But where to lead this benighted party?
Politics since Blair is no longer about interests. The electoral middle ground is too comfortable to vote its pocket book. Those who still vote at all are said to base their choice on values, moods, personality. Policies do not matter, rather the tough/tender language in which they are couched. That is why no daylight exists between the Tory candidates and why they spend so much time discussing their old schools. You would think they were auditioning for Salad Days.
I hereby declare that no Conservative can possibly outflank Blair or Gordon Brown on the right. That shot is snookered. No Tory could be tougher on welfare, tougher on crime, tougher on unions, kinder to business, keener on war, more besotted with prisons than is Labour. Blair wants selective education and more private health. He believes in cheaper private cars, cheaper jets and more expensive trains. Abroad he is a card-carrying Donald Rumsfeld neocon. What can a Tory say to such a man? As for Brown’s policy of spend-and-borrow, that is pure George Bush. Curing it would take a reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher, whom God preserve.
I suggest the Tories do exactly what Blair did in the early 1990s. Not for nothing is The Unfinished Revolution by Philip Gould, Blair’s guru, lying dog-eared on every muesli tray of the Notting Hill set. Blair took one look at Labour’s four election defeats and decided to tear the party up and start again. Forget the unions and the left, he said. They vote Labour anyway. It was the rest that had to be jolted into seeing Labour anew. Hence Gould’s challenging chapter headings: Love and Anger, Line in the Sand, Electric Shock Treatment, Hitting the Centre Ground Running. Hence the banishing of the unions and a staged fist fight over clause 4.
My Tories will do just that. They will give the electorate electric shock treatment. Blair took a simple vague idea from the left — social justice — and carried it into the centre ground. It worked brilliantly. The Tories must do the same with a simple idea from the right.
That idea is less government. It is deregulation, subsidiarity, localism, personal freedom. The concept is rooted in Conservative libertarianism. Yet it is modern and populist, attacking the control freakery and nanny state of Blair’s Labour. No other idea puts such clear water between right and left and yet is likely to appeal to the middle ground. It offers teachers, doctors, farmers, businessmen, social workers, volunteers freedom from red tape. It is a vague “value” with which each voter can identify.
The best propaganda weapon of Ken Livingstone, when he was leader of the Greater London Council, against Thatcher was the daily tally of London’s unemployed on a banner across the front of County Hall. I will put the daily tally of new regulations on a banner across Conservative Central Office (wherever it is these days). I would flash it on screens and text it to the world. Big Labour means bad government, I would cry. Every time a flatulent bureaucrat messes you about, call the red tape hotline and vote Tory. As Blair would have said: new Tory, new freedom.
I will make a core party aim the methodical dismantling of central government. Everything would follow from it. Past Conservative efforts in this direction were pathetic. Four of Michael Howard’s five key pledges (on schools, hospitals, crime and immigration) involved more government, not less. Eight years after leaving office Tory spokesmen still cannot stand at the Commons dispatch box and demand that ministers do less rather than more. I will sack any frontbencher who calls for an increase in the Whitehall payroll or more regulation of any sort.
This must be spelt out. Less government will never come from appointing David James to trim spending here and there, as if government were a box hedge. It needs the Weinstock method (at the old GEC). Outdated corporatist bureaucracies must be abolished lock, stock and barrel. Their headquarters must be cleared and sold, no questions asked.
We do not need ministries for industry, social services, education or health. Their functions can be abolished or devolved to local government. Let counties run their schools as they did as recently as the 1950s. Let them organise secondary education as they wish. Give hospitals to local charities and doctors to local health authorities. Dismantle the National Health Service and sell its gargantuan Leeds headquarters. In performance Britain’s centralised health service is now slipping far behind decentralised ones overseas.
I will return street policing to municipalities and parishes, where it was invented. I will do the same for children’s and old people’s services, for housing and recreation. If people dislike what local government delivers they should be given the remedy of a reinvigorated local franchise, neighbourhood as well as municipal. Why should a Tory believe that Whitehall knows best? Why does a Tory think that Britons are inherently less capable of self-government than Danes, Swedes or Frenchmen? This is not Toryism. Most of central government’s present functions could get by with one Treasury official and a tax equalisation office.
My Tory party will declare May Day to be Freedom from Government Day. Giant bonfires across the nation will greet the latest cull of Whitehall bumf. Doctors will burn their NHS forms-in-triplicate, farmers their single farm payment manuals and teachers their daily activity returns. Smokers will smoke. Disabled loos will be thrown open to all. Smiling children will munch hamburgers and chips while effigies of Ruth Kelly will go up in flames, along with health and safety inspectors and audit commissioners. They will all go, along with league tables and central targets.
Democracy supplies its own accountability and its own efficiency audit. British politicians often talk of choice and diversity. But they fear it in practice. If they dismantle the nanny state, they ask, who will be nanny? If standards diverge, will they be blamed? Not if they have the courage of their convictions, if they devolve and mean it. The reason for our obsession with standardisation is that voters have so little discretion over service delivery. Properly devolved democracies do not have this problem. They believe in local options.
I will call for central taxes to fall and local ones to rise, with both an income and a property element. The job of the centre will be fiscal redistribution, in seeing fair play between rich and poor. That is all. There would be no more talk of Westminster “keeping down council taxes”. If people do not like what they pay, they can protest, organise, vote, participate, get off their backsides. Democracy is dead if it is passive. Turnouts will rise, especially Tory turnout, as it did in the last election when local taxes were a big issue, 1970.
The Tories must do what Blair did in the 1990s and steal the enemy’s clothes. In this case the garment is the old Labour slogan “power to the people”. This reallocation of public sector control is not radical. It restores what existed in the 1950s, a good Conservative era. It also matches a drift that dominated decentralist constitutions in France, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia in the 1980s and 1990s and was again on show in recent anti-European referendums.
My Conservatives will capitalise on this anti-centrist mood. They will rediscover the territorial roots that Thatcher and John Major tore up in the 1980s and 1990s. They will re-empower Ambridge and Borchester alike, reviving the political life of parish, county and municipal government, a life so vivid in France and so dead in Britain. They will restore civic pride and thus, perhaps, civic Toryism. When the cry goes up, “Something must be done”, the Conservative answer will be, “Then go and do it”.
This is Thatcherism meets communitarianism, Hayek meets Etzioni. Economic conservatives can resolve their quarrel with social egalitarians only through the diversity of local democracy. Big government has failed to give public satisfaction. Let the Tories show that in governing, as in all things, small is beautiful.
Vote Jenkins.
