I’m winging it even more than usual this evening because I have lots to do, so apologies for this post being particularly loosely thought out—it’s coming straight off the top of my head out to the keyboard and it requires you lot to do the hard work for me. I’m not hopeful on either count. When I write two lighthearted lines here I get page after page of argument; when I invite people to participate in some serious political debate I get nothing. Here we go anyway.
Last week a clever and successful woman who I only know through ‘Blogging wrote me a long email about her journey from the Tories to the Liberals to her present and very longstanding Labour membership. She jokingly said in that message that “perhaps [people like us] should form our own party”. She set me thinking.
What kind of policies would be consistent both with Right-wing ideals and with the UK Conservative Party winning the votes of long-term, but independently-minded, Labourites like me—and possibly you? (I was going to call myself a long-term Right-wing Labourite, but a lot of my dream policies are comfortably to the Left of even the Respect Coalition. That made you jump, didn’t it?)
Your mission, dear readers, is to devise or choose policies that might make you even slightly more likely vote Tory. To play this game you have to be someone who has voted Labour in the past (or, if under voting age, intends to do so in the future) and the policies you suggest should be consistent with at least one strand of “Conservative” thought. I will interpret that broadly enough to include “one-nation” types, traditionalists, wets, Thatcherites, and even Portillistas—but not Heath-ite throwbacks.
Here are my suggestions to get you started (or to start a fight). I hope you’re not reading this, Michael Howard, because I would probably have some kind of blackout on my way to the polling station if you adopted my proposals and I was forced to vote for your lot on principle.
Bring back selection in schools, scholarships, and rigorous public exams; privatize the universities and let them set their own fees. All of these policies are completely consistent with a meritocratic, small government, free market administration that aims to target financial assistance to those most in need of it and those most willing to “get on their bikes”. (They should also appeal to traditionalists, too)
Get rid of the DTI and instead have a powerful, tightly-focused government competition department with the money to pay for bloody good lawyers. It would challenge cartels, monopolies, and the abuse of intellectual property law. This would be completely consistent with a belief in entrepreneurial and openly competitive British industry (and, incidentally, help the surprisingly Anglo pharma industry escape the creeping research and development paralysis caused by growing thickets of bad patents).
Legalize (that is make available under licensed prescription) all drugs. When the next recession bites you can bet drug-related crime will climb, but even in the present good times, criminalized drug users are a comfortable niche for blood-borne infectious diseases and drug sales fund terrorist groups. Oh, and druggies are not generally very happy people either.
Any of these—especially the first—would make me wonder if maybe it was time I started wearing stripey shirts, brogues and a Barbour. All three and I might even get measured up for a blue-rinsed bouffant wig and comfy slacks.
I’m off now. Do your worst.
[…] ks to Anthony Wells, who, I think, is political secretary to Michael Howard. He linked to my post asking Labour voters what it would take to get them to put a cross in the Conservative box. Th […]
Stop fussing about immigration. Economic migration seems more consistent with soft-toryism than Labour values.
Pledge never to introduce ID cards. The state should know some things about you (for taxation purposes, say), but these should be tightly prescribed.
Don’t mess with the voting system. It’s not brilliant, but it’s not broken.
Don’t ban things just because you can. (I’m thinking of fox-hunting, here, but I’m sure there are other examples.)
Put more police on the beat (you don’t have to recruit more; Labour are quite right to claim that numbers have gone up, but they’re all desk bound, or in specialist units) and bring in some kind of sensible uniforms. Most policemen these days just look comical. Rationalise speed limits (ie raise them on motorways).
Introduce fewer laws per year, and insist that each is properly debated. Scale down the Home Secretary’s interference with judges. He’s unlikely to be as legally qualified, and he hasn’t got the time to consider cases on their merits. Judges are among the best trained people in the country. Some of them may be reactionary fossils, but most know what they’re doing.
I’m with you on your suggestions. It’s pretty obvious that my main villain is David Blunkett.
An ethical foreign policy would be nice too.
