Power to the people

Michael Gove says that the Conservatives stand for freedom, law and progress, and have it within their power to launch a decentralising, democratic revolution

As a journalist I got used to asking questions. As an apprentice politician I've had to get used to answering them. And that has meant learning all over again that the simplest questions to ask are the trickiest to answer.

Most of my acquaintances have been extraordinarily encouraging about my decision to relinquish a journalistic career at the Times in the hope of being elected as the MP for Surrey Heath. But the father of one friend was perplexed. Sufficiently so to ask the question I least expected.

It wasn't 'Why have you done it?' He could quite understand why someone would want to give up the frustrations of shouting on the sidelines and see if they could make any difference on the pitch. What he couldn't understand was why I'd decided to stand as a Conservative.

Why indeed? I had thought it didn't need explaining. He knew me well enough to know that I'd always been right-wing, didn't he? He knew I was an Atlanticist who in a fight between George Bush and a tax-raising, terror-appeasing bundle of liberal prevarications was backing Bush all the way. He had often heard me protest that more centralised state control was part of the problem, not the solution, in education and health. And he knew that I found having to listen to the relentless left-wing bias of the Today programme an exquisitely painful duty, not unlike the whipping which members of Opus Dei are commanded to inflict on themselves. If that didn't make me a Conservative, what did?

It was only as I reviewed each of these pieces of incontrovertible evidence of deepdyed Toryism that I began to understand the mischievous power of my friend's father's question and, with it, the precise nature of the challenge we Conservatives face.

For in each of the cases I was inclined to bring up as proof of Conservative instincts, the father of my friend could argue that Tony Blair had appeared to be on the rightwing side of the argument and many Conservatives on the wrong. His case was simple. While the Prime Minister had publicly stuck with Bush through difficult times, several prominent Tories had come out for a Kerry presidency. When New Labour had taken very tentative, indeed almost imper

ceptible, steps towards more market solutions in health and education, Conservative MPs had voted against them. And when the BBC had got its come-uppance for running left-wing propaganda masquerading as news, it was a Labour government that held the Corporation to account while many Conservatives simply missed the point.

'I don't know what your party really stands for any more,' my friend's father ventured, 'And I can't see why I shouldn't carry on voting for someone who exceeds my expectations rather than a group who seem determined to disappoint them.'

Before explaining here, as I did to my friend's father, what makes me a Conservative, and what I believe will make the Conservatives a governing party again, I have to acknowledge that he had a point. The Conservatives have, in the past, exasperated their supporters and confused the rest of Britain by displaying a distressing lack of consistency. During the Nineties, in government, we forfeited the trust of the British people. Afterwards, in opposition, the party failed to stay true to promises of modernisation. Conservatives reached for hasty, handme-down expedients in an effort to secure an instant breakthrough in the polls, rather than sticking to a strategy for the long term.

It was the eventual decision to elect Michael Howard as leader that led me to believe that the party was ready to move on from its past mistakes. As home secretary, Howard was the one unalloyed Conservative success of the Nineties. And at the Home Office he showed a consistency under lire in pushing through Conservative principles, which is the precondition of success as a leader.

But what are those principles? Hasn't everything for which the Tories once stood either been colonised by Blair or rendered marginal by the changes he has presided over? If New Labour now calls itself the party of business, the future, the universities, hard-working families, the Atlantic alliance, strong defence and no-holds-barred crimefighting, what is left to us? Fox-hunting, Gibraltar and the House of Lords?

The first thing to say, of course, is that Labour's attempt to appropriate natural Tory issues is an acknowledgment of the intrinsically conservative nature of England. Tony Blair recognises that no one can govern this country effectively who is seen as anti-enterprise, nostalgically tied to old ways of working, hostile to educational excellence, opposed to our most durable alliance, disinclined to stand up for Britain abroad and negligent of voters' security.

Because Blair's embrace of these positions is bogus, inauthentic, compromised, timorous, mechanical or half-hearted shouldn't blind us to their importance. These are all issues where Conservatives should be seeking to establish superior claims to Labour rather than denying their importance and retreating to the positions Blair has left us.

I am as passionately committed to the cause of Gibraltar, or the freedom to hunt, as any Conservative, but I don't believe we should be defined by defence of those issues other parties won't embrace. The durability of Conservatism has come not from its attachment to specific causes, but its respect for human nature. Over the centuries, Toryism has survived and prospered, even though its causes, from tariff reform to the empire, have passed into history, because there are certain durable qualities in our make-up to which it speaks.

Conservatives have remained successful by realising when the vessels for their values are no longer seaworthy and then carefully transferring those values on to new carriers. Whenever Conservatives have forgotten their values, or clung too long to outdated craft out of sentiment, they have been overtaken.

