believe in and what you think is going wrong. It also means making genuinely tough decisions, despite the ingrained hostility of others. I was in government for exactly a decade, beginning as a junior education minister and ending as Prime Minister. Throughout that time, I sought to challenge accepted orthodoxy and push a conservative agenda against entrenched vested interests. My scope for doing so was, however, limited most of the time by the fact that I was serving under or alongside others whose priorities did not always match my own and who had the power to hold me back.
When I stood for the leadership of the Conservative Party, I had the opportunity to make clear to party members what I believed. Whether you call me a Thatcherite or a committed limited-government conservative, it was pretty clear where I stood. I argued we needed to take bold action at once to turn the country around and get the economy moving.
Having secured a strong mandate from the party membership for that agenda, I was ready to take it into government and deliver what I had promised. I knew it would be controversial and difficult, 10but with only two years until the next general election, there was no time to waste if we were to get the results we needed.
Things did not work out as I had hoped. My time in Downing Street was brief, and I did not have the chance to deliver the policies I had planned. We made mistakes, and I take my share of responsibility for that. I could write a whole book identifying what went wrong, complaining about the unfairness of it all and justifying the choices I made. Maybe I will write that book one day, but for now, I believe the situation is so urgent that there is no time for finger-pointing. We need to start winning the argument.
This isn’t just a British problem. The conservative movement across the West has been faltering for almost a generation. Once it seemed like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had shifted the landscape permanently. Now, that work has been undone.
Just as there were urgent economic challenges in the UK at the time I stood for the leadership, there were also urgent international challenges to the West. These are becoming ever more pressing. The rise of China and the increased hostility of Russia and Iran are part of the biggest concerted threat to our established freedoms that we have seen for nearly a century. My deep concern is that we are seeing far too much complacency in response.
Genuine conservatism has come under attack, not least from those who should be its main advocates. We have high-taxing, interventionist governments expanding the role of the state while professing to be conservative. We have conservative politicians accepting extreme environmentalist dogma and wokeism. Time and again, left-wing arguments are indulged by those who should be fighting them, enabling the political agenda to move progressively to the left and away from the values that have defined and forged the freedoms for which we have previously fought.11
The West has lost its way. We need to wake up and meet the challenges before us or we will lose. Having fought and won an ideological battle against authoritarian communism in the Cold War, we have allowed ourselves in the years since to become decadent and complacent. We believed we had secured permanent victory, whereas what we really had was more like a temporary truce.
There was a time when the US and her allies had a clear mission to spread freedom and saw doing so as a moral responsibility. But too often in recent decades we have failed to stand up to aggression from authoritarian regimes, which has only emboldened them. It is clear now that had we acted earlier, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.
China and other anti-Western powers will take their cue from how they see us acting and from the things they hear Western politicians saying. Weakness and disengagement will only heighten the threats we face. There has been a tacit assumption that conservatives won the case for free markets, limited government and low taxes and that these arguments no longer need to be made. But in practice, by not continuing to fight these battles, we have seen the role and size of the state increase: in the UK, government spending is now up to 46 per cent of GDP, even higher than it was before the reforms of the Thatcher years, while in the US it is 35 per cent of GDP and getting higher under Bidenomics. Just as before, we are going in the wrong direction.
As I discovered, the political atmosphere is not conducive to those of us who genuinely believe in small government and low taxes. Even suggesting that a Conservative government should keep its election promises not to raise taxes was somehow presented as an extremist position. If that mindset continues to prevail even on parts of the right, we are going to continue getting bigger and bigger 12government, an ever-higher benefits bill and a tax burden rising to unsustainable levels. We saw in the 1970s how that ends, when the UK had to go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout thanks to massive inflation and spending under a Labour government. It is not unrealistic to imagine that something similar could happen again.
This book is a warning that we have to change our ways if we are to avoid that fate. I believe it is essential for conservatives everywhere to understand the challenges before them. That is what I tried to do, and while I was not sufficiently prepared for the institutional backlash and lacked enough support from my colleagues to win the argument, I remain convinced it needed to be done. It was in the best interests of my country and of the Conservative Party’s chances at the next election to act quickly. I fear that opportunity has waned.
Another reason why change is so urgent is the need to refashion the UK’s economy in the wake of Brexit. Arguments about whether Brexit was a good or bad thing are irrelevant if we don’t answer the question of what we want to make of it afterwards. I have been a firm believer since the British people gave their verdict in the 2016 referendum that we have to reduce regulatory burdens and red tape, put in place more trade deals, control immigration and boost our economy.
