Which Way's Up? E-Book

Nicholas Boles

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Nicholas Boles, newly elected MP for Grantham and Stamford, is the founder and former director of the influential right-of-centre think tank, Policy Exchange. More importantly, this close friend of David Cameron and leading Conservative moderniser drew up the Tories' plans for government, making him more powerful than most members of the former Shadow Cabinet. In Which Way's Up, this leading political thinker looks at how David Cameron, at the head of a modern, coalition government, can transform Britain. This book is a wide-ranging examination of the problems (and solutions) facing Britain, from one of the new government's preeminent movers and shakers. It will also be a unique chronicle of the first six months of this historic new government.

Leseprobe

Which Way’s Up?

The future for coalition Britain and how to get there

Nick Boles

For my parents, all three of them

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Why prosperity matters and how to get it back

2. Power to the people

3. Using deficit reduction to drive radical reform

4. Healing the wounds of a divided society

5. Managing migration to keep our kingdom united

6. Securing our energy supplies and saving the climate

7. Boxing clever to keep Britain safe

Conclusion

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Theodore Agnew, Dudley Fishburn, Phil Hulme, Edmund Lazarus, Laurie Magnus, John Nash, Lisbet Rausing, George Robinson, Richard Sharp and Dennis Stevenson for their generous sponsorship of this project. Their backing does not imply that they share my views or support either the Conservative Party or the Coalition. I am also grateful to Janan Ganesh, Michael Lynas and Ben Moxham for their help with some of the ideas and arguments that follow. Responsibility for any errors and stupidities is mine alone.

Introduction

Britain’s new Prime Minister arrived in Downing Street on the evening of 11 May 2010 and paid generous tribute to the outgoing Labour government, noting that ‘compared with a decade ago, this country is more open at home and more compassionate abroad.’ He was right to do so. Labour can be justly proud of the legislation that has given full equality to gay people, strengthened the place of women in society and delivered much greater respect for, and inclusion of, people from ethnic minority backgrounds. They can also celebrate the progress they made in increasing Britain’s aid to the developing world and the leadership they showed in the fight against global poverty. But David Cameron’s carefully chosen words skated around a harsher truth: that, in most respects, the last ten years have been, for Britain, a wasted decade.

The wasted decade

In 1997, Labour had an extraordinary opportunity: the economy was growing steadily, Tony Blair had won a huge majority in Parliament and the public finances were in an enviable state. This was the moment to act boldly. Labour should have promised the public sector real growth in spending in exchange for radical reform to bring in competition among those who provide public services and choice for members of the public. They should have said to public sector workers: we will give you better pay, increase the number of frontline workers and invest in modern, high-quality facilities, if you accept changes to working practices that will increase your productivity. Instead, Labour wasted their first term, scrapping the internal market reforms in the NHS and grant-maintained schools in education, and sticking to Conservative spending plans until the public began to protest. Then they opened the floodgates and unleashed a tidal wave of cash that pushed up costs, paid for some good new buildings and equipment, but washed over the inherited central planning structures of the NHS and state education, leaving their fundamental flaws intact.

The same sad tale of missed opportunities characterises Labour’s record on welfare reform and employment. A buoyant economy and full Treasury coffers provided the perfect platform for radical reforms to confront the culture of permanent worklessness, which imprisons millions of men and women in soul-destroying subsistence on meagre benefits. Never again will circumstances be so benign. This was the moment to experiment with hiring independent contractors to get people back to work and paying them according to their success in doing so. This was the time when a Labour government, with its proud belief in the moral worth of work, could have introduced compulsory community work programmes, to ensure that able-bodied adults claiming benefits for more than a year or two would have to work for their dole money. Instead, having pledged to ‘think the unthinkable’, Labour threw their one true reformer, Frank Field, overboard and sat back, while hundreds of thousands of migrant workers came into the country to take the low-paid jobs that British citizens had no reason or motivation to accept.

