What has happened to my Tory friends?
The Remain campaign wants to deny individuals the freedom to make their own decisions
Astrange role reversal seems to have taken place. On Monday in this newspaper, former No 10 spin doctor Andy Coulson, not previously known as a head-in-the-clouds idealist, came over all... how shall I put this... blue skies thinker.
When Andy and I worked together there was indeed, as he reflected in his article, a difference of approach between us. The Andy Coulson I knew then was totally focused on being able to convey simple practical messages about what a Conservative government would do to improve people’s lives: control immigration; increase pay and living standards; cut red tape for “white van man”; stop government wasting everyone’s hard-earned money. Of course I agreed then (and now) about those objectives. But I also believed that it was fundamentally un-Conservative to promise simply to “deliver” such things without explaining how it was to be done.
Statist politicians – whether of the Left or the Right – have no philosophical problem asserting that government will “deliver” some policy outcome or other, because they have the technocrat’s faith in the ability of a central authority to plan and implement a better world.
The Conservatism I believe in is of a very different intellectual heritage. It is sceptical of utopian schemes to remake the world. It observes that governments start out promising great things but usually end up disappointing people, producing all sorts of unintended consequences and wasting vast amounts of money along the way.
My Conservatism, the one I thought David Cameron shared, has an instinctive impulse towards trusting people. This simple notion is based not on ideology but history. We have seen that people’s lives improve when they are given the freedom to make their own decisions; free from the constraints of a distant administrator’s master-plan.
That’s why I believe in people power. Because it works. It is, in the end, more practical than warm words from politicians.
Fast-forward to today’s EU debate. I don’t know what’s happened to Andy Coulson, but it seems his head has been turned. Now he’s some kind of airy-fairy internationalist. He used to hate the EU, but now he hates the idea of leaving even though the EU makes it impossible for Britain to “deliver” the controlled immigration he wanted us to promise. Even though the EU cuts people’s pay with cheap imported labour, hurting living standards. Even though the EU piles up red tape on “white van man”. And even though the EU wastes inordinate amounts of taxpayers’ money on pointless bureaucratic schemes. None of that seems very practical to me.
When Andy Coulson, reciting the pro-EU campaign’s favourite line of attack, says there’s a hole in the Leave argument because it can’t say what would happen if we ran our own country, he scores an own goal. The Remain side can’t say what would happen if we stay in the EU.
Can the Prime Minister, or the Chancellor tell us what the EU will be like – and how that would affect Britain – 40 years from now? And if not, what are they asking voters to buy into? They won’t say because they don’t know. And that’s not very practical.
The obvious truth is that we can’t predict the future. The question is, therefore, how best to handle whatever it throws at us? The statist view is that government, with its ability to call on the best experts, and economists, and statisticians, and skilled bureaucratic administrators – all led by heroic, far-sighted politicians – can guide us.
The Conservative view is that this is all rather hubristic and a bit weird. A touch inhuman. A bit frightening, even. In an unpredictable world, we are better off trusting the things that we know, that we are able to touch and feel: our families, communities, local civic leaders we can go up to in the street and talk to if things don’t work out they way they promise.
In the end, that’s what this referendum should be about. Not the demeaning and obviously phoney scaremongering about short-term effects. But a fundamental – and very healthy – disagreement about the kind of government that works.