That to me is the clear logic of Brexit. What I cannot understand are those supporters of Brexit who then want to behave in an anti-growth way and retain or add to business regulations. They are essentially condemning the country to be poorer.
The UK has not yet decided if it wants to be Norway on Valium or Singapore on steroids. We are still in a halfway house, with virtually all the EU laws still sitting on our statute book. Contrast that with Australia and New Zealand in the 1970s, which implemented major 13reforms to make their agricultural sectors competitive and are now very successful. That is the sort of model we should be looking at, instead of continuing to argue about what happened in 2016.
It would not be the first time we have missed an opportunity to make some necessary and fundamental changes to the way our economy works. After the financial crash of 2008, countries responded in different ways, some of which have turned out to be more successful than others. In the UK, we rightly sought to curb government spending, which had grown too high under Labour. But we did so through a lot of salami-slicing, making cuts that would later come back to bite us, rather than taking the opportunity for a fundamental reshaping of the state in the way others did.
We also saw during the so-called New Labour years under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown a lot of supposedly progressive legislation that embedded a left-wing worldview into our institutions. These range from the Human Rights Act, which has implanted a particular concept of rights rather than freedoms, to the Equality Act, which enshrined the left-wing obsession with identity politics. These are all things with which conservatives instinctively disagree, but we failed to push back against them for fear of being labelled as illiberal or worse.
This brings me to the crux of why I wanted to write this book now. In 2024, both the UK and the US will be having elections, while elections are due in Canada and Australia by 2025. Similar conversations are taking place among conservatives in all these countries about what they stand for, how to diagnose their national ills and how they can best shape their arguments to their electorates. Our nations face many of the same challenges, and I believe the only way for us to present an attractive and credible programme for the future is to see the issues I have described as part of a wider need 14to rediscover genuine conservatism at home and to reinvigorate the power of the West to defend freedom abroad. These two objectives are inextricably linked.
This book goes through my experience in government department by department. In many cases, reforms I wanted fell victim to vested interests and the leftward drift of our national institutions and political culture. Some have accused me of being a wilful disruptor, setting out to upset political orthodoxies for the sake of it. I dispute that characterisation. While it is true that I see myself as an instinctively anti-establishment figure, I have never wanted to disrupt things for the sake of it. I am, after all, a conservative, and I have had plenty of jobs in government that have required me to be a capable technocrat, dealing with problems from prison riots to floods.
When I see a failure to tackle long-standing issues, I want to break through the orthodoxy to solve it. When something has not happened for forty years, it’s not because you have the wrong person heading the government this month; it’s because something more fundamental is stopping it from happening. Too much of politics has become a cult of the leader and a belief that changing the front person will in itself achieve some miraculous overnight transformation. In truth, it requires years of effort and hard work by a team committed to the same objective over a prolonged period of time.
For that reason, politics has to be about ideas. The conservative values of patriotism, freedom and family. We know instinctively why they are better than those of our opponents. Political philosophy and ideology have become unfashionable in recent years. But trying to grip intractable policy issues without them is like trying to navigate a hazardous mountain range in the dark without a compass. Politics is ideological – you either believe in big government 15running everything or you don’t; you either believe in low taxes stimulating economic growth or you don’t. In order to mount a sustained campaign to fix the problems that need fixing, there has to be a unifying ideology around which a party can rally and for which it can fight. Without that, well-meaning technocrats will continue to be pulled along on the tide of events. Western nations have allowed themselves to become weakened abroad and subject to creeping left-wing notions at home that have caused damage to their economies and harmed growth. If this is allowed to continue, the free world, which has taken its dominance for granted for decades, will be overtaken by its opponents. The West will be defeated by China, and authoritarian regimes will defeat liberal democracies. The prospect is now closer than ever, and firm action is required to counter the threat.
It is not too late to do something about it. There are fundamental weaknesses in these authoritarian regimes, but to tackle them properly we need to wrest back control of the West from the left, whose ideas have placed increasing burdens on our economies and undermined our values. There needs to be a positive movement on the conservative side to take back the agenda. The West is in danger, and conservatives need to step up and save it.16
Chapter 1
A Leftist Education
I sat at the back of the maths class watching Li-Mei, aged eleven, stride up to the front and demonstrate a piece of algebra. It was something that children in the UK and US might only get around to learning at the age of sixteen, if they ever did at all. The Department for Education officials with me were shocked. This was just another high school in a humdrum city: Wuhan, China, in 2014.
