Stop relying on Thatcher’s work, Gove tells party

THE Tories need to find new economic arguments to win over young people, and not rely on the memory of Margaret Thatcher’s reforms in the Eighties, Michael Gove said last night.

The Environment Secretary also urged the Conservatives to stop using the example of the failed socialist reforms in Venezuela to attack Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Gove told a meeting of the Centre for Policy Studies that the Right had to find new ideas to win the argument against Labour.

He said: “Simply to rely on a few tired arguments about what has happened in Venezuela, heart rending though the fate of that country is, or to say that we need to recapture the arguments of the Eighties, heroic as that decade was... the world has changed.”

Mr Gove said the Tories had to make “the argument from first principles against vested interests”.

Young people associated capitalism with “an economic system that seems to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer, an economic system that is wired in the interests of crony capitalists, not the creative and the disruptive”.

The party had to appeal to people who had been “let down” by “the old economic model” and who were now “thirsty, desperate for a greater degree of control over their lives”, he said.

The Tories had to create “an economic system that works in their interests, an economic system that values natural and human capital, a system that welcomes innovation and dynamism, and disruption, rather than simply working in the interests of the established trade associations who already have the connections and cash to rig the system in their interests”.