Sometimes countries get into a rut. The Spanish Empire in the 18th century, Austria-Hungary in the 19th, even France in the 1950s before De Gaulle – everyone could see what their problems were, but their politics seemed unable to generate the momentum needed to find solutions.
Seven years ago we seemed to have got out of our own rut by voting to leave the EU and take back control. But now we are sinking back into it.
Conservatives have been in power for 13 years. When that’s so, and when many of the problems are worse than when you started, you have to say something compelling if voters are not to think “enough”. We carry the can for the state of the country. If we can’t credibly show things are going to be different next time, we aren’t going to win the next election, whenever it is.
That means some real conservative policies. But in my experience party members and voters, current and former, are frustrated at the Government’s inability to articulate them (and I say this in a week when one mentor to the Prime Minister, William Hague, argues in The Times that a crackdown on ultra-processed food is the priority).
A Labour government would be just the wrong thing for this country at a critical moment after Brexit. I want to prevent it. I am not interested in the mentality of “let’s lose decently and then decide what to do”. “Steady as she goes”, in the hope that people turn against Keir Starmer, is not good enough. If we are to prove that more tax, more net zero, more migration under Labour is bad for the country, we have to stop offering a version of that ourselves.
So we need clear blue water. As I have argued here before, we need a five to 10-year action plan to rebuild Britain, put it on a different path, and allow us more freedom to run our lives as we wish. Here are 10 policies I believe should be part of it.
1. Get tax and spending back down to Blair-era levels over the next 10 years. Tax, spend, and government regulation are at their highest since the Second World War, and are choking economic activity. The Blair era is hardly ancient history: we can get back there.
2. Open Britain to trade. The Pacific trade deal, the CPTPP, is great, but go further. Abolish most tariffs, including on food imports, over three years, and deregulate the vast apparatus that constrains British food production.
3. Delay the net zero 2050 target. Abolish the deadlines on boilers and EVs. Get fracking and build low-carbon modern gas power stations and zero-carbon nuclear. Stop wasting money on green levies and if we must use renewables make them stand on their own two feet.
4. We need a pause for breath to absorb high levels of immigration and rebuild social cohesion. So reduce legal migration to 100,000 over three years, and keep it there for a decade, through a binding cap on visas.
5. Build more houses. We have a four million backlog. Lowering migration will help but change to the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act is necessary. We need a major national effort to identify housebuilding areas, mainly in south-east England, including on the green belt, and if necessary driving it through by a national referendum on the whole plan.
6. Freeze social spending in cash terms. Cut back the scope of universal credit; increase the state pension age, gradually and fairly, to reflect increased life expectancy; and reform the tax system so it no longer discriminates against the family.
7. The NHS will never work as well as European systems. So establish a Royal Commission to explore how to change it to a European-style social insurance system over a generation. Meanwhile, stop adding new burdens to it – especially not a National Social Care service.
8. Abolish the Equality Act and replace it with a simple non-discrimination duty. Make positive discrimination illegal. Scrap government spending and law-making on diversity. Ensure the full range of political, social, and historical opinion is taught in schools, and that parents have access to it. Forbid medical transitioning to the opposite sex below the age of 18. Finally, scrap concepts such as “hate” or “harmful” speech and pass a Free Speech Act protecting free speech online and off.
9. Pass a Government Modernisation Act, to give ministers and Parliament real control over appointments and budgets. Review the scope of devolution and make it harder to hold a Scottish independence referendum.
10. Finally, so voters can if they wish complete the work of taking back control that began in 2016, offer all-UK referendums within five years on the European Convention on Human Rights and on continuing the Windsor Framework arrangements for Northern Ireland.
There’s room to argue about almost all of this. But something like it is surely the starting point for an optimistic vision of how the country would be different with another five years of Conservative government.
If we can’t communicate that, then we won’t persuade anyone – and then the election, when it comes, can have only one result. DT.
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