Dr Madsen Pirie is the President of the Adam Smith Institute, a leading free market think-tank. His new book, Zero Base Policy, was published yesterday, and can be purchased via Amazon.co.uk.
Anyone who supposes that a dozen years of Gordon Brown's vandalism can be put right by tweaking a few policies and running things rather more efficiently is mistaken. The parlous state of Britain requires a jump-shift in policy rather than an improved continuity. Proposals which lie beyond the box of the commonly acceptable might not make for good election manifestos, but they could mend a broken economy and a broken society.
My Adam Smith Institute colleague, Dr Eamonn Butler, detailed in his book, The Rotten State of Britain, how bad things have become, and how the optimistic promises of 1997 failed to bring results. The UK, once a model low tax economy now ranks amongst the heavily taxed ones. The pensions system, then the envy or Europe, now faces an unfillable black hole. Where we were promised "education, education, education," we have lower social mobility and more children leaving school without any meaningful qualifications. In place of the comparatively free society we enjoyed, we now have a society of snoopers, with severe restrictions on our freedom of speech, of assembly, and of the right to peaceful protest.
The counterpart of this critique is a programme of action to set Britain back on the path to prosperity and progress. This week the ASI publishes Zero Base Policy, setting out a shopping list of 33 proposals to put things right.
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