The same unwillingness to take difficult decisions to secure long-term benefit characterised Labour’s approach to the old problem of energy security and the new challenge of climate change. It has been obvious for a long time that Britain’s existing nuclear power stations will have to be taken out of production over the next few years, that the process of securing planning consent and then building new nuclear capacity will not be quick, that our increasing reliance on imported gas, while helpful in cutting carbon emissions relative to oil and coal, is making Britain dangerously dependent on unstable and potentially unfriendly regimes, and that it will take a sustained commitment over several decades for renewable energy sources to supply a significant proportion of the country’s energy needs. All of these facts were known to ministers, so there is really no excuse for Labour’s failure to build more gas storage, create a simple and consistent scheme to subsidise investment in renewables, invest in grid improvements to cater for renewable production in Scotland and the North Sea, and start the process of commissioning new nuclear reactors so that they come on stream before the existing capacity is shut down. The fact that they did none of these things means that Britain faces the possibility of power cuts for the first time in forty years and has very little chance of meeting the target of supplying 20 per cent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The fundamental flaw at the heart of the New Labour project was this. Having spent fifteen years developing bold plans to recast Britain but neglecting to do what was necessary to win an election, the Labour Party was taken over by a small elite of ruthless pragmatists, whose single-minded obsession was to win the next election, to win big, and, once they had done so, to start work on winning the one after that. They had no analysis of the big challenges facing the country, no theory to explain how things could be transformed for the better, and no grander mission than to be the first Labour government to win and complete a second term in office. They realised this goal, and handsomely surpassed it. But, in their fixation with electoral success, they passed up the opportunity to grapple with big problems and implement big changes. And so a decade went to waste.

The coalition

In May 2010, at the end of a long and deep recession, with government borrowing at an all-time record and British troops being killed every week in Afghanistan, a new government was formed. Not just a new government but a new kind of government, taking Britain on a journey that none of us has been on before. Unconvinced by each of the parties on offer, and certain only that they despised the political system that had governed Britain for the last sixty years, the voters stumbled their way towards an outcome, which has forced that system into sudden, radical change. As a result, we have a Liberal Democrat–Conservative coalition government that secured the support of 60 per cent of the voters, that has a comfortable majority in the House of Commons and that draws on talents as formidable and diverse as those of Vince Cable and Iain Duncan Smith.

The negotiation of the coalition government’s programme took remarkably little time and, while some contentious issues had to be parked in the policy limbo of the independent review, a number of bold reforms remained intact, not least the liberalisation of state schools, radical welfare reform and a whole slew of constitutional changes such as the introduction of an elected upper chamber and a referendum on the introduction of the Alternative Vote for future general elections. Enacting and then implementing these reforms will certainly keep the government busy for the first year or two. But the coalition will need to go further and be bolder if it is to steer Britain out of the doldrums in which it became becalmed at the end of the wasted decade.

It implies no criticism of either party’s leadership to observe that the coalition agreement is a blend of two manifestos and, in some places, has had to settle for the lowest common denominator between them. As election manifestos are themselves compromises, artfully constructed to display radicalism without doing anything to spook the horses, to woo floating voters without doing anything to drive away long-standing supporters, it is inevitable that they fall short as long-term programmes for government. This book is my attempt to do what no-one has yet done and look beyond the next two years to outline a radical programme for a two-term Liberal Democrat–Conservative coalition government.

Why me?

I have spent nearly ten years campaigning for the Conservative Party to become more liberal. In 2001, I published A Blue Tomorrow: New Visions for Modern Conservatives with Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey, which argued for a Conservatism ‘which is more sensitive to the changing social mores of Britain’ and asserted that ‘the Tories must become capable of speaking to all the British people in an appealing tone and proving constructive about the future.’ In 2002, I set up Policy Exchange with Michael Gove and Francis Maude to be the forum and idea factory for a modern, liberal centre right. It was at Policy Exchange that James O’Shaughnessy, now director of policy at 10 Downing Street, first coined the phrase ‘progressive ends through conservative means’. It was also at Policy Exchange that, in 2005, we developed the blueprints for Gove’s education reforms and, in particular, for the idea of a ‘pupil premium’, which was adopted by both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and is now a key plank of the coalition programme. I am genuinely delighted that the Conservatives have gone into government in coalition with Liberal Democrats and hope that, in one form or another, Britain will have a government that combines the best bits of liberalism with the best bits of conservatism for the rest of this decade.

