Mrs May must promote fresh ideas and start a renewal of the Right
The policies of Michael Gove’s department show the type of bright thinking the Tories should embrace
What an incredible amount of fuss about a simple cough. It is truly a measure of the Conservatives’ fragile psychological state that, last week, serious figures in it were plotting to remove the Prime Minister because she had a bad cold. We’d tell a child in that situation to get a grip.
But we seem to be trapped in a grown-ups’ nightmare. The Right is confronted with a popular, Marxist opponent and has no idea what to do. In normal times, Tories would have staged a coup by now. But, fearful of reopening the Brexit debate, they are frozen in the headlights.
Moving on from here will not be easy, but it is possible. It is clear that Mrs May is not capable of uniting her party, but the issue underlying all of this is not just what type of Brexit Britain wants. There is another question the Tories need to answer as well: what should the Right’s response to Corbynism be? Its response so far could be described as a long, painful splutter. Perhaps that’s why Mrs May’s unfortunate performance struck such a chord. The Prime Minister seems to believe that Britain’s long-term economic problems can be addressed by fiddling around with their symptoms: energy price caps and extra council houses. This amounts to a kind of Corbynista-lite throat-clearing.
The response on the Conservative Right, exemplified by Philip Hammond, is little better. Watching Jeremy Corbyn’s speech recently, the Chancellor was said to have “spluttered with rage and indignation” about the ills of Seventies socialism. Mr Corbyn might well take Britain back to the Seventies, but the Tories seem determined to follow him back there preemptively by basing their appeal on arguments that worked 40 years ago. Unsurprisingly, they don’t today.
The painful truth is that nationalising major industries and unsustainable public spending are wildly popular. The Tories have no effective ideological and policy responses to this. Optimistically, the party is 18 months away from getting its head around the problem.
Getting there might well require a change of leadership. At a minimum, it requires a concerted effort to foster new talents and ideas on the Right. That means that if Mrs May is to stay, she must reshuffle her government, not just for the sake of discipline but in order to promote energetic new thinking and get fresh ideas into government.
Having spent three days with the Conservatives in Manchester, I attended just one event in which I felt the tug of fresh energy and political dynamism. That event was a conversation with Michael Gove, hosted by Open Europe. Mr Gove was brought back into government in June and handed the ultimate hospital pass: the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. “Look!” his enemies crowed. “Gove will be in charge of telling farmers that their EU subsidies are over.”
Six months later, it’s hard to think of a single substantive and well-received policy announcement that has not come out of Mr Gove’s department. He has started Britain’s withdrawal from the Fisheries Convention, a precursor to the EU’S failing Common Fisheries Policy, signalled the phase-out of fossil fuel-burning cars to improve air quality, announced a ban on ivory trading and started new farming and food trade policies that prioritise the environment and health over land ownership and production quotas.
Mr Gove can conjure visions of vibrant rural wetlands and salmon returning to our empty rivers. He can talk about how to tackle antibiotic resistance in agriculture with the same interest and enthusiasm he applies to the inefficient bureaucracy of the farm subsidy system. Listening to him, you do not have to ask what Britain will use its newfound freedom for after Brexit or whether the Government has any vision for the future.
The Right desperately needs this blend of creativity and pragmatism. Consider our economic problems. They are not the same as those of the Seventies. Rather than spiralling out of control, wages are stagnant. The government is overspending, but it is vastly under-investing.
By international measures, Britain is the best place to start a business, with one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world. And yet our economy, public and private, invests about a quarter less than in more successful advanced economies. Our infrastructure is poor, especially outside the South. Our research spending trails our rivals’ by a huge margin. Rather than suffering the overbearing public ownership of the Seventies, our major utilities are privately owned but are still failing to innovate and invest in the future.
We can certainly boast about the UK’S high employment rate, and that is worth a lot, but our people are increasingly unqualified for the best jobs. The biggest problem facing British students is not their debt burden, but the worthlessness of the degrees so many of them are borrowing to get. Our schools might be improving, thanks in part to Mr Gove’s reforms, but there is no route into better work for millions of adults with obsolete skills.
The Government could be developing Right-wing solutions to these problems: a massive infrastructure investment programme funded by rolling privatisations, which would be enthusiastically supported by asset-hungry pension funds. It could look into why competition is functioning so abysmally in the universities market and why companies and apprenticeship providers aren’t providing skills training of the scale and quality required. It could examine how corporate ownership of data is compromising innovation by small business and threatening individual freedom. It could overhaul the hugely distortionary tax incentives that funnel money into property rather than productive businesses. It could embark on an ambitious review of planning law to get more, and better, houses built.
Instead, the government is limping onwards with an air of defeat. This is not just the fault of Mrs May or her vocal cords. The Right is facing a genuinely difficult set of challenges. But, powered by people like Mr Gove and dozens of other energetic MPS and thinkers, it can overcome them. The Prime Minister might not be the person to lead Conservative politics into the future, but she can, and must, lay the ground for its renewal.