It was a visible manifestation of how the West was falling behind. We were turning out children who struggled to read and write, while we spent vast sums of taxpayers’ money on their education and made life harder for working families through such high taxes in the process. Despite Britain being the home of the Enlightenment, many British children were not being taught the most basic scientific and historic facts. Our results in English and maths had been slipping for years. And England had some of the most expensive childcare in Europe.
I was in my first ministerial role, as a junior minister in the Department for Education. In 2012, then Prime Minister David Cameron had given me a dual mission: improve educational standards and make childcare easier and cheaper for parents. Before being 18asked to join the government, I had set out in a series of think-tank pamphlets how, by removing regulations and upping our standards, we could transform the system. This only showed the danger of writing pamphlets: real life is much messier. Even on an issue where the solutions seemed obvious, the resistance was huge. At this stage, I was just delighted to get my first government job. Little did I know what I was up against.
Progressive ideas were dominant in all areas of education – even at the heart of government. The previous Labour government had gone so far as to remove the very word ‘education’ from the title of the department, instead rebranding it the ‘Department for Children, Schools and Families’, complete with a childish rainbow logo. While we had restored the name upon taking office, the place still had rainbow decorations hanging from the ceiling. It was indicative of the culture we found.
High taxes on families and a squeeze on wages meant it was hard for parents to afford to have children or to stay at home to look after them. The progressive left had both lobbied for more childcare and at the same time made it so exorbitantly expensive that parents couldn’t afford it. For young children, the so-called experts favoured ‘child-centred play’ over counting and learning the alphabet. This approach was more labour-intensive, with the result that it required higher numbers of staff, which hugely increased costs. Regulations on childcare ratios set out the number of children that each member of a nursery staff was allowed to look after. Staff could only look after a maximum of four two-year-old children at a time. Even in nominally more socialist countries like France and Spain, the regulations were much looser, with half or even a third as many staff being needed. In the 1980s and 1990s, things had been much looser. Britain had a boom of women entering the workplace 19as well as a boom of family incomes – our maternal employment outstripped Spain and Germany. But thanks to increased state regulation by the Blair government, the number of childminders had halved to be replaced with government Sure Start centres, due to more state subsidy and the imposition of countless new demands on childminders.
The result was that parents lost their choice as to how to look after their children. Instead, we had a highly expensive, state-subsidised, prescriptive, bureaucratic model. I wanted the opposite. I wanted parents to decide and to keep more of their own money. I arrived at the department determined to change this, but from the very first hour I could see there would be resistance.
My officials had done their homework and were holding copies of my childcare pamphlet. Though trained to be courteous and respectful to the ministers they were sent, the looks on their faces made clear they did not like what they had read.
The position of a minister is akin to that of a child emperor. Your every whim about how you would like your coffee served or your papers stacked is pandered to. But when it came to challenging the way the system operates or deeply embedded orthodoxies, there seemed to be endless ways requests could be evaded. I took this on in my usual style – full frontal.
I was very clear to my officials what I wanted to achieve. I set a deadline for them to put together initial proposals and was persistent in keeping up the pressure for progress. This was a culture shock for some of the civil servants, who seemed to want to take their time and were not impressed when I began telephoning them directly to ask why the deadline had not been met. Apparently, this was not the correct protocol, and I should instead have restricted myself to asking staff in my private office to pass on a gentle reminder.20
I soon found friends of mine across government having quiet words with me, suggesting I might approach things differently. Articles appeared in the press describing me as a ‘martinet’. I received an award from The Spectator with the walk-on tune at the ceremony being a song by Ms. Dynamite. This was the department where I first earned the sobriquet ‘human hand grenade.’ And all for just asking officials to do things and adhere to deadlines! Having worked for Shell and Cable & Wireless at various rungs of the ladder, I was shocked by the slowness and bureaucracy of it all.
It was a particularly frustrating introduction to the way government works. None of the officials had objected to the deadline or suggested it was impossible to meet. The paper simply didn’t arrive. The senior officials clearly regarded me as a naive junior minister of little consequence and paid lip service to my demands while hoping I would eventually lose interest and move on to something else or be reshuffled out of the department.
