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Andrew Lilico: Things to believe and to disbelieve about climate change

Until perhaps two years ago, whether climate change was occurring and whether it was anything to do with human activity were topics that politically-minded people debated.  Greens urged that the burning of fossil fuels was going to heat up the planet, raising sea levels, expanding deserts, and causing much misery.  Climate change sceptics urged that the evidence was not there, and that we should not shackle the Market, undermine trade and limit the development of poorer nations on the basis of scare stories and hype.

In my view that debate went on rather longer than was fruitful, and because some people still cling to the most sceptical positions there, the real debate that we should be having has been seriously hobbled.  I shall explain.

I know lots of very smart people who still don’t believe there is any good evidence of human-induced climate change.  I understand why, as intellectually-confident individuals with lots of letters after (an sometimes before) their names they feel able to defy the overwhelming consensus of a scientific community.  Presumably many people that have become environmental scientists in the past twenty years took up research in that area precisely because they already believed that there was human-induced climate change, having been influenced by the concerns of green writers in the late 1980s.  That their subsequent research has confirmed their initial prejudices may make figures along the lines of “99% of all climate scientists think that…”  My guess is that the proportion of experts in feminist ethics who think that women had a good deal in the 1950s or that the husband is the head of the wife will be rather small, also.

But although, given the likely biases in the climate change research community, I think it appropriate to be polite to listen to my very clever friends’ scepticism, the fact remains that we forfeited our right to be listened to concerning the details of this debate when we chose not to do environmental science.  So now our entertaining dinner table debates cannot hope to influence policy.

Andrew Lilico: How British politics would be changed by recession

Despite the credit squeeze, the Northern Rock affair, falling house prices, high oil prices, and the expected slowdown in the economy next year, mainstream economic forecasters are not at this stage expecting a recession.  And neither am I, yet.  But two and a half years to the next General Election is ample time, in terms of the economic cycle, for matters to turn nasty.  And if the economy did turn nasty, there is the risk that the sort of policy emphases we adopt today will be irrelevant to what are perceived as the major challenges in two and a half years’ time.  So it seems worth doing a bit of alternate futures thinking now…

During a recession, I suggest, the following seven political issues would be materially affected.

