Only the Tories can cut the state down to size

May I claim my prize? Unless I am much mistaken, and unless my internet searches have missed something, it was I who brought the expression ‘dog-whistling’ to British politics.

I did not invent it. For this honour — as for a good deal of vulgarly succinct modern slang — we have the Australians to thank. I borrowed the phrase from John Howard’s election campaign.

It happened like this. In July 2003 two senators from Queensland contacted me to say they were shortly to visit Britain on a studytour and would like to meet me to discuss British politics. Flattered, I readily agreed. Senators George Brandis and Brett Mason came round to my flat and the three of us sat by the Thames on a late July day, discussing our politics and theirs.

They seemed decent, clever and interesting men, both members of Prime Minister John Howard’s governing Liberal party although (I sensed) a little to the liberal side of that deeply conservative politician. I asked them what their leader’s secret might be, given that he seemed to have all the charisma of a stoat, and yet had a habit of sneaking through to victory at the hustings.

‘Dog-whistling,’ they replied. I looked puzzled. They explained.

Thus it was that on 31 October 2003, immediately before Michael Howard was elected as Conservative leader and in the confident expectation that he would be, I wrote in the Times that to explain Mr Howard’s Antipodean namesake’s success, Australians ‘speak of his skill at “dogwhistling”. Dogs can hear whistles pitched beyond the range within which the human ear can register a sound. John Howard, it is said, somehow manages to signal to the Right that he is on their side, without committing himself to language which can be turned by Australian progressives against him.

‘With Oliver Letwin dog-whistling to social liberals, and Michael Howard dog-whistling to the traditional Right, this new-look Centre could prove quite formidable.’ Though open to correction I cannot find any earlier use of the phrase in mainstream British journalism, though it has now become commonplace. I do realise my achievement is of no account whatsoever save to my mother and me, and you must forgive me my little squeak of pride; but in the battle of ideas columnists cannot claim authorship of much, and whenever the term appears in print these days I feel the same thrill of ownership as lifted my heart when on the eve of the leadership contest between John Major and John Redwood, the Sun gave away a free pair of Vulcan ears with every copy. Had I a farthing for every printed instance of that Vulcan analogy, I should today be wealthy indeed.

As for dog-whistling, the expression is becoming rather shopworn and it may soon be time to retire the cliché, not least because, over immigration policy, dog-whistling is precisely what Michael Howard is not doing. His attachment to the subject owes more to the hunting-horn than it does to the high-frequency pitch of a whistle inaudible to the human ear. And rightly. There is no need for the Conservative leader to be coy about his policies on immigration because they are neither racist, nor extreme, nor hateful.

The imbalance critics detect in the Tory campaign so far arises not from the leadership having spoken out in too forthright a way on immigration, but from its failure to have found the same confident tone on anything else. There is a need for a direct Tory appeal pitched over the heads of the media to the electorate at large — whether by dog-whistle, hunting-horn or billet-doux — but in this communications seem to have failed them. This will be the election upon which modern historians pronounce that the Tory party lost its nerve on the only modern cause which makes it worth being a Conservative: the role, the size and the cost of the state.

I have seldom heard so much vapid nonsense as is today being spouted by the Tory tendency which calls itself the ‘modernisers’. It is impossible to confound their argument because they do not have one. When confronted on tax and the small state, they sigh, roll their eyes soulfully, and murmur that you may very well be right, and these arguments may very well be returned to one day, but today the time is not ripe for them. New Labour (for whom they have an exaggerated regard) has ‘moved the goalposts’, they say, and these days it’s all about delivering public services. Shrinking the state is not, they declare, part of the zeitgeist of the epoch.

Zeitgeist shitegeist. Here we are in the middle of the longest period of economic growth in living memory, with unemployment and all its associated welfare costs at their lowest for decades and with real incomes expanding steadily, when the cost to the Exchequer of helping those who cannot help themselves the hand-to-mouth firefighting for which a government must empty the piggy-bank when times are hard — ought to be at an all-time low. Here we are when a chancellor can afford to shift resources towards the things which will arm us for tomorrow: infrastructure, transport and energy, radical tax reform taking the poor out of tax and encouraging wealth-creators. Here we are when tax-rates can fall without depressing tax-take, because so many people are earning more. Here we are, in short, when government should be investing: lower current spending, higher capital spending, lower taxes.

If ever there was a suitable time to get across the Conservative message that the state’s principal role is as enabler, not provider, if ever there was a climate in which, with fewer cries of pain, welfare subsidy could be capped, the state payroll squeezed and flabby public welfare made taut, this is it.

And what is a Labour government doing? Hiring a million more public servants, inventing a hundred new handouts, and increasing state spending so fast that even increased earnings cannot keep up with it. Everywhere you look, the state is getting fatter. If this does not alarm Conservatives, what is our political philosophy for?

I know no way of saying that the state is bloated without leaving an audience in no doubt that it ought to be slimmed. I know no way of persuading voters that the state ought to be slimmed without promising them that the aim — the aim; nobody can promise how fast it can be achieved — should be a very substantial reduction in the tax they pay now and their children will pay tomorrow. I know of no party better placed to declare that this is the direction it wants to take, and be believed, than the Conservative party.

Whisper it, dog-whistle it, shout it from the rooftops — but one way or the other, and before 5 May, let’s hear it from somebody. Poor Howard Flight.

Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.