Stuff the DTI. Abolish most of the home civil service (those not actually involved in service delivery with a high confidentiality factor) and replace with, a. A solid cadre of non-departmental project managers, and b. a big, non-departmental research and evaluation unit, distributed around the regions (to save costs on london property values), who would be responsible for briefing ministers and for following up initiatives to make sure that those which were screwed up were not repeated. The evaluation unit should probably have a statutory duty to publish its reports without ministerial intervention.
You could probably cut the home civil service to about a third of its present size, and pay them a competitive salary so you recruited people who were as good as you needed and still save money.
Sorry to be negative, but the only reason I can offer for you to vote Tory is the imperative to rid us of the *menace* of ‘New’ Labour. I use that word only after consideration, but I’m afraid (using *that* word in all its meanings) that this government is a danger to us all, Labour, Liberal and Tory.
I have never known an administration that has lied, and lied, and lied again on just about every conceivable controversy. Yes, yes, *all* governments stretch and contort that always slippery concept, Truth, but never on the scale of this one. Even ‘that woman’, when she was forced to duck and dive, did so in a manner that left no-one in any doubt that she was extremely uncomfortable. But this lot, are just like an old-style Soviet government, their instant, first re-action is to lie, and to keep it up until, usually the prints, prove what liars they are.
It started within months of Blair’s regime, with the Ecclestone case. I can still remember when he came out with the classic, “Hey I’m a pretty straight sort of a guy”, I knew instantly that he was a liar. All his ministers took his cue and they’re still lying, and the list of those caught out continues to grow.
I’m no shrinking naif, I know that politicians need to be slippery, but they need to slither within certain bounds, and this lot went beyond the pale years ago. I do not assume the Tories will definitely be better, but if they prove to be as bad or even worse, then I fear for my country, because, in desperation people will turn to fringe politics for someone who means what they say, however potty and vile, and does what they say.
Nobody’s mentioned Europe. But without mentioning Europe, none of the rest can be delivered since Brussels is where the government is now. So the first policy has to be “Repatriate our independence and re-assert the primacy of our own laws”. After that, well, what everyone else said mostly works for me.
Don’t ban things just because you can. (I’m thinking of fox-hunting, here, but I’m sure there are other examples.)
I’d gladly abolish the 1984 Video Recordings Act – it’s completely redundant in the present age of easy Amazon imports, and it puts a major obstacle in the path of small-scale video distributors wishing to release highly uncommercial niche titles by requiring them to stump up a four-figure sum to the British Board of Film Classification. Existing criminal legislation is more than adequate to cover things like graphic animal cruelty and child pornography, which are the only things the BBFC gets especially exercised about these days anyway.
I have no problem with the BBFC continuing its role in an advisory capacity, as happens with cinema releases – in practice, the vast majority of distributors would doubtless continue to use their services under pressure from major video chains (something similar happens in the US). But the pressure would be economic rather than legal, which is much healthier.
Follow my advice and merge with the sane wing of the Lib Dems. Also do everything DC, BD and MB suggest, and don’t ban smoking. Oh, and following MB’s point, legalise all speech, even if it’s nasty.
Agree with Michael about the Video Recordings Act, out of date toady and pretty anomalous in its historical context.
Exploitation cinema and especially pornography are perhaps as laissez-faire capitalist as the modern world gets, yet whilst they flourished in state worshipping europe they were supressed by the supposed market fundamentalists in Britain.
I’d vote Tory if they had a good plan for bringing individual and institutional autonomy to public education (I favour putting the money in a private account to be spent on whatever educational goods and services the holder sees fit), provided they had the wits to sell it to the public and implement it effectively.
Such an inititaive could have across the board appeal, with self help for the traditionalists and the notion that you don’t have to put up with a raw deal for those warring against exploitation and whatnot.
It’s on selling to the public that I don’t trust the Tories. Think of the fuss from those subsections of the right and, bizarrely, the left, that are terrified of self organiztion amongst the masses, fearing as they do a pandemic of individualism in the rampant, corrosive and competitive forms, the proliferation of market values, and sin against the Holy Ghost, obsession with choice.