1. Macroeconomic management — Macroeconomic management has not been much of a political dividing point over the past ten years.  It has been a political issue — perhaps the biggest of all, for Tony Blair won two General Elections on the basis that the economy had been managed soundly.  But there has been very little political dispute over matters such as the inflation target or the government’s fiscal rules and whether these have, in combination, delivered optimal macroeconomic management. Yet in the past, when economic recessions were more regular, macroeconomic management was among the most central issues of political debate.
2. Unemployment — Unemployment is not an issue in the UK, and has not been so since perhaps 1994.  If there were to be a recession, unemployment would rise — though almost certainly not to the three million plus levels of the early 1990s and early 1980s.  Political parties would need policies to respond to rising unemployment.  Parties that chose active macroeconomic management (e.g. aimed to “borrow-and-spend their way out of recession”) might claim that that was their answer to unemployment.  Parties preferring to do something else would have to offer an account of how their preferred solutions would address unemployment.
3. Welfare benefits — During the late 1970s and through the 1980s, schemes for delivering unemployment benefits and income support were major political debating points.  How generous the schemes were, what incentives there were to find work, benefits to assist in retraining, the merits or otherwise of private unemployment insurance schemes, high marginal rates induced by benefit tapers, the slippery slope into incapacity and disablement benefits, and many related issues would come back onto the political agenda with a vengeance.
4. Housing — In recent years the form that housing has taken as a political issue has related to concerns about affordability in general, concerns about affordability for key workers in certain regions, allegations that there is an urgent need to build more new houses, and consequently concerns about building in green spaces and increased urban densities.  If there is a recession, this political context will change very dramatically.  House prices will fall markedly, and affordability will disappear as an issue.  In a context of falling prices, there will be much reduced pressure to engage in largescale new-build programmes overruling the will of local people.  The issue in housing will cease to be how to get more of it and how to make it cheaper, but instead the issue will become one of labour mobility — people with negative equity may be unwilling to move house and realise losses, meaning that labour mobility decreases, exacerbating unemployment.
5. Regional policy — Recession would be unlikely to be spread evenly over the country.  It is very difficult to say in advance where it might bite most, especially since (a) I’m not yet expecting one at all; and hence (b) I don’t know what exactly might be causing it.  Suppose that we assume the cause is a major correction in house prices, simply a result of the market returning to equilibrium, with the result that consumption and investment fall whilst people rebuild their balance sheets.  It is perhaps natural to assume that the greatest such falls would occur in London and the South-East, so perhaps these would be the regions hit hardest.  This would result in a major change of emphasis in regional policy.  Instead of such policy being aimed at dispersing enterprise and jobs away from London and the South-East, often by providing subsidies for businesses to locate elsewhere, regional policy might become more focused on assisting London and the South-East to escape from a malaise.  This would also have potentially profound political consequences, since it would be a recession that impacted most on relatively more Conservative-voting regions.
6. Social Cohesion — Issues of social cohesion have been relatively significant in recent years as Britain absorbed two great new waves of immigrant: the asylum seeker (usually bogus, in practice) and then the Eastern European.  But up to now, insofar as this involved economic elements, these were about whether immigrants had preferential treatment for local authority housing, or whether immigrant labour was very cheap and bid down wages, or whether immigrants claimed benefits and hence imposed a tax burden on others.  Recession would bring a new and vicious element: envy.  British-born people without jobs or otherwise under pressure will envy the jobs of immigrants, and are likely to suggest that immigrants are “stealing our jobs” (even though that’s not remotely how the economics of these situations work). Features of immigrant communities that seem merely irritating or even charming when times are good may start to seem very burdensome when times are harsher.  On the other hand, since a significant component of recent immigration has involved footloose Eastern European workers, if jobs become scarcer they may well move away from the UK to pastures greener — at which point we shall doubtless face scare stories in the press about Britain’s “collapsing population”.
7. Regulation — In a recession many businesses will fail, and many practices that one got away with during good times will be exposed. Both of these factors will create pressure to increase regulation in various ways.  But of course at the same time businessmen who were quite content to have all sorts of regulation when times were good — for it deterred new firms from entering their markets — will say that there must be significant deregulation for their industries to survive.  Political parties will need resolutions to this paradox.

Andrew Lilico: We don't need more regulation of party funding, we need less

If I give £100,000 to Amnesty International, or the Church, or my local cats home, no-one need ever know.  The charity concerned may need to check that I’m not sending them the proceeds of crime, but they don’t need to publicize my donation if I don’t want it publicized.  And rightly so, for in many cases it is of the essence of charitable giving that it should be in secret.  Indeed, the Bible teaches us as follows:

“When you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

(Matthew 6:2-4, NIV)

In contrast, if I donate money to a political party, everyone must be told; I shall be subject to extensive press scrutiny of my private life, any connection I have to public affairs, and any business I do for the public sector; my motives will be questioned — it will be assumed, inferred and alleged that I am corrupt and wicked for wanting to assist a political party; if anyone — including many thousands of people beyond my control — should use my money improperly or react to my donation by acting favourably towards me, I may be questioned by police, arrested, and have my public reputation and personal career destroyed.  Does this seem right?

