Tories should open their doors to bearers of new ideas

The hard Left onslaught from Labour gives the Tories an opportunity, a solid base and a challenge

Annual conferences do not always renew a party for the future, but they do generally reveal it for the present. That was certainly true of Labour’s carnival of singing, celebrating and unifying in Brighton last week. What was revealed was a party now settled on being utterly different from the centrist, Blairite, shape-shifting Labour against which some of us struggled unsuccessfully for so long. We know after last week that Jeremy Corbyn intends to fight the next election even if he is well into his seventies at the time; that the grip of the Left on the party organisation has been tightened for the foreseeable future; that they are serious about a programme of nationalisation costing hundreds of billions of pounds. Most revealing of all, we know that Labour’s moderates have capitulated, lacking any vision, backbone or credibility to do anything other than tag along with a leader they know would do incalculable damage to this country.

For the Conservatives in Manchester this week, the consolidation of Labour behind an agenda inspired by Marxism and pacifism is of the utmost importance. It means that Labour’s next election campaign will have many of the strengths of the last one – a leader displaying authenticity and passion, a readiness to promise the earth, and an identification with radical change. With these come the same weakness – that for those who want a dynamic, competitive economy, Labour’s agenda is off-the-scale bonkers.

To anyone thinking of growing a business in Britain over the next 20 years, the possibility of a truly socialist government coming to power is a bigger risk than anything resulting from Brexit. Higher taxes, state ownership and a hostility to finance and enterprise would send investors and wealth creators scuttling away, throttling at birth the opportunities for young people that Corbyn and John Mcdonnell love to go on about. This gives the Tories an opportunity, a solid base, and a big challenge.

The opportunity is to tear apart the Labour ideology for the jobdestroying, backward-looking, nation-bankrupting fantasy that it is. The solid base is the many millions of voters who will keep wanting the Conservatives to do well, and know they cannot afford the alternative. And the challenge is to develop and communicate competing ideas which attach purpose, excitement, new thinking and of course the support of young people to the Conservatives.

What does the Manchester conference reveal about the party’s readiness to respond to this? From the grassroots and the backbench MPS, it shows that there is a hunger for the necessary unity, including for the Foreign Secretary to display it. There is an openness to compromise with each other on the details of Brexit so that it can be delivered, but in a realistic way. Encouragingly, it shows ministers are adjusting to the election result and the Labour threat with revised policies – changes to tuition fees and more help for young people to buy a house. All the elements are there for recovering balance after the major setback in June.

But to go beyond that and meet the full challenge of Labour’s transformation by winning a battle of ideas is going to be the difficult part. Such an exercise is always hard for the party in government. Britain has a wonderful civil service, able to assess any risk or manage any difficulty, but it is the natural tendency of bureaucracy to hamper and temper ideas. Being a minority administration doesn’t help either. Aside from the necessity of implementing Brexit, caution will be a natural instinct.

Yet caution will not defeat a rampant Left, nor mobilise the tens of thousands of new activists needed to take arguments on to the battleground of social media. It will not be sufficient, at an election in 2022, to say we managed our exit from the EU and took the edge off Labour’s appeal with policy modifications. If balance and unity are restored by the time Tories head home, then real political brainstorming should begin, building on this week’s announcements with a focus on three key areas for the future.

The first is house-building. Call in the big mayors and developers. Change regulations that stand in the way – for instance, allow microapartments provided they’re of high quality. Encourage major build-to-rent schemes, not just ownership. Make it a cross-party effort, showing that even a weakened government can give a lead and work with everyone.

Second, prepare education for the technological revolution about to hit us. The old model of learning, then having a career, then retiring will be made obsolete by most jobs changing every few years and by many people living for a century. No public sector system will ever keep up with the pace of change – so work with businesses and non-profit organisations on creating new skills for people throughout their lives. If we’re going to ask employers to stump up for anything more, let it be for this.

Third, tackle generational inequality with opportunity, not subsidy. I and one or two MPS have floated before what many people probably regard as a mad idea – a lower rate of income and capital gains tax for everyone under 30. Since they only pay a small proportion of total tax revenues, they could receive a huge reduction if it were paid for by a small increase for the rest of us. This would be fair, given all the financial disadvantages younger people now face. It would appeal to the millions who do not go to university as an alternative to abolishing tuition fees. And it would take the argument back on to the ground of how to encourage innovation and hard work.

I am not saying the Conservatives should rush to adopt all these ideas in a panic – although I would get going with the house-building policies immediately. Fundamental changes to tax and education need a lot of thought. It is the encouragement and nourishing of these or similar proposals that will be important to avoiding sitting still in the face of a hard-left onslaught. Tories should fling open their doors to bearers of new ideas. Those not possible now can be presented in the next manifesto. Let excitement and radicalism flow. Create a buzz. It could be the reassuring sound of the world’s oldest party renewing itself yet again.