I’m not necessarily talking about exploitation cinema or pornography – what inspired me to make my post was recent news that a friend of mine has decided not to go ahead with distributing a DVD of an extremely obscure Danish silent film in Britain, because the VRA-imposed compulsory classification charge – about £1,000 – would wipe out any conceivable profit.
In most other countries, a really small-scale release of the kind he’s after might be feasible – but in Britain, legislation introduced by a supposedly red-tape-cutting small-business-friendly Tory government is actively preventing him from entering the market. And there’s no child protection argument here, as it’s not going to get anything stronger than a PG certificate (a U is more likely), and no child is going to be interested in it in the first place.
1. Elected District Attourneys.
2. Manifesto commitment to withdraw from Common Agriculture Policy, along with a big push on how CAP causes third world starvation. I’d get manifesto commitments not to cede any more power to Brussels, and manifesto commitments not to pay into the Brussels budget until proper audit were done, and seen to be done.
I’d have a select commitee specifically to talk to the EU Auditors on a monthly basis. (In case you haven’t guessed, Slowjoe is a proud European, but also a EU-rophobe.)
3. Excellence in Education competitions, where talent is identified in things like spelling, maths and history. Ideally, learning should be made fun. How would I do this? I think I’d put out regional tenders for different private companies to organise bits of the competitions, with the DofE organising the finals, in association with Oxford (for the Arts) and Cambridge (for the Sciences).
I would want learning to become sexy 🙂
Slowjoe himself would definitely push for deregulation in the style of the removal the video board, but I doubt that would be easy to sell in a manifesto.
I’ve much sympathy with most of this but feel the need to say it won’t necessarily play well oop north and it ducks some hugely important and challenging issues, such as:
What to do about state pensions, violent crime and Britain’s record prison population, the finding of a survey by the OECD which put the UK 27th out of 30 countries for the percentage of youngsters in full-time education after the age of 16, traffic congestion on motorways and inner urban areas, and the promised referendums on the EU Constitution and joining the Euro?
Scale back planning laws so that the only reason to stop a building going up is that it breaches safety regulations.
Scrap every single tax except for VAT (and raise VAT, if you like, but not above 20%).
Have a referendum on the death penalty.
Legalise all drugs.
Increase military spending.
Privatise universities.
Write a simple constitution that does nothing except protect freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of association, right of jury nullification, freedom from government interference, right to bear arms, etc.
Yes, I said “right to bear arms”. Re-legalise guns. Re-legalise self-defense.
While acknowledging that criminals have rights (not to be beaten by the police, for instance), make it clear that they do not include the right to a safe working environment or a compliant victim, and that victims’ rights are always ascendant over criminals’.
Reaffirm the ancient principles of copyright law as a tool for protecting the individual creator, and repeal and resist any moves by corporations to distort it for their own purposes.
Make it clear that UK law transcends EU law within the UK. Declare a policy of treating the EU as what it was originally sold as: a free trade area, not a political union. Resist any EU trade restriction practiced in the name of free trade. Try to teach the Europeans what “free trade” actually means.
Federalise: take as much power as possible out of the hands of Whitehall and give it to parish — yes, parish — councils. In areas where there are no parish councils, do not be tempted to create them: give the people 6 months to do it themselves. Give the parish councils the right, but not the obligation, to devolve power upwards to local councils, who in turn have the right to devolve any of their power upwards to Parliament. These powers include running the police force and other emergency services.
Privatise all schools and replace state-run education with state funding assistance for private education. Have this assistance decided as a set amount per child, with no extra benefits for certain types of school or whatever. Also extend this funding to home-schoolers.
Make national insurance both optional and worthwhile.
Scrap the N “H” “S”. Make A&E the 4th emergency service. As with education, give state funding assistance to those who need it to afford healthcare.