The following is, if practicable, a highly desirable situation: anyone should be able to give any money they want to, without any publicity, to any political party.  Why?  For at least three sorts of reasons:

• First, it is an issue of personal freedom.  Unless there is good reason to prevent me from doing so, I should be able to dispose of my money as I like without answering to others.
• Second, it is a matter of democratic involvement.  If I want to participate in the democratic process, assisting ideas that I want to see put forward, aiming to have the views I myself prefer advanced in a coherent and well-argued way, I should be able to do so insofar as is feasible and reasonable.
• Third, it is a matter of competition and dynamism in the political process.  If we limit the donations of the wealthy — either by placing a cap on them or by deterring them from making donations in other ways (such as excessive and negative publicity) then we shall defend vested political interests and make it extremely difficult for new parties to break in.

Andrew Lilico: On advisory juries

Juries have a surprisingly significant place in our cultural understanding of justice.  The trials of Socrates, of William Penn, of OJ Simpson, the refusal of juries to convict when death penalties would follow for adultery in the Commonwealth or for theft in the early nineteenth century, the dramas of 12 Angry Men or LA Law, the complexities of the Guinness Four or Louise Woodward cases — for the educated layman, these and other examples are branded into what we mean by due process.  In recent years, jury trial has taken on an added political dimension, as it has come to be seen as iconic of the struggle to sustain key British constitutional features against encroachment by Europhiles, leftist “modernisers”, and authoritarians.

One issue of recent interest has been precisely where it is best to draw the line between cases in which a jury trial is to be assumed or guaranteed (as opposed to being available, perhaps, upon appeal being granted to a higher court) and cases in which a judge (say, a magistrate) might hear a case without a jury.  Such a line has always existed, and it is a pragmatic question, into which issues such as expense or the threat of jury intimidation are normally thought to enter, where it should be drawn.  I would have much to say on the matter, but that is not what I want to talk about today.

On this occasion, I wish to focus on the recent debate as to whether certain sorts of cases are intrinsically unsuited to jury trial.  The kinds of cases people have in mind are those that turn crucially upon sometimes very involved expert evidence —fraud trials are perhaps the most well-known examples, though child abuse cases are also relevant, as would presumably be future criminal cases of alleged cartels.  The idea of the jury sceptic is that juries are fundamentally ill-suited to arbitrating in such cases, because understanding them requires either a level of technical expertise that juries do not have, or a degree of experience in listening to such evidence that juries do not have.  If the jury simply cannot understand the case properly, how can it come to a useful verdict?  Given these pragmatic vices of a jury, might it not, so the thought goes, be better to have a suitably expert judge, or perhaps a panel of suitably expert judges, come up with the verdict?

Andrew Lilico: Why trade is green

I decided to have roast lamb for dinner on Sunday.  I had my fourteen-year-old at the supermarket with me, and when I reached for the delicious New Zealand leg joint we later enjoyed, he scolded me thus: “But Dad!  That’s from New Zealand!  That’s so environmentally unfriendly — why not get the British lamb over there?”  I was therefore obliged to offer him an extended discourse upon why, in fact, purchasing the sort of products we import into Britain is typically more environmentally friendly than buying the domestic variant, not less.  Since my son’s error is a common one, and even seems to be drifting into policy formation, I thought I would explain my thinking to you, Dear Readers.

The fundamental basis of trade was set out by David Ricardo, more than a century-and-a-half ago.  Economists call it by the intimidating title of the “Theory of Comparative Advantage”, but the idea is actually very simple and intuitive, and comes down to the same concept as Henry Ford’s famous “division of labour” — indeed, it is the main basis of all commerce, whether international or domestic.  The idea is this: People (and countries) differ in their relative capacities.  One of us might be, say, an excellent farmer but only moderately good at designing pension schemes.  Another might be moderately good at both farming and pension scheme design.  If the person with the relatively greater skill in farming specialises in that, and offers for trade the extra food she produces through this specialisation, then the person that is moderately good at each can focus on pension scheme design (eschewing farming) and trade the extra pension schemes he has time to produce in exchange for food.  Trade allows us each to focus on our area of relative (or “comparative”) advantage.

