Risk drives progress

As Boris Johnson writes overleaf, at the heart of all human success stories is a willingness to take risks. Exploration, innovation and speculation all require putting something you have on the line in the hope of greater reward – anything from opening a new business to inventing some brilliant new technology. When the risk-taker wins, everyone else does too. That is the essential power of real free markets, and that is one reason why we have launched our campaign for capitalism: we welcome Mr Johnson’s decision to support it today.

Too many other senior Tories no longer understand what makes our civilisation tick. Progress is driven by ambition: British society has to remain free for citizens to experiment, free to fail (to show what doesn’t have a future, freeing up resources for what does) and free to enjoy the rewards of their labour, talent and entrepreneurship.

Every new tax grab reduces the fruits of the risk-taker; every regulation that slows down innovation and progress, or makes it harder for new companies to enter the market, reduces prosperity. Labour (and sadly many Conservatives) don’t get it. They don’t understand how the economy works, don’t appreciate the wonders capitalism has worked for humanity – nothing has done more to lift the people out of poverty – and back policies that would destroy enterprise and discourage hard work.

Why doesn’t the government do more to counter the present cultural slide into soft-socialism? It will end, as it always does, in the crushing of the human spirit and abject poverty.