But the coalition government will need strong, forward momentum if it is to survive the inevitable arguments and reversals that it will encounter. The best way to achieve this momentum is to identify the fundamental values and beliefs that most Conservatives and Liberal Democrats share and ensure that the government has a busy programme of action that will deliver them. A common commitment to promoting shared beliefs will provide a gravitational force to stop the coalition flying apart.

Where Gladstone and Thatcher meet

It should not surprise anyone to find a great deal of common ground between Liberal Democrats and modern Conservatives. Margaret Thatcher herself once said, ‘I would not mind betting that if Mr Gladstone were alive today he would apply to join the Conservative Party.’ It is certainly the case that, in her impatience with inherited privilege, Mrs Thatcher drew more from classical nineteenth-century liberalism than the Tory tradition. Modern Conservatism is itself a cocktail that contains liberal flavours. Both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are inspired by the example of great civic leaders such as Joseph Chamberlain, who led the Liberal Unionists into a coalition with the Conservative Party. The greatest Prime Minister the Conservative Party has ever produced, Winston Churchill, was a Liberal MP for twenty years from 1904, and only left the Conservative Party because it had turned its back on the principle of free trade, a principle that both parties now share.

If the coalition is a big top pitched on ground that is common to modern Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, its blue and yellow striped canvas is held up by five sturdy posts, each of which is planted in the solid earth of shared principles, values and beliefs. The first, and most important, piece of common ground is the paramount importance that we both attach to personal freedom and the right of every individual to live their life in the way they choose, subject only to constraints on their freedom to act in a way that harms others. This shared focus on the freedom of the individual leads both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to feel genuine horror at the overweening power of central government and its treatment of citizens either as supplicants, dependent on the generosity of the state for income and public services, or as lab rats in some vast social experiment, designed to improve mankind.

The second piece of common ground is a belief that the mission of a progressive government, like this coalition, should be to offer more opportunities to those who have been born in poverty or inherited other disadvantages, and to help them convert these opportunities into real improvements in their lives. Our commitment to personal freedom, and our shared suspicion of socialist utopias, mean that we will never be duped by the left’s claims that government action can make people equal. But we are impatient for a government that focuses money and attention on helping people pull themselves up out of deprivation, and we do not accept that it is right for Britain to be divided into one country for the rich and another for the poor.

The third piece of common ground is our sense of responsibility for the natural world and the health of our planet. Neither party believes that money makes the world go around; neither is willing to accept that the price of prosperity is a gradual poisoning of our planet’s oceans, forests and skies. But, in designing policies to combat climate change, we share an innate scepticism about fine phrases and grand plans. What we want from our coalition is a relentless focus on the practical steps that will give people and businesses and communities both the power and the incentive to cut carbon dioxide emissions in their daily lives.

The fourth point of common ground is our shared understanding that Britain’s prosperity is not guaranteed, that every generation must earn its way in the world, and that we will be condemning our children and grandchildren to a grim future of decline, if we duck our current fiscal problems, postpone the day when public sector profligacy is reined in or delude ourselves that the mirage of easy money that disfigured the last decade can be conjured up again.

The fifth piece of common ground is our belief that local communities should be given the power and freedom to take charge of their own destinies, and that, to do so, they need strong and independent local government, representing the wishes of local people and trying out new ways of doing things that will make life better for them.

This book is a result of the application of these shared values and beliefs to the biggest challenges facing Britain in 2010. I have tried to avoid a shopping list of issues and policies, and instead have sought to tell a story about the way the coalition government should think about each of the big challenges and the principles that should guide the development of policy.