Get rid of all pointless bureaucratic rules that people currently have to obey in order to claim benefits. (E.g. “You’re not entitled to unemployment benefit because you didn’t sign on when you were between jobs for three weeks two years ago.”)
Have MPs’ salaries decided by a referendum two years after every general election. And have general elections occur on the same date every five years.
Bring back the old law that, when an MP is appointed to the Cabinet, they must immediately stand for re-election.
Make the Lords half elected, quarter appointed, quarter inherited, and disallow political parties and whips from the Lords.
Reintroduce the old 10% margin of error for speed limit enforcement.
That should do it.
1. Scrap state pensions and introduce contribution-based plans for all new state recruits. And yes, that means MPs too.
2. Make the British Library the ONLY copyright library (I STILL have to send copies of books I publish to Trinity College Dublin [WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY?????], National libraries of Wales and Scotland AND the University libraries of Oxford and Cambridge for chrissakes).
3 Remove as many functions as possible from local councils, Particularly, education, social service provision and road repair.
4 Pay MPs a bonus of £500 for every law passed in the last 30 years they REPEAL.
The Tory party needs to convince voters that it isn’t a bunch of cranks. They need to create a convincing image of … well, conservatism. Exactly as Labour did in 1997, only moreso. Because in 1997 quite a lot of voters were unhappy for good reasons. Now, the majority of people, especially the majority of likely voters, are reasonably comfortable. They dislike the government because it has created an impression of being out of touch, fractious and spiteful, but they don’t actually think its done much wrong, aside from Iraq, which no party with a chance of getting into power could credibly oppose.
Therefore:
1. Not strictly policy, but the party needs to expand its membership into the realm of the living. It can only do so by adopting non-cranky policies that are in tune with the public under retirement age. If it does so, it can, just as Labour did, ignore its “base” of whose votes it is assured anyway, and aim for the centre ground.
2. It needs to pick a loud, public fight with the editors of the Daily Mail, such that the bond between them can never be restored. The Mail appeals to people who will only ever vote Tory in a general election, even if they sometimes protest in unimportant contests by voting for UKIP. It is loathed and detested by everyone else.
3. Most important for creating an impression of non-crankiness, the party must commit itself to membership of the EU, and then shut the fuck up about it. It should continue to oppose individual insane EU policies, such as the CAP, but talking about withdrawal or unilaterally ignoring European policies needs to become as acceptable in Tory circles as admiring Iain Duncan Smith’s eyebrows. Mentioning the EU should be grounds for instant sacking.
4. They need to come to terms with the fact that people aren’t very bothered about the amount of tax they’re paying right now. Thus talking about huge tax cuts just makes them look irresponsible. They could gain, however, by committing themselves to getting rid of the “stealth taxes” – insurance premium tax, tax on pensions, council tax, and so on – because these annoy people by being unexpected.
5. Purge every other trace of cranky libertarian radicalism from the manifesto. That doesn’t mean all radicalism: just the ill-thought-out mindless bits. All privatisations, private finance initiatives, constracting out programmes, and so on must be thoroughly scrutinised and costed on public-interest grounds. Where the private sector is involved in public services, the party should commit itself to competition wherever possible. It should also commit itself to examining all those programmes already operating to reform those that are not serving the public interest.
6. Adopt New Labour’s constitutional reforms, which are mostly sensible as far as they go, and put them on a sound legal footing that gets rid of the contradictions and confusions. Devolve enough power to local government to make people actually take some notice of what it does. Resist any urge to control the behaviour of devolved authorities from the centre.
7. The public is supremely sick of people messing with the structure of the public services, and unconvinced that giving them more money really helps, but would like them to actually work. Returning control to the professionals and genuine representatives of patients/parents/etc is probably the only way to convince the public anything useful is happening.
8. A commitment to the maintenance of civil liberties. And none of this crankiness about scrapping the human rights act, which is just shameless Daily Mail pandering. Doing a way with most of the Blunkett legislation and the worst bits of the anti-terrorist laws would be a start.
9. To make up for (8), which will undoubtedly be unpopular with more of the press than just the Mail, do some populist things that don’t negatively impact civil liberties. Raise speed limits to represent the actual speeds at which it is safe for competent drivers to drive. Allow overtaking on the left where it is clearly safe too do so to get rid of those endless overtaking-lane tailbacks. Allow people to use force in defense of life and property according to a “reasonableness” test that is biased in their favour, as opposed to the present “proportionateness” test, which says that if you confront a thief with a shotgun and he only has a switchblade you need to ask him to wait while you fetch the kitchen knife. The list of possibilities is endless.
10. Apply some imagination to reform of the House of Lords. The public is never going to trust an appointed chamber, and an elected one would just be a waste of money, needlessly duplicating the commons. The country does need a revising chamber full of knowledgeable, independent, people, though. I would suggest random selection from a list of eligible candidates, so as to get a cross sectional representation of various interest groups (lawyers, churchmen, doctors, educationalists, industrialists, trade unionists, “ordinary people”, and so on), possibly with some electoral component.
I don’t need a reason to vote Tory, I just would because I think Tony Blair is one of the most dangerous men ever. I think with the recent introduction of terror laws and the potential introduction of ID cards we only need him now to shift ahead quite quickly in his next term of office in that incideous way which he is so capable of doing by removing the right to vote and we are stuck with a communist dictator who will manage to convince the British public that it is for their good and don’t write this suggestion off as extreme or silly, believe you me the man has brought this country so far from trusting politics that I doubt anyone would care until they were stopped in 10 years time from even criticising Tony Blair and if they did they would be put in a detention centre for being a danger to national security now recognised actually no longer as national security but Fony Tony’s ego. Sorry but its true.
Agree we need a constitution protecting our privacy & freedoms. Ban whips forcing MPs to vote against their constituents’ interests. Alternatively, introduce real democracy through e-voting, PR or secret voting.
Tighten up the Parliament Act and the Civil Contingencies Act:
http://www.spy.org.uk/cgi-bin/civilcontingencies.pl#coup
Set up a quango whose job it is to de-spin government statements.
But I agree that first and foremost we need Blair out for the reasons mentioned by other. So I’m tactically voting for the candidate who is most likely to beat the Labour MP (a LibDem).
There’s a mistaken belief is that it’s pointless to vote LibDem as they’ll never form a government. However, splitting the Tory and LibDem vote is exactly how Labour has kept a massive majority since 1997. Thus I encourage everyone to promote tactical voting ahead of the election:
http://www.deep-trance.com/archives/can_the_tories_actually_win.html
Tax aviation fuel at the same rate as petrol. It’s about time someone had the guts to do this and with the Conservatives new enviromental outlook it should go down a treat!
“Get rid of the DTI and instead have a powerful, tightly-focused government competition department with the money to pay for bloody good lawyers. It would challenge cartels, monopolies, and the abuse of intellectual property law. This would be completely consistent with a belief in entrepreneurial and openly competitive British industry […]”
1. Free competition (including cartels and monopolies) is dealt with by the independent competition authorities (OFT and CC), which are powerful, tightly-focused, and have bloody good lawyers. This means politicians do not meddle in competition cases.
2. DTI has a very small competition team, which simply sets the policy, which is completely consistent with a belief in entrepreneurial and openly competitive British industry.
3. The UK competition regime is generally regarded as the best in Europe, and one of the few best in the world.
4. Abuse of IP law is a matter for the courts.
5. As for getting rid of the DTI, that’s one option, but it’s just moving civil servants around from one department to another. The competition policy team would presumably go to the Treasury, as might Business Relations. Employment law might go to the DWP, science and technology to DfES, energy to DCLG, trade promotion to FCO (though God knows they’d screw it up).
6. But this wouldn’t reduce staff numbers – anything the DTI does that’s a “luxury” it’s long ago stopped. Indeed it’s been cut so far that it’s already had to stop a number of activities which all cost-benefit analyses show gave an excellent return to UK business.