PROGRESS DOES NOT just depend upon the invention of things. The discovery of new thinking can also drive societies forward. Adam Smith’s 1776 book
The Wealth of Nations, and its inquiry into the causes of prosperity, produced one intellectual leap forward. Earlier economists had obsessed over the causes of poverty. That was a fruitless inquiry. The worthwhile question was Smith’s “What causes wealth?”
The Conservative Party could be on the threshold of a leap-forward moment as it approaches a stubborn problem with its own breakthrough insight.
The stubborn problem is the size of government. Conservatives know that Gordon Brown’s bloated State makes inefficient use of taxpayers’ money. Labour’s tax burden is depressing economic performance at a time when competition from Central Europe and the Far East could hardly be greater.
Up until now the formulaic Conservative response has been to identify ever more detailed ways of reducing the supply of government services — Michael Howard’s carefully costed James review being the latest failed attempt to persuade voters that there are painless ways of slimming government bureaucracies.
The breakthrough insight, provided by David Willetts on these pages, is to approach the problem from the opposite side of the equation. The problem of fat government can be cracked, he thinks, by first thinking of ways of reducing the demand for government. Reduce demand and the supply problem takes care of itself. The public will never vote for cuts in state services until they are convinced that those services are no longer needed. Voters may be unhappy at the performance of the welfare state but they will support its continuation until there are fewer needy people or until vulnerable people can call upon superior sources of care.
Social breakdown is a leading cause of higher government spending. A Conservative programme to reverse this breakdown is urgently needed, therefore, to address the crime-ridden estates, weak extended families and substance abuse that have all created chronic forms of dependency.
Social reform is not only the right way to reduce the long-term size of government, it is also the road to social justice. Wealthier households can, to some extent, insulate themselves from the problems of crime and failing schools. They can afford to move into better neighbourhoods or buy remedial education for their children. Britain’s poorest families have much less capacity to absorb social decay.
By focusing on social breakdown we challenge one of the most popular fallacies in today’s Conservative Party. Because economic liberalism worked in the 1980s some Tory MPs have become enthusiastic advocates of laissez-faire forms of social policy. But social and economic libertarianism are not natural bedfellows. More and more evidence has proven that strong and stable families greatly improve the life chances of a child. They are the best educators and the most discerning agents of wealth redistribution. Capitalism prospers in societies where the burden of funding the welfare state is light and the holistic care offered by the welfare society is broad and deep.
Reducing demand for government requires a stronger welfare society; the maintenance of Britain’s liberal economy depends upon a modest acceptance of social conservatism. I emphasise “modest” because some libertarians will caricature all social conservatism as authoritarian.
Conservative social reform does not need to be authoritarian. Some Conservative ends can be achieved by liberal means. The problem of current government policy is not primarily its liberalism but its centralised authoritarianism. Welfare programmes owned or funded by this government invariably share the same biases against the family, against abstinence-based drug rehabilitation and against real school choice. These are biases that are fuelling the hunger for government interventions.
Policies towards family structure and drug addiction provide two principal tests for Conservative social reform but neither should be too difficult to pass. Tolerance for diverse lifestyles can be combined with active support for the aspiration of men and women to marry. The aspiration to marry, still hugely popular, can be promoted, for example, by much greater provision of entirely voluntary education about relationships.
President Bush’s healthy marriages initiative is one model. It does not compel anyone to attend marriage preparation classes but there is already evidence that they are preventing some unhealthy marriages from ever starting and giving other couples skills that they need to prosper.
Greater diversity in the voluntary sector could also start to reduce demand for government services. Those drugs charities that endorsed the Government’s ill-fated decision to downgrade the legal status of cannabis receive huge amounts of public money. They overwhelmingly prioritise “harm-reduction” approaches to drug addiction. Abstinence groups that seek to help people to avoid or escape addiction are frozen out of the public funding circle. But people who have escaped being addicted are much less demanding citizens than those having to manage lifelong addictions. If harm-avoidance charities receive fairer access to public funding, they are likely to reduce long-term demands on the public purse.
Helping families to stay together and helping people to escape addiction are only two features of a social reform programme. Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice is assembling a diverse alliance of groups and individuals who are renewing the social fabric. Many are rebuilding society by preventing indebtedness or reducing rates of reoffending. Some are tackling illiteracy or integrating minority communities into the mainstream of British life. Others are starting social enterprises that are helping the homeless or long-term unemployed people into work.
The idea of “investing to save” is anathema to the Tory party’s small-government fundamentalists. They dub it the “grow government to shrink it” strategy without offering a positive strategy for social renewal. They prefer to turn a blind eye to social fragmentation or even accept it as the inevitable consequence of modernity.
While it may be true that the growth of government has had damaging effects on society, there is little basis for the corollary that society will be restored by a simple rollback of government. Active measures are needed to create an environment that will nurture the habits and institutions of a responsible citizenry.
The Conservatism of Disraeli, Shaftesbury and Churchill was quintessentially a socially reforming Conservatism. A cohesive society delivers social justice and will also create room for a more economically competitive tax burden. The pursuit of that society deserves to become the Conservative mission again.
Tim Montgomerie is the editor of conservativehome.com