Those Conservative values, which we abandon at our peril, are a belief in the maximum freedom for individuals, a recognition that wickedness should be countered by discipline not therapy, and an acceptance that the price of progress is a patchwork world.

A belief in freedom is the beginning of my politics. Buried in my soul, at a level too deep to surrender, is my passionate dislike of coercion, conformity and collectivism. I think the inherent dignity of humans depends on the free exercise of their will, and efforts to curtail, corral or conscript for the sake of a greater good not only stifle the human spirit, but also generally fail to achieve the good proclaimed.

To my mind there is a beauty in the quirky, the eccentric, the divergent, which one never sees in uniformity. And underpinning my conviction is the knowledge that progress, from Socrates through Galileo to Vaclav Havel, has depended on the defiance of consensus, on those who dare to be Daniels. The enemy of progress is the doctrine of knowing your place, the principle that your identity comes from membership of a group, the edict which holds that permission must be sought before you can act in accordance with your instincts.

One of the principal reasons I instinctively dislike the Left, and feel that this government is still emphatically on the Left, is their inclination to curtail freedom. They may claim to value it, but their actions show that they have only the most attenuated sense of what liberty means.

They are only too happy to resort to bans, whether on smoking, smacking or hunting, negligent of the fact that each of these practices is already effectively circumscribed and controlled by social custom and voluntary action. Individuals have their cherishable specialness denied by this government's insistence on treating them as members of interest groups, with employment quotas in public service making jobs dependent on ethnic background, and university places contingent on having gone to the right sort of state school. While these policies are meant to encourage greater opportunity, this government has brought about no greater level of social mobility. Tax credits and the whole apparatus of means-testing have made an increasing number of Britons clients of the state, their place defined by Gordon Brown, their incentive to rise above their allocated position reduced.

Instead of a rich variety of schools, each developing new ways of teaching better, each responding competitively to the needs of parents and pupils, each with a defined character shaped by an inspirational individual at its head, each giving freedom to its teachers and benefiting from parents' freedom to choose, we have learning directed from the centre, thousands of pupils written off, no proper personal incentive to save them, and anonymous establishments where the people who run things don't know your child's name. flow can the quirky, the eccentric, the individual, the Galileo of tomorrow be cherished in this system which works to deny freedom?

Because Conservatives believe freedom is precious they are instinctively prepared to defend it more vigorously. There is a reason why Conservatives have always been seen as the stronger party on law and order. They believe in the rule of law and understand the preconditions of order. They know that the protection of the weak requires a clear code of right and wrong, upheld by police who are free to pursue the wicked, judges inclined to punish them and, when the threat comes from beyond our shores, armed forces strong enough to deter and ready when required to strike. Conservatives know that making excuses for those who would threaten us only emboldens the enemies of order and that weakness in the face of evil is more provocative than strength. That is why Rudi Giuliani is a conservative, and a hero to conservatives like me.

Thinking of the reasons which brought Giuliani to power as mayor of New York underlines the importance of the third leg of enduring Conservative principle, the belief that the price of progress is a patchwork world. Giuliani became a mayoral candidate who had credibility as a crime-fighter, and went on to become a city father who cut crime dramati

catty, because of the decentralised and democratic nature of American life. He rose to electoral prominence as a prosecutor who was indefatigable in his pursuit of crime. And as mayor he was able to implement crime-fighting policies because he had a specific local mandate to change the way the police operated and introduce a zero tolerance policy.

A system of elected district attorneys, responsible for bringing prosecutions, and elected officials charged with administering justice, whether mayors, sheriffs or judges, gives Americans the freedom to shape crimefighting policies which are right for their locality. There is a patchwork of different responses across one nation. And that, of course, means inequalities. But that is the best means of securing progress. Once a successful model is identified in one community, voters will soon clamour for its introduction in their neighbourhood. The principle of decentralisation and democratic accountability has led to innovations not only in criminal justice, but also in educational choice, welfare reform and even healthcare rationing.

The reason I'm a Conservative now is that I think our freedoms need not just defending but extending; we have been too weak for too long in the face of those who would exploit our natural decency, and the time is ripe for a decentralising, democratic revolution which takes power out of the hands of central government and puts it back in the control of the people. The reason I'm standing for Parliament is that I want to do everything I can to put those principles into practice, and that means fighting all out for a Conservative government.

The reason I'm writing this article is that I now have a simple question for my friend's father, and everyone else who may have voted for Blair because they were exasperated with the Conservatives. If you agree with my principles, why won't you vote for my party?

Michael Gave is assistant editor of the Times and Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Surrey Heath.