CentreRight

Al Gore is fond of suggesting that the Chinese word for "crisis" consists of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity."  As with so many other things he says, he's wrong about that (see here), but it strikes me that in the depth of this severe political crisis, there is a genuine opportunity for the conservative movement in Britain.  We can capitalize on the anti-politician sentiment most effectively if we adopt, explain and push a series of policies that reduce the power of politicians and their opportunity, not to put too fine a point on it, to rob us blind.

Cometh the hour, come the men.  Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan, both sea-green incorruptibles who have come to public attention recently, have already outlined the perfect policy response in their book The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain (and, incidentally, have used a genuinely innovative print-on-demand service to publish it).  Just try these ideas on the doorstep and see what response you'd get:

• Clean Up Westminster by abolishing MP's perks, binding MPs by the same laws as everyone else and decreasing the size of HMG and the House of Commons.
• A Return to Law, Order and Accountability with directly-elected sheriffs, local control of police and local control of prosecutions.
• Supremacy of the (Reformed) Parliament, by scrapping the HRA, withdrawing from the ECHR and reserving certain powers exclusively for Parliament.
• Independence for State Schools, by scrapping the National Curriculum, granting parents rights to take their children where they'd get a good education and getting HMG out of classrooms.
• True Localism, by avoloshing QUANGOs, granting real powers to counties and replacing VAT with a local sales tax to fund it.
• Putting Patients in Control, by allowing people to opt out of the NHS and into private insurance, reatining a strong safety net and incentivizing prevention rather than cure.
• Neighbourhood Welfare to secure social justice; fighting poverty and allocation of benefits to be local.
• A Great Repeal Bill to get rid of burdensome and costly red tape, provide a mechanism for continuous repeal, and introduce sunset clauses on new laws.
• An Independent Britain, with foreign policy controlled by Parliament and replacement of our current relationship with the EU by a genuine free trade zone.
• Introduce Direct Democracy with the right of citizens to propose laws directly, referenda to block bad new laws and local referenda established as a new way of thinking about democracy.

I can't imagine many areas where this plan would not be applauded if it was put to the voters directly.  What is clear to me is that the pre-financial crisis political consensus has been swept away by the financial downturn and the utter barrage of revelations about just how bad Parliament is.  The public is demanding radical action.  The conservative movement has the blueprint for such radical action, and also some - like Douglas and Daniel - who possess the credibility to advance that platform with the voters. 
Can we put two and two together?  If we do not take this opportunity now, the public will look elsewhere for radical action.

I have been busy so missed the opportunity to post this closer to the actual anniversary of Mrs Thatcher's first election victory.  In any event, I thought it important to reflect on Mrs T's oft-cited policies on the environment.

She tends to be lauded by those in favor of immediate action on global warming, on account of her early interest in the issue.  However, as I describe here, she has been dismayed by the direction in which global warming policy has gone, and anyone who suggests she would be in favour of the sort of policies currently being talked about clearly hasn't read Statecraft. 

In The Downing Street Years she talks about the "cranks and romantics" of the environmental movement and how effectively Nicholas Ridley dealt with them.  I shudder to think how Nick Ridley would respond to, for instance, the 80% emissions reduction target and the bind that puts on so much of a Conservative government's policy in other areas, something that I believe Matt Sinclair plans to write about here soon.

I was a bit mystified when George Osborne, in an otherwise splendid defence of capitalism today, said this:

I was mystified because this is not a critique of any libertarianism I recognize.  Every libertarian I know not just recognizes the need for but insists on the important role of institutions, laws and cultural norms in preserving freedom (and it recognizes these collectively as the Rule of Law).  As I have argued elsewhere, for example, if we are to enjoy our liberty, we must acknowledge property rights, which in turn requires institutions that protect those property rights from abuse - and that entails laws and courts, as well as the social norms against stealing.  It is not libertarians who disdain institutions, laws and cultural norms, but anarchists.

For example, here are libertarian theorist Tibor Machin's most "basic tenets of libertarianism:" 

1. Adult human beings (and children derivatively and with proper adjustments) are sovereign over their lives, actions, and belongings. They have rights, among others, to life, liberty, and property.
2. Human beings have the responsibility in their communities to respect and act in recognition of this fact when dealing with others.
3. Human beings ought to develop institutions that ensure the protection of their sovereignty, delegating the required powers to agents (governments or the equivalent) for that purpose.
4. Such delegation of powers must occur without the violation of sovereignty or individual rights.
5. The agencies to which the power of protecting rights is delegated must exercise this power for the sole purpose of protecting those rights.
6. All concerns, including the protection of individual rights, must be acted on by members of communities without violating those rights.

Most Conservatives today would agree with all or most of those tenets.  It is actually a very old strand of small-c conservative thought that starts from a different set of tenets, to do with natural orders and ordained hierarchies, but I do not think many Conservatives today believe in the class system as the fundamental basis of social order (no doubt Viscount Crouchback will differ in the comments).  Yet the tenets as here described recognize the need for an institutional and legal framework that protects against force, fraud, theft and breach of contract, which are the problems I suspect Mr Osborne is alluding to in his reference to "free-for alls."  So there is no contradiction between libertarianism and a disciplined market.