So if in trading with New Zealand the Britons find that New Zealand sells us lamb, what that means is that New Zealand is relatively better at producing lamb.  Let’s strip away the complexities here and say that what it means is that lamb produced in New Zealand is, for the same quality, cheaper.  What does “cheaper” mean?  Again, setting aside certain complexities, it means “produced employing fewer resources” — less land, less energy, fewer minerals, fewer trees felled, and so on.  But what about the fact that the New Zealand lamb is produced in New Zealand, and so has to be transported all the way here?  Doesn’t that destroy the argument?  Typically not.  For the price of New Zealand lamb sold in Britain incorporates the cost of transporting it to Britain.  So if the lamb imported into Britain is cheaper than the British variant (for the same quality), that means that, even after allowing for the costs of transporting it, New Zealand lamb is produced using fewer resources than is its British alternate.

Andrew Lilico: The reform of state marriage

Certain elements in the Conservative Party today exhibit strong libertarian instincts.  One manifestation of these is suspicion about the appetite of David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and others to endorse marriage in various ways.  One hears questions along the lines of "Whether two people get married and whether those two people stay married doesn't really warrant state intrusion - why is cohabiting "worse" than marriage?"

Those who cohabit are simply imprudently married, in my view (as indeed is the view of the government, with its recent proposals of extending marriage rights to cohabitees), so I shall simply employ the language of "married" rather than saying "married/cohabiting" etc..  Then the question becomes "Why should the state take an interest in the details of people's marriages?"

States have always taken a close interest in whether two people should be married and whether they should stay married. States offer marriage contracts; stipulate conditions for divorce; restrict the numbers and nature of people one can marry; make the level of welfare benefits and taxes dependent on whether or not one is married; regulate adoption of children according to marital status; make inheritance after death dependent on marital status; adjust their assessments of rape and violence dependent on marital status; and many other things.

Why? Many reasons. But here I shall offer just five.

Andrew Lilico: Why I am not a "liberal Conservative" in foreign policy

I believe in duty-driven imperialism. This isn’t quite the same as being a neo-con, as I shall explain in a moment, but since the difference relates to what happens after one topples wicked, corrupt and oppressive regimes, I wasn’t expecting it to result in any practical disagreement between myself and the Conservative leadership (whom I understood until only a couple of weeks ago to be, for practical purposes, straightforward post-Iraq neo-cons of the Rumsfeld (you can intervene to destroy oppressors but you shouldn’t imagine you can build a democracy afterwards) type, as opposed to the pre-Iraq Wolfowitz (by creating a democracy in Iraq, we can create a virtuous domino effect across the Middle East) type). Alas! I was wrong.

Belief in duty-driven imperialism has two components: the "neo-con instinct" and the "you break it, you own it principle." Here is how I understand the neo-con instinct: If you lived in a country with no police force, and your neighbour regularly beat up his wife and children, and you were bigger and stronger than he were and could go round and stop him, what should you do? Perhaps you would say the following:

"So long as he sticks to beating up his family inside his own house, he is no threat to me. If I go round to stop him something may go wrong and he might hurt me, or his family may get hurt during my fight with him. Furthermore, other people in the street may come out and complain and I shall get a bad reputation as a bully. So best to leave him alone unless and until he represents any material threat to me."

If this is your attitude, then I shall call you a "realist". I shall also think you selfish and dishonourable.

Andrew Lilico: How we should approach welfare reform

Welfare reform is back under discussion.  During the 1980s and early 1990s this was a hot political topic, probably because of high unemployment, and even through the mid 1990s many of us wrote pamphlets in which jargon such as “Wisconsin-style systems”, “workfare”, “compulsory private insurance”, “opting-out” and so on were the lingua franca.  This debate largely perished with the collapse of Frank Field’s “thinking the unthinkable” project, and since then (with the exception of a growing — rather confused — discussion of pensions reform, of which I shall write more another time) Gordon Brown’s bizarrely complicated system of means-tested benefits and tax credits has ruled uncontested-though-roundly-criticized.

More recently, however, the report of Iain Duncan Smith’s Social Justice Policy Group and David Cameron’s speech at the 2007 Party Conference has re-ignited the discussion.  I want here to offer a few principles that I believe should guide our engagement with this issue.

First, I believe that we should paint an accurate but restrained picture of the problem, giving it sufficient emphasis to demonstrate our genuine concern, but avoiding creating the impression of a world in crisis or that matters were much rosier in the past.  If we want a “sunny uplands Reganite” Conservatism, we must appear optimistic about the world — “you can get it if you really want it”.  Implying that things are much worse than they actually are makes one appear dour and unpleasant, whilst implying that the world was much better in the past makes one appear like one of those Conservatives that looked back to a mythical golden age before those “nasty feminists and homosexuals” ruined everything in the 1960s.  I believe that our position should be a “much done, but much left to do” analysis of the world, and we should characterize Labour as having spent ten years failing to move things on.

Andrew Lilico: The role of religious policy justifications in two kinds of liberalism

Let’s distinguish two different ideas that are both called “liberalism”.  In another context I would be tempted to call them Accepting Pessimistic Static Liberalism (APSL) and Tolerant Optimistic Dynamic Liberalism (TODL), for reasons that will become obvious, but since acronyms like this are likely to put readers to sleep, I shall instead call them “American Left-Liberalism” and “British Conservative Liberalism”.

The first form of liberalism is static, in that it sees Liberalism as a final, ideal state of society.  In a truly liberal society we have all the answers there can be; everything that can be resolved has been. There are, of course, brute disagreements between people and between points of view, but these reflect fundamentally irreconcilable moral outlooks and preferences (it is pessimistic about the possibility that such differences of opinion can be bridged).  Since we cannot hope to change each other’s minds and behaviours in these ways, we must foreswear our attempts to persuade or impose upon each other, and instead accept other people with different moral, religious, aesthetic, and spiritual outlooks.  I suspect that it is an outlook of this sort that American Conservatives often have in mind when they condemn their opponents as “liberals”, so I’m calling it “American Left-Liberalism”.

Andrew Lilico: Everyone hates you, America, but so what?

A few months back, Lord Saatchi produced a Politeia pamphlet and address, in which he considered, and attempted to counter, anti-Americanism.

America is not universally loved.  That much is clear.  But before leaping in to try to make it loved, let us first understand the senses in which the fact that America is not universally loved does and does not matter.

In Kipling's poem to America, "Take up the White Man's Burden", urging it to take on the burdens and duties of imperialism, one of his stanzas was:

Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Andrew Lilico: What should we say about the environment?

I have discussed my view of the importance of topic choice previously.  Notwithstanding that discussion, and although I have not always been convinced by the arguments and policies put forward on green issues, in my view Cameron’s early emphasis on the environment had great political potential, but a slight mishandling of the issue has meant that it has not played for us as well as it could have done and could yet be made to do.  I shall explain.

I have no statistics to prove it, but I am confident that many core Conservative activists are much more environmentally conscious and active than the average Briton.  They recycle; they buy dolphin-friendly washing-up liquid, free-range eggs and organic carrots; they are members of the WWF and the RSPB; their favourite TV programmes are David Attenborough documentaries; at the time, they were first in the queue to buy ozone-friendly sprays and lead-free petrol; they write letters to their local paper to complain about urban sprawl or the poor state of their local park; they regularly spend their weekends rambling in the countryside.

Andrew Lilico: When all else fails, why not try being Conservative?

I have heard Conservatives argue that 1997 represented some kind of political sea-change that we have to accept.  The British voter proved himself more left-wing than before, and decided that he wanted a bit more spent on health and education, and we have to accept that.  Voters showed that they didn't want more privatization and we have to accept that.  They showed that there were tight limits to the role they would tolerate for the market, and we have to accept that.  Unfortunately it took two more defeats, in 2001 and 2005, before we even began to understand or accept these things.

I want to say the following, and say it loud and clear: I consider that point of view utterly and completely wrong; there is virtually no truth in it at all; it massively under-estimates the scale and nature of our defeat in 1997; far from not accepting this outlook since 1997 we have accepted far too much of it; and whilst we are trapped in that kind of thinking, it will be very difficult to make sustainable advances for the Party.

In 1997 the Conservatives lost.  You were crushed.  Everyone hated you.  Left-wingers hated you because they believed you had destroyed jobs and the union movement, had starved the public services of funds to create a death-by-a-thousand-cuts, and would use its poor performance to justify dismantling it wholesale if you were re-elected.  Eurosceptics hated you because you had introduced the Maastricht Treaty and intended to join the euro if you were re-elected.  Civil libertarians hated you because you had abolished the Right to Silence, had reversed the Presumption of Innocence in a wide range of cases, and intended to introduce ID cards if you were re-elected.  Social Conservatives hated you because you were adulterous and corrupt.  Ideologues hated you because you were pragmatic. Pragmatists hated you because they believed you dogmatic.  Modernists hated you because you were old fashioned.  Traditionalists hated you because you seemed addicted to a continuous maelstrom of change.  Nice people hated you because you were nasty.  Nasty people despised you because you were weak.

Andrew Lilico: The reform of higher education

In September 2004 the Bow Group published a paper I had written (with the assistance of Karen Richardson) on the Reform of Higher Education. At the time it received quite a bit of press interest — e.g. here and here.  Since term is starting again, and since I believe that the arguments of the paper still largely stand, I thought I might summarize them for you.

I began by considering the rationale for state involvement in the sector.  It seems to me that this is always the first step — unless we understand why the Market or the voluntary sector is not best-placed or most appropriate to deliver goods and services, we will not understand what it is that government intervention is supposed to achieve, and hence are unlikely to develop optimal policy proposals.

Andrew Lilico: The key reform needed in the welfare state

In my view, the British welfare state suffers from two key failings. One is that it fails properly to reach or address the needs of an important class of the socially excluded.  This is an important issue, discussed for example in Iain Duncan-Smith’s Breakdown Britain and Breakthrough Britain reports, but I shall not discuss it further here.

The other key failing is that the way the welfare state works offer very little scope for working class and middle class people to prioritise their spending and saving so as to choose to receive more-than-average amounts of public services.  I have a relative who, in a foreign country in the 1960s, had her daughter go to a good school and later to university.  To help fund this she used to rise each morning at 5am and chop wood.  Other well-known practices include the jam jar into which savings were placed to pay the doctor if someone fell sick.  Throughout the ages the idea that parents might sacrifice something so that their children might have more opportunities — better health treatment, better education, and so on — than they did has been rightly seen as a definitive element of good parenting.  Similarly, providing the best care in old age that we could manage ourselves or otherwise afford has been seen as a key duty of children to their parents.

Andrew Lilico: Are all humans people?

I view every human animal as a person.  Throughout history this has been a minority point of view.  At almost all times and places, most people have considered that there were human animals that were not people — women, slaves, children, prisoners of war, members of certain races, members of certain religions, criminals, and committers of certain moral offences have all been regarded as less-than-fully-people.  To be a person required something more than just being human.

Today the most clear-cut class of human animals not normally regarded as people are the human embryos.  Many things are permitted to be done to these human animals that would not normally be thought unproblematic as things done to people — killing them; conducting medical experiments upon them; using their organs; and so on — and there are complex policies developed to regulate these activities (including, for example, the judgement of the HFEA last week that hybrid embryos can be created).  It does not follow from my belief that all human animals are people that no human animal should ever be killed or experimented upon or its organs used to help others — quite the reverse: we believe that, under certain circumstances all of these things can be done to people.  But I do believe that the same kinds of principles that guide and limit when we kill adults, experiment upon them, or use them for organs should also guide and limit our treatment of embryos.

In a moment I shall ponder some potential add-on features that might be thought necessary before a human animal really becomes a person.  But first I wish to dispel a certain confusion that some readers might have.  When we discuss what extra might be needed for a human animal to become a person we shall be discussing issues of philosophy, ethics, politics.  But some readers may wonder whether a human embryo really counts as a human animal at all.  This is not a matter of ethical debate.  It is simply a scientific fact, given only the following definition: a human animal is a working instance of a certain kind of creature with a certain DNA structure.

Andrew Lilico: Legalisation not Decriminalisation – the way forward for Cannabis control

Following Ann Widdecombe’s speech at Conservative Party Conference in 2000, the subsequent (apparently coordinated) confessions by Portillista Shadow Cabinet members to cannabis use, Peter Lilley’s SMF pamphlet and subsequent Telegraph article on the issue in summer of 2001, and Michael Portillo’s raising of the issue during the 2001 leadership election, the Conservative Party had a brief debate on whether it should favour cannabis legalisation.  At the time it seemed like the ultimate “moderniser” issue, and Radio 1 DJs, the Telegraph, and the Independent were combined in an unholy alliance of support for the Party.  Yet now this view appears to have been abandoned entirely, and even modernisers trumpet their “tough” stance on “drugs” as if these were an undifferentiated class.

I wish to argue that certain forms of cannabis should be legalised for sale, trade, possession, and recreational use.  But before I begin, I want to emphasize some things I shall not be arguing.

• I am not of the view that cannabis use is harmless.  I believe that cannabis is a dangerous substance, have never tried it myself, and would urge right-thinking people to avoid it.  Furthermore, I have great sympathy for the view that, if (against my urging here) it is to remain illegal, then its classification should be raised.
• I am not of the view that cannabis should be decriminalised, or that decriminalisation would be a useful first step.  Quite the reverse — I believe that decriminalisation would make the UK’s drug problem worse and would be generally retrograde.
• I am not of the view that legalising cannabis would be a first step to legalising other drugs such as heroin, or that the only coherent intellectual arguments for legalising cannabis would imply legalising these other drugs, also.  On the contrary, I shall, below, argue explicitly against the legalisation of Heroin.

Andrew Lilico: The Power of the Right in the Policy-Formulation Debate

One of the most misguided notions informing Conservative marketing and policy-formulation over the past ten years has been a certain kind of defeatism.  Starting with the oft-repeated idea that people voting Labour in 1997 showed that “they wanted a bit more spent on health and education”, and reinforced by two further General Election thrashings, some Conservatives have developed the idea that the Right has lost the main intellectual arguments over core policy areas such as the public services, and needs to accept a New Labour “settlement” in order to “gain a ticket” to participate in respectable policy debate.

Peter Franklin decided to devote his column of August 15th to refuting a remark I had made on one of his previous columns.  He had asked “Does the Right ever ask itself why no one is listening?”  I had replied that this was plain wrong, that it isn’t true that no-one listens to the thinkers of the Right, indeed that, on the contrary, the thoughts of the Right are dominant everywhere except perhaps in the Conservative Party.  Peter replied that although the Right had won the highest-level economic debate — of Capitalism versus Socialism — a “second left” now dominates our society.

What did I mean by my remark?  Policy debates go on all the time in a number of different realms — on the pages of ConservativeHome, in your association, in student common rooms, and many other places.  But there are two really key places, and the others are really only relevant insofar as they influence these two: First, there is the public space of public policy debate, conducted in newspapers, on television, in the speeches of major politicians, in pamphlets from think-tanks, and so on.  This is the space in which policy debates impact most on voting.  In this debating space big issues are covered, but detail is typically not.

The other key space of policy debate is that among policy-formulators.  This is the debate between civil servants, consultants, think-tank-pamphleteers (as above), academics, the occasional policy-wonk politician, and others.  These debates are much more detailed, involve far more facts, sometimes involve complicated mathematical models, and are much less accessible to the public.

Andrew Lilico: What should we say about taxes?

The latter phase of the Major government was subjected to a particularly effective alliterative Labour mantra — “Twenty-two Tory Tax rises”.  The idea was that in 1992 John Major had promised not to raise taxes — indeed had strongly attacked Labour for various tax-raising proposals — but had then raised taxes many times.  Perhaps partly as a consequence of this, in opposition the Conservatives have regularly come under considerable pressure to make unequivocal promises about taxes.  In both 2001 and 2005 we went into the General Elections promising tax cuts, with our only clear basis for paying for these being cuts in fraud and waste.

Now, as far as I can see, no-one doubts that government expenditure involves fraud and waste, but equally few people seriously believe that any one party will be materially more effective at cutting down on fraud and waste than any other party.  Do you believe this, Dear Reader?  Do you believe that Gordon Brown is not bothering to reduce fraud and waste, benignly looking the other way, but that a Conservative administration would effectively and efficiently eliminate it all?  I don’t.  I object to Gordon Brown’s government in all kinds of ways, but a belief that it is inefficient, except insofar as that is a natural concomitant of socialist methods of micromanagement and planning, is not amongst them.

Now we have a new formula.  We will “share the proceeds of growth”, having “put stability first”, and will “not commit to any upfront unfunded tax cuts”.  But we face pressure from our own side to commit to tax cuts, and journalists ask whether we really believe that a low-tax economy is more dynamic — and, if so, what is supposed to be the problem with committing to lower taxes?

In my view, all of these approaches suffer from the same confusion: they see the level of taxes as a startpoint, when in fact it is a residual — that is to say, the level of taxes is just the balancing item at the end of our political programme.  The right approach, in my view, is to begin by asking what it is that we want the state to be involved in, and what is best left to the market and the voluntary sector.  Then amongst those things in which the state is to be involved, we ask what is best dealt with by regulation or by the facilitation of (or compulsion to) private or voluntary provision, and what is best addressed by state provision or by state funding.  This then tell us how much we need to spend.  Then, knowing how much we need to spend, we know how much we need to raise in taxes, and we have our answer for the level of taxation — the level of taxation is the result, not the startpoint.

Andrew Lilico: What form should Britain's nuclear deterrent take?

What form should Britain's nuclear deterrent take?

Earlier this year there was a short and seemingly decisive debate over nuclear weapons, focussed on two main positions — namely (A) that we should commit to replacing Trident with a new generation of submarine-based city-killing nuclear weapons (a sort of Trident II); or (B) that we should abandon Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. Slightly less discussed positions were that we should put the decision off for a few years, or that we should aim to extent Trident's life.

But what seems to me to have barely been discussed at all is a different sort of position, still committed to retaining nuclear weapons.  The Trident system of city-killing submarine-based high-yield weapons was crucial in the Cold War.  Such weapons had two main functions: (1) They avoided a scenario under which the Soviet Union attacked the UK with nuclear weapons but offered no immediate threat to the US, whereupon the US would have to decide whether to respond with its own nuclear weapons, thereby placing its own cities and citizens under threat - would the US really do it?  (2) In the event that a conventional war was lost, it might be possible to deter conventional forces from over-running the UK by progressively eliminating Soviet cities until the conventional advance halted.  The deterrence provided by such weapons was key in maintaining the balance of terror.

Andrew Lilico: Two economic policies

Are Gordon Brown's monetary policy arrangements beyond criticism? If not, how could they be improved? Could any criticisms of them be politically useful, or would they just be technical matters best left to academic and practitioner debate?

There are many ways the Brown's arrangements could be criticized, and many politically useful reforms that could be proposed. I shall here mention just two, trying to focus on the politically-attractive criticisms and leaