The way ahead

So what is the point of the Tory party? What does it stand for? Where is it going? We at The Spectator decided to ignore any petty skirmishing that may be taking place at Westminster between any putative leadership contenders, and to think long term.

Here is a great party and movement, flat on its back after a third successive — and unprecedented popular rejection. What are the key principles that should guide its recovery?

In the hope of finding the glimmerings of a formula, we invited thinkers from all sides of the party to the dining-room in Doughty Street. We called upon the experience of Michael Heseltine. We summoned the brains (both of them) of David Willetts MP, the free-market boldness of Nick Herbert MP, the social conscience of Gary Streeter MP and the wisdom of Charles Moore.

Peter Oborne, political editor of The Spectator, attended, and the event was kindly moderated by Andrew Neil, who was appearing in a strictly non-party-political capacity. The editor, Boris Johnson, began by asking the panel whether they agreed that the Tory party should be the party of small government. Didn’t the Tories have a prime duty to cut taxes?

GS: I don’t think there’s much appetite out there for a smaller state. Nobody is screaming for it and I don’t think it should be a primary objective. I think the social infrastructure of our country is where we need to do an awful lot more work. In the end our recovery will not be because we are nicer people than Labour or the Lib Dems but because we have the solutions for the virtual collapse of family, community and almost anything that used to work, and really we ought to brand ourselves as the party that’s going to make these things better. Not small government but good governance. We’ve heard about the mother with three teenage daughters who have all got babies. I think we should all engage in a debate about a framework of values. Now I come from a certain religious framework and I’m not talking about a religious framework, but if we carry on as we are, the consequences are going to get worse and worse and worse.

CM: I agree very much but I think tax has a lot to do with that. If you are forced to entrust 40–45 per cent of what you earn to people over whom you have virtually no control — which is the government — you, by doing that, lose a lot of power and opportunity from your own life. And you transfer it to people who abuse it. And so high taxes damage community and they damage a sense of independence and they damage people’s capacity to run things in the way they want to run them. I absolutely agree, it isn’t pure free-market doctrine that should be the guiding light here. But there should be a small state because a big state is a bad thing from a Conservative point of view. A big state arrogates power from the local to the central and it takes power away from people and gives it to bureaucrats. And that is a demoralising thing. It’s not just an economically bad thing, it is morally a bad thing.

MH: But, Charles, just listen to what you’ve said. You talk about giving 45 percent of one’s income to people who’ll abuse it and then you talk about the state as though it’s a malign influence. The moment you start talking in those terms you’ve excluded and in many ways rejected a huge swath of people who don’t pay anything like that sort of figure. And secondly, by using language which suggests that the bureaucrats will waste it, you are actually being heard by an audience which says, ‘Oh, so he thinks that all of us in the 40 per cent of the GDP that is public sector are bureaucrats wasting money. This is for your education system, your health service, your fire people, your police, and goodness knows what. And actually they hear that message and they realise that it is being spoken by people who have got no affinity with what they do or the importance of them in society at all.

CM: But surely there has to be a Conservative idea about a smaller state being better than a bigger state. We can argue about precisely where this point comes but it is absolutely a key point that if we believe in people’s freedom and independence and also in community, it seems to me that the demoralisation problems that Gary’s talking about, things like family break-up, are intimately related to the interference of the state. They don’t just happen for no reason. Once upon a time, poor people in this country had to stick together because if they didn’t they’d had it.

DW: May I just bring out what seems to be the big issue here? There is a very attractive model in which we say the state finances services, then you open up delivery to the private sector, and it seems in a tiny way to be where Labour is heading on health, and where you could head on education. That is a very ambitious agenda for rolling back the state, but I know of no evidence that this would bring down the burden of tax.

BJ: What if you put up spending on private-sector contractors and still achieve worse performance? Private-sector contractors have not been brilliant in hospitals, the DSS or prisons.

NH: Can I point out that in prisons this has not been the case. The private-sector delivery in prisons has been overall a huge success, improving the calibre of prison regimes that it has run.

AN: You seem to be talking about a system in which, although the state has the responsibility of financing basic public services, it does not necessarily provide them. Can we just establish, is that the route that you want your party to take?

MH: Well, we took that route with old people’s homes and there is no evidence at all to suggest that the state is an inferior provider than the private sector, on old people’s homes, and as a general rule old people’s homes are less expensive in the public than in the private sector. Can you just imagine that we are now fighting a general election campaign and we advance these arguments and the sort of reaction that they cause in the vast majority of people who are the beneficiaries of either state education or state health? They mean absolutely nothing. There is no conceivable way in which you could provide private-sector service alternatives in anything like a realistic time frame.

CM: But you can if you know what you are really trying to do and where you are trying to go. If you know that you can start to explain. The classic one on these lines would be council house sales, where there was a very clear understanding that here was a piece of public provision which could be made better for the public. An advantage could accrue to the people who had been given on the whole this rather crap public provision. And that had a huge electoral benefit. Are there future equivalents of that? I think there are and education is the most obvious.

AN: But simply giving people vouchers that you couldn’t cash in at a single private school, because you couldn’t top them up, doesn’t seem to me to do anything at all.

DW: You’re absolutely right. You then have to confront the question whether peo ple can use these as a partial top-up, whether they could use these to help with private fees, and at that point we come to the issue, why Conservatives are talking about education. People ask themselves, are they talking about education because they care about my kid’s schooling when he or she is being let down by a state school? Or are they talking about education because it’s really to help people with their fees in private education? That is why I’m afraid the so-called Tory modernisers are on to something. There is something about us. We have to show that what matters to us is the quality of the education of those teenage mums.

NH: I think the idea of putting all this spending power in people’s hands and saying ‘you choose’ should be potentially very attractive, provided these benefits are made universal; and that’s what we’ve never done before.

MH: This is cloud-cuckoo-land. You’ve got certain capacity in schools. Some are extremely well managed. Most are fairly well managed, some are rotten. You now say to the parents in all these schools, ‘Good news. Here is your voucher. You are now free to choose.’ Choose what? The good schools are full. You can’t get into them. So you say, ‘OK fine, we’ll give you the capital allocations to build more capacity.’ Building more capacity in the good schools takes three or four years before you get near doing it and the election’s almost on your hands and nothing much has happened. Let’s assume we can speed the whole thing up and you did get a significant migration of 10 per cent of the kids out of the failing schools into the good schools but you haven’t done anything about the failing schools. Actually, now that you’ve got a vicious circle of decline, the education standards for the kids left behind will get worse.

DW: We began talking about the immorality of poor people paying more tax, and we are drifting into a proposal of everyone having an education voucher, including the people who are going private. Which means we take the 700,000 kids who are going private and say we are now going to put public money towards you. This voucher debate has probably gone around this table for 20 years now, and I think there is out there a much wider debate about strengthening society and making Britain a better place to live in. There isn’t a law of social entropy which says everything always has to get worse. Just as we’ve shown that the economy doesn’t have to get worse, our proposition is that society doesn’t have to get worse. Families don’t have to break up more and more, walking down the street doesn’t have to be a more and more unpleasant experience. What we can do is we can trump Blair. We should say we offer a stronger economy than you, with more economic reform, more market forces, and we offer a better society, with more stability and better neighbourhoods and more community. I know it’s Blair’s language, but before that it was Conservative language. We say it’s a strong economy and a strong society.

CM: One reason that people voted Tory was that Tory MPs had war service. And that meant that they had authenticity about the account they could give of their commitment to their country, and that applied for about two generations. It obviously doesn’t apply now. More and more Tory MPs have become professional and I think by that they’ve really damaged themselves, not just the Tories, by paying themselves these huge pensions. They just seem to be a class of people who are serving themselves. The Tories have to find a way in which people come into politics out of a whole series of service and achievement within a community.

MH: But, Charles, it’s happening. They’re called the Lib Dems. This is exactly where they have all gone. We’ve lost the public sector: you know, the teachers, the doctors, all these people. They are all now Lib Dems. Looking at the Tory candidates, they just don’t represent the Britain that now exists. The change in this country in the last 10 to 15 years is incredible. I’m a publisher, and we did a job not long ago for the Abbey National, and it was to attract new savers. And I could not believe the brochure we had. There was a black person, there was a gay person, there was a single parent. This was the Abbey National looking for depositors. There wasn’t a single person in that brochure that you’d identify as a Conservative. The candidates that we are now choosing are by and large of a certain background, which people find it hard to empathise and identify with. They are chosen by an electorate which is wholly unrepresentative of anything on earth — GS: Even their own communities!

MH: Michael Howard, actually, for all his virtues, is not a saleable proposition. Ken Clarke, whatever you may think about his policies, he is a bloke. Blair has exactly the same quality. He transcends class divisions. It doesn’t matter that he is a public schoolboy. I bet you there would not be a prejudice against an Etonian if he was an Etonian who empathised. It is the Kennedy phenomenon. Prodigiously rich but wildly popular.