I am grateful to the excellent BreakingViews financial news website (subscription or trial required) for alerting me to a new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on the scale of the UK's fiscal problems.  It makes for sobering reading.  Some highlights:

• The UK's deficit to GDP ratio is 11%, half again higher than the 7% that caused Callaghan to go to the IMF.
• The debt to GDP ratio is 42%.  The IFS projects that at current trends it will reach 90% by the 2050s - and stay there.
• To balance expenses and revenues by 2015, HMG will need to find another 39 billion Pounds from somewhere.  Interest expenses alone will be 1.5% of GDP.
• With no further spending cuts, that will require an additional 1,250 Pounds of annual taxation per family.
• No further tax rise will require spending cuts of over 1% per annum.
• The implications of a 90% debt to GDP ratio sugget that any fiscal stimulus package will "pale into insignificance relative to the underlying weakening of the public finances.

BreakingViews' Edward Hadas suggests that printing money may prove more attractive to HMG than accepting any of these unattractive options.  Of course, that will risk uncontrolled inflation.  In any event, I hope the Treasury team is reading this analysis alongside today's findings from the CHome party members' poll.

Come now, Tim, remember the last time they tried to intimidate City workers?

But that's not the point of this post.  I am astonished not to have seen anything here about the despicable actions of South Yorkshire Police in preventing willing neighbours from attempting to rescue a family that perished in a fire, saying they must wait for the Fire Brigade to come.  The ever-excellent Natalie Solent at Samizdata has some insightful things to say:

One of the lesser known sights of London is the Watts Memorial in Postman's Park. I gather it featured in the film Closer, starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law. No, I am not being funny, suddenly veering off into a travelogue in the middle of a post about the deaths of a family. I wish there were something to laugh about. The memorial was set up by a Victorian artist, George Frederick Watts, to commemorate those who died saving others. It consists of hand made plaques each bearing the name of a person who sacrificed his or her life and a brief citation. Very quaint they are, with their crowded lettering with the extra-large initial capitals and little swirly plant motifs and curlicues in the corners. Even the names are quaint, laboriously given in full. Police Constables Percy Edwin Cook, Edward George Brown Greenoff, Harold Frank Ricketts and George Stephen Funnell are among them. I wonder what PC Percy Edwin Cook, for instance, who perished when he "Voluntarily descended high tension chamber at Kensington to rescue two workmen overcome by poisonous gas" would have made of his successors in the South Yorkshire force.

Congratulations to those brave souls who are prepared to brave the angry anti-capitalists tomorrow in a small counter-demo.  As the organiser says:

I hope a few more people will join them and that they will get some press exposure, at least allowing the other side to be heard.  I'd be there if I could.

I am distressed that Boris Johnson has once again fallen for the hype of "green jobs," saying

To give Boris the benefit of the doubt, this is wishful thinking.  Study after study of "the new energy economy" in the US demonstrates that green jobs are hype rather than reality.  Even an alliance of trade unions and green pressure groups admitted that what green jobs there are in the US are of low quality (of course the solution to that, the report claims, is strong unions).  The truth seems to be dawning even in California.

That's the US, of course, but there's a new study out from King Juan Carlos University in Spain that examines the effect of policies aimed at promoting green jobs there.  Prof. Gabriel Calzada found that for every green job created, 2.2 jobs were lost in traditional industries.  I also understand that the study (there isn't an English version available on line yet as far as I can tell) points out that the jobs that were created were mostly transitory, and that 40,000 jobs are expected to be lost in the solar industry this year.

This should, of course, be blindingly obvious.  I don't think anyone has summed up the green job mythologising better than Catherine Bennett in The Guardian, of all places, back in 2004, satirising the thinking of HRH the Prince of Wales:

Don't fall for the hype.  Turn again, Boris, before it's too late!

Tim,

First of all thanks for the opportunity to post here.  It's a fine venue with a fine crowd.  For my first post I thought I'd add some thoughts to what you have to say below.  It is right and, indeed, essential, for conservatives (of all stripes) to involve themselves in "environmental" issues.  However, to do so by borrowing a set of policies from a movement that is opposed to conservativism in virtually every sense is just foolish, and that is what most conservatives who talk about environmentalism have in effect done.  They have ignored not just the conservative tradition of stewardship that you mention, but also the important and respectable theories of Free Market Environmentalism (FME). One of the many reasons why the Quality of Life policy group went so far off the rails was because it failed to include, or even reach out to, leading British thinkers on FME like Prof. Julian Morris of the International Policy Network.

The fact is that we can tackle virtually every "environmental" issue without going down the road to ecological serfdom (and actually inducing environmental disaster as a result) by applying these two principles - even the vexed subject of global warming.  In fact, that's the subject of the last chapter of my book. We conservatives have the will, and we have the principles, but the party has not put the two together.  I've offered before privately, but will do so now publicly, to come over and brief the party on the principles of stewardship and FME and how they can produce a credible, proven, genuinely conservative environmental policy.  I'm not expecting any response, however.