I also had to deal with the fact that back then we Conservatives were serving in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Each government department had a Liberal Democrat minister working alongside the Conservatives (known to us as spies), and in Education this was David Laws, a close ally of the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg. Although the Liberal Democrats claimed to be in favour of school standards, they were unable to resist the temptation of scoring political points with the progressive left.
Getting round the Liberal Democrats, the officials in the department and the rather wet Conservatives in No. 10 was a way of life for the ministerial team at the Department for Education. Michael Gove, the secretary of state leading the department, was in his radical phase before he became a champion of net zero and anti-growth policies. He was constantly trying to pursue policies that No. 10 21thought were too bold. His special adviser Dominic Cummings was his agent in the department, causing trouble and chaos. There was an element of the pirates having taken over the ship. Cummings gave me useful advice about how to avoid unnecessary No. 10 interference in my activities. If I did a press release announcing a new policy, then that would have to be cleared by No. 10. However, if it was a ‘media script’, that would avoid scrutiny. A lot of scripts were issued.
When it came to my childcare proposals, the institutional inertia from officials was compounded by the Liberal Democrat desire to play to the gallery. I drew up my plans, which proposed a modest loosening of regulations, allowing nursery staff to look after six two-year-olds instead of four and four one-year-olds instead of three. They would also introduce more competition by permitting schools to expand their provision and reducing the number of regulations associated with setting up as a childminder. None of this would be compulsory, but it would allow parents greater choice and help reduce the costs they faced.
As far as the progressive left was concerned, I might as well have proposed arming toddlers with handguns. I was accused by Polly Toynbee, a columnist at The Guardian, of wanting to establish ‘cut-price baby farming’, while the Pre-school Learning Alliance launched a campaign saying the proposals were ‘a real risk’ to children’s ‘physical wellbeing’. Justine Roberts, the head of Mumsnet, the online forum for mothers, also came out against the proposals.
This orchestrated opposition came predominantly from vested interests in the nursery industry, which were keen to preserve their existing business model with its high staff numbers and significant government subsidy. They told the world that the high costs of childcare were inevitable and that they should therefore receive 22even more government money (that is, taxpayers’ money) to help pay staffing costs.
They did not like being challenged as to whether they thought the high costs were in fact the result of their having to recruit twice as many staff as their equivalent nurseries in France to look after the same number of children. To me, the basic arithmetic was obvious. I could not understand why some seemed unable to grasp the point.
I also saw how this alliance was able to silence those who worked in childcare and agreed with me, gradually undermining support for my ideas. It was an early lesson in the ruthless power of progressive organising and how the media prefers to report on personalities rather than truth and substance. Much of the reporting on me was highly personal, with even female columnists asking whether as a mother I myself would be able to cope with looking after multiple children.
Seeing the way the wind was blowing, despite not having previously voiced concerns about my plans (and having formally signed off on them), Clegg now turned hostile to them. In June 2013, he announced publicly that he would be blocking changes to the childcare staffing ratios. This was largely about pandering to various lobby groups and media commentators, but it was also widely seen as an act of political spite, attempting to defeat a prominent Conservative policy in retaliation for the failures of some of his own flagship proposals. Clegg, I found, was one of those politicians who despite fully understanding the logic and sense of a policy, nevertheless backs off as soon as there is any suggestion they might attract criticism from progressives. He would rather be popular than do the right thing. He has now found a much more appropriate home in California and is working for Facebook.
After my plans had been torpedoed, I was called in for a meeting 23with Prime Minister David Cameron. He wanted to reassure me. He said it was a huge surprise that I had gone into the job and tried to deliver on what I’d said I would do. Most ministers, he’d found, got sidetracked or gave up because it was too difficult. Indeed. I remain frustrated that we were defeated on childcare. Ten years after this battle was lost, British parents still face immense costs and government subsidies have gone up further.
We would be more successful on school standards – another battle against the ingrained ‘progressive’ education philosophy championed for decades by the left. Ever since the revival of the US’s ‘progressive education’ movement in the 1960s and the publication in the UK of the Plowden Report around the same time, there has been a persistent and damaging idea in both countries that education should be ‘child-centred’. Though this sounds warm and fluffy, what it has meant in practice has been a belief that children should be left to somehow discover ideas for themselves, instead of being rigorously and effectively taught the body of knowledge they will need to survive in a tough and competitive world.
This remains the heart of the debate over education. The reason children in Japan and China know their numbers by the age of three is that they have been taught them. They haven’t been left to ‘discover through play’ on the off chance they might stumble upon the basics of literacy and numeracy. A lot of nonsense has been talked by ‘progressive’ educationalists and the result has been that too many children end up not being able to read, write and add properly.
To my mind, there is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about leaving poor kids unable to get on in life and compete in the employment market while those from privileged backgrounds have access to a decent education that teaches them what they need to know. It is a 24tragic irony that left-wing ideologues have been embedding privilege in our society for decades.
The progressive movement in education arose out of trends in postmodernist philosophy, pioneered by the thinker Michel Foucault, which led to the notion that truth and morality are relative, and there is therefore no space for evidence and objective truth. Instead, we should all celebrate finding our ‘own truth’, whatever that is. Foucault also pioneered the crazy thinking about sex and gender ideology that now permeates the educational debate.
The age-old resistance of young people to taking on the values handed down from older generations has become baked into an educational philosophy that says such generational transmission is somehow regressive and wrong. This sort of attitude has an instinctive appeal to a lot of people, who see it as being about overthrowing hierarchies and rejecting tradition in favour of free-thinking discovery. But taken to its full extent, as it has been in some quarters, it involves the undermining of historical and scientific facts and leads to the situation where children are taught that the British Empire was wholly bad or that there really are 100 different genders.
The prevalence of this worldview reveals a deeper unease about our culture and values. We can see it in the obsession with condemning our history and promoting collective guilt through campaigns to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. This is portrayed in the UK as a progressive movement to contextualise our imperial past, but it is in fact an ideological attack on that past that promotes a new narrative in which Western countries are always the villains. The scientific, industrial and technological advances that made the West and now most of the world prosperous are turned into parables on the evils of capitalism and racism. This repudiation of the Enlightenment is 25astonishingly self-defeating. There is a distinct air of self-loathing about it that is characteristic of the left.
The most pernicious part of this ideology is the suggestion that in the modern world, there is no need for children to be taught facts. After all, they can look things up on the internet, so we are far better off teaching them skills and encouraging their creativity. We need them to become free spirits with enquiring minds, not an army of drones reciting lists of dates and facts, right? You can see how this might be a superficially attractive argument. But it is utterly wrong.
Of course, children should view the world with a critical eye, challenge accepted ideas and be free to develop strong political views. But to do so, they need to be taught the basics, warts and all, without having the facts conditioned and censored by left-wing ideology. As Martin Robinson has argued, we need to rediscover the basis of a classical education: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric. Under this curriculum, students are first taught the facts (grammar), before learning how to analyse them critically (logic), and then they acquire the skills to craft and present a convincing argument (rhetoric). This approach does far more to encourage their intellectual and creative development than bombarding them with precooked ideological interpretations from the very beginning of their schooldays.
My conviction that there is something profoundly wrong in our country’s education system was formed to a large extent by my own experiences. I come from a middle-class family with well-educated parents who surrounded me with books and ideas, so I did fine at school. But there were too many children who left my school without being able to read and write properly, while too much time was spent on supposedly ‘progressive’ teaching practices and subjects. 26When I have spoken about this at various times during my career, it’s often upset former teachers and classmates, who find it uncomfortable. I guess they will just have to accept that this is ‘my truth’.
I went to primary school in Scotland, which was still a very traditional experience – maths in the morning, comprehension in the afternoon, every single day. ‘The belt’ was still in use, a rarity in the early 1980s. When I moved to Leeds at the age of ten, the teachers turned up their noses at my traditional Scottish education. I was told my new teachers were ‘modern’ and did ‘projects’ and had new subjects like ‘environmental studies’. Even at the age of ten, I reacted viscerally to being informed that the education I had received was somehow backward and that my current one was better and more enlightened. That wasn’t my impression, particularly when I found that ‘environmental studies’ was an awkward fusion of history and geography in which a lesson on Richard III and the mystery of the Princes in the Tower one day would be followed by something totally unrelated about the Consett Steelworks the next, devoid of any context.
Then it was on to Roundhay School, a state comprehensive in Leeds, where these progressive approaches were firmly embedded. I should be clear that there were some good teachers and good teaching there, and I have never sought to portray it as some dreadful sink school. It was a mid-table state school that was not particularly bad but not particularly good either. What wound me up was the political correctness that pervaded everything it did, and the sense that lessons on unconscious racism seemed more of a priority than ensuring that everyone could read and write properly.
Lots of children did perfectly fine at Roundhay but it was too often despite the prevailing ethos there than because of it. I had the benefit of my father being a maths professor who helped me with 27extra tuition at home, but others were not so lucky. There was a general lack of discipline, and among most students it was seen as acceptable to mess around and rather uncool to do any work. I lived in fear of being beaten up in the lunch queue or stabbed with a pair of scissors in my media studies class. Attempts to ‘engage’ children ended up with us at the age of thirteen being asked to stand on our desks to pretend we were on Sir Francis Drake’s ship, Golden Hind. These experiences were certainly not unique to my schooling but I found the lack of challenge and the acceptance of mediocrity very depressing. When we talk about the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, this is what I think of.
Having seen how pervasive the progressive orthodoxy had become, my experience when I became an education minister showed how far it had spread into the bloodstream of the whole education system. The shared assumptions and outlook of those involved at all levels of education constitute what some have taken to calling the ‘blob’ – a permanent, immovable mass of resolutely left-wing prejudices and vested interests. My attempts to reform the nursery provision had given me my first direct experience of it, as I quickly discovered that ‘the sector’ would close ranks against any attempt to alter their established way of operating and would mount a highly emotive and quite effective PR campaign to push back against change.
In the aftermath of the nursery reforms being blocked, it was said that I should have approached it more gently – ‘rolled the pitch’ better – and tried to bring people with me. But I believe there is very little that can be done to change hearts and minds when the blob is so implacably opposed to being challenged. They are never going to agree, so it is pointless to try to persuade them. The choice for a genuinely reforming politician is either to have the fight and 28face them down or to accept that you simply cannot make changes if they are opposed to them. The latter was not an attractive option for me. I chose to fight.
My other significant battle was over reform of the maths curriculum. Here I faced constant pushback and attempts to dumb it down, with concerns expressed that what I wanted to do was too challenging for children to cope with. But I had seen evidence from East Asia that proper, rigorous teaching could achieve excellent results. My visit to China confirmed what I had read and cemented my impression that we needed a similar level of focus on excellence if we were ever to match their world-leading performance in maths.
It has become fashionable in progressive circles to stereotype East Asian teaching methods as crude and rote learning that crushes pupils’ creativity and turns them into joyless automatons. But what I found in the classrooms we visited in China was quite different. Teachers explained mathematical concepts clearly and gave students swift and encouraging feedback. Children were excited to be there, answering questions enthusiastically and taking pride in explaining the solutions to the rest of the class.
What made those Chinese classrooms stand out was the level of focus on the subject. Concepts and techniques were dissected and discussed in great detail, then examples were worked through with increasing levels of difficulty. Children sat facing the front, allowing the teacher to spot anyone not paying attention or struggling. Those teachers also specialised earlier than in the UK, with separate maths teachers in primary school as well as at a secondary level. Maths was taught every day from primary school onwards, while teachers provided swift feedback to individual students on their class exercises and homework to ensure none of them fell behind.
After this and other such visits, my view was that if children in 29China could manage it, why could British children not do the same? I used what I had seen to inform my proposals for reform of the maths curriculum. It might seem a little odd that I should be so evangelical about Chinese teaching methods when so many of my wider arguments in this book focus on the threat posed by China to the West. But it is essential that we recognise the nature of that threat and understand how the challenge has been manifested. China’s increased economic power comes in significant part from its advances in science and technology, and this is built on educational excellence. The story of how they came to do this is a revealing one. Many of the improvements arose out of Japanese teaching methods, which the Chinese system then perfected and rolled out on an industrial scale. What has characterised the Chinese approach to education, as with their attitude to so much in the postwar period, has been a simple desire to win. I felt we needed to match that determination.
I championed the adoption of the ‘maths mastery’ model, which was associated with countries like Singapore and which the Ark chain of academy schools had successfully introduced. I made other changes to embed rigour in the system, such as banning the use of calculators in tests at the age of eleven to improve mental and written arithmetic and ensuring that long division was a required skill. Even this provoked a massive row from critics, who said it was ‘old-fashioned’. Those who might have been expected to be in favour were not always very helpful. The objective of the Royal Society Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education is to promote the take-up of the subject, yet they seemed to think that the way to do this was just to make maths easier. I found that utterly self-defeating.
Every day at the department was whack-a-mole in the battle for 30