So Chapter 1 addresses the question of where Britain’s future prosperity is going to come from and rejects the ideological posturing of both the Luddite left and the ultra-free-market right in favour of hard-nosed pragmatism and a realistic assessment of Britain’s competitive advantages. Chapter 2 links the recent political crisis as a result of the MPs’ expenses scandal to Liberal Democrat and Conservative objections to the power of the central state and argues for a rapid acceleration in the transfer of power and responsibility, both from central government departments to local authorities, and from all forms of bureaucracy to individuals, households and communities.

Some commentators have warned that the fiscal crisis will make it impossible for the government to make radical changes in the way that it makes decisions and delivers services to members of the public. I disagree. Chapter 3 shows how the unavoidable pressure to make drastic cuts in public expenditure can drive a set of far-reaching reforms to free up our public services – and argues that it is only by giving choice to the people using public services, creating competition among the institutions that provide them, and fostering local experimentation and innovation, not just inside government but out in communities, that we have any chance of achieving dramatic savings without forfeiting the values we cherish.

Chapter 4 addresses the divisions between rich and poor, those in work and those living on benefits, and challenges the view that income inequality is the main cause of Britain’s social problems, arguing that it is through emancipation of our schools and liberalisation of social housing, as well as through new programmes like National Citizen Service for young people, that we will recreate the glue that binds people together and restore trust to our society. Chapter 5 confronts the challenge of excessive immigration, from both inside and outside the European Union, and proposes some bold but practical measures to build a sense of solidarity between people born here and people who move here so that Britain remains one, unified, nation.

Chapter 6 makes the case for brutal honesty about our dependence on imported fossil fuels and suggests that it will require hard-headed calculation to ensure that we avoid power cuts towards the end of this decade while bringing about a long-term shift to a low-carbon way of life. Finally, in Chapter 7, I chart a new global landscape of opportunities and risks as the solitary dominance of the American superpower wanes and new giants in Asia and Latin America are roused from their slumbers, and I propose a foreign policy of ‘British Gaullism’, which uses all our resources, including our growing aid budget, to promote British interests around the world.

There are some ideas in this book that will make some of my Conservative colleagues uneasy. There will be others that the more left-leaning Liberal Democrats will find hard to swallow. Taken together, I hope that they achieve a synthesis that is both true to the fundamental values which bind our two parties and equal to the huge challenges facing our country.

At the end of Labour’s wasted decade, Britain is socially divided, lacks economic confidence and harbours doubts about its destiny. The coalition government has an opportunity born out of crisis. Nobody disputes that dramatic changes are needed to revive our economy, renew the bonds of community or restore our sense of national purpose. We cannot afford to waste another ten years. We need a decade of bold reform and purposeful leadership to make Britain envied the world over for its economic dynamism, social harmony and international clout.

1. Why prosperity matters and how to get it back

Developments during the last decade have given lots of ammunition to enemies of capitalism. It has become clear that man’s activities are contributing to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere and that this will bring about a significant rise in global temperatures, if left unchecked. There has been growing evidence that increases in wealth beyond the level required to satisfy basic material needs of clothing, shelter and food do not produce equivalent increases in happiness. And the decade ended with a devastating financial crisis, caused by the reckless greed of the people running the power supply of capitalism.

Against such a backdrop, it is surprising that the anti-capitalist left haven’t swept all before them in elections around the world. But the fact that they have not found a way to translate the events of the last ten years into support for an alternative approach does not absolve politicians on the centre-right of the obligation to answer two serious questions about capitalism. The first asks whether it is right for advanced societies like ours to make increases in prosperity a prime objective of government policy. The second asks whether free markets are still the best way to organise the allocation of resources to satisfy human wants and needs. Only when we have answered these two questions will we have laid the foundations for a new economic policy, one that recognises recent failures and excesses and is designed to ensure that they are not repeated.