CM: Like Michael Heseltine, in fact!

MH: I gave you the cue. (Laughter.) GS: Blair’s genius is that he embodies what New Labour are all about — he is the message. We have to find someone, and I don’t have a long list, who can embody what we are about and connect with the 11 per cent we need to win.

MH: I disagree with this idea that you have to have an agenda before you have a leader. You have a broad sense of direction, which is the net beneath which no one will fall and a ladder on which all are free to rise, and a Britain of which we are all proud. You don’t need anything more than that because if you are going to lead the Tory party, that is the only message that will unite it. This is the curse of Thatcher. The party became absolutely obsessed with the divisiveness of what was called Thatcherism. Thatcherism was a disaster.

NH: But we can’t just say we are going to offer you more of the same but run it better. That would be a lethal thing to offer to the British public, because they might look at us and say, well, actually you aren’t going to run it better. What the government has learnt, and Blair has certainly learnt, is that he has only been able to improve the health service significantly in those areas where he has introduced a mixed economy. And where he has done that he has improved things very fast, and waiting lists have come down very fast. But I think he’ll be constrained on further reform and he won’t be able to do it. I think we should occupy that ground and let Brown and the Labour party be opponents of it.

BJ: Be the heirs of Blair, you mean?

MH: That’s what I said. Build on what he’s done. Don’t frighten the horses.

GS: The reason we Tories are still required and necessary is that the issues will change. The issues on which Labour will fail will also be different. Think drugs and crime and the collapse of structures and communities and so on. However, it is easier for them to bring in the private sector in the provision of healthcare. Harder to tackle welfare dependency. Easier for us to do that maybe. And those are the kind of issues I think we will be required for. I am quite optimistic about the medium term, though I think the next election might be quite tricky. The 2 or 3 or 4 per cent reduction in the Labour vote was about Blair and Iraq. It may bounce back to them, in which case we’re not going to make many advances.

CM: One thing that worries me about the Tory party which we haven’t discussed at all is its complete loss of its historic ability to give an account of Britain’s role in the world and, actually, I think Blair deserves some credit for trying to give such an account and wrestling with this tremendously difficult situtation about Iraq. He’s tried to give a view which is pro-America and yet bridged to Europe. I don’t agree with all of it, but God knows what the Tory view is. I mean there’s a basic Euroscepticism, but it’s just a tendency to say ‘No, No, No’. And there isn’t a postCold War account of what is the global order and there isn’t an attitude about what shall we do about freedom and democracy in the world. There isn’t an account about Islamism and what to do about the revolt against the West, either because of globalisation or because of religion.

GS: I think Tony Blair’s been outstanding in his foreign policy. Whether he should have gone to war or not, that’s another matter. But as a leader I do think he’s someone you can be proud of. I know I shouldn’t say that, but that’s what I feel.

PO: Well, before I am physically sick I would like to put forward a view which The Spectator has survived on for the past 200 years, and also the Conservative party, and that is that there should be something called a British foreign policy. A British foreign policy which is a foreign policy that follows British interests, and does not do what it is told to do by President Bush in the United States. Nor do we go on amazing adventures abroad with catastrophic consequences and great loss of public integrity. Nor do we surrender our policy to Europe. We should be honourable, pragmatic, sane, compassionate. We would not have gone into Iraq. This idea that we mimic and copy whatever America does, which everyone round this table seems to be saying, possibly with the exception of Michael Heseltine, is just wrong.

CM: Yes, of course, you’d have a British foreign policy but what’s the content of that foreign policy; what’s it all about? For a long time the Tories had an account of what it was all about and now they don’t, and that’s a very big problem for them.

MH: If I’m talking to a young audience, I need a vision and the Eurosceptic case is a negation of vision.

CM: Honestly, Michael, you have to be over 70 to believe this stuff, and you are. It’s all Giscard, Chirac, all that generation...

MH: Charles, if you look at what happened to the Telegraph circulation, then you begin to understand...

CM: The Telegraph’s circulation is a good deal better than the current state of the Tory party.

AN: The younger generation are far more Eurosceptic. They’d rather go to Los Angeles.

NH: We have absolutely no sense at all of what we want to see in place of the EU constitution and we’re frightened of debating that because of the divisions.

AN: So basically your party hasn’t got a domestic or a foreign policy!

BJ: That seems a nice positive note on which to end.

CM: Backwards not forwards!