Empower the people

England’s A-level results disaster is deeply unjust. The latest rule changes by Ofqual are welcome, as far as they go. But the depressing reality is that this sort of mess is inevitable when you shut down schools and stop exams. Without concrete data upon which to judge students, the Government fell back on a one-size-fits-all solution that failed to reflect individual talent or effort. Nothing could be less conservative; nothing could be more guaranteed to undermine the legitimacy of our system in the eyes of the young.

The same goes for the economy. The Government did what it felt it had to do to cope with an unprecedented health crisis, and some of its emergency policies were appropriate to the scale of the threat. But what are we left with? A leviathan state, an economy that has been shredded, permanently in some areas, and an enormous public debt. Our economy shrank 22 per cent in the first half of the year, almost three times worse than the decline in Sweden, a country which chose, sensibly, to keep more of its society open during the crisis.

So what now? The Government is right to say that it will never close all the schools again. It must also consider the solutions proposed by a new campaign group, the Campaign for Economic Growth. It launches by making the case for an Office of Regulatory Assessment to cut red tape, pointing out that useful lessons can be learned from the pandemic, such as allowing restaurants to sell takeaways without mountains of paperwork. We’ve tried the top-down diktats and they failed, for schools as well as the broader economy. It’s the obligation of a Conservative government to provide conservative solutions, to ensure that when all this is over, it is the individual citizen who is empowered, not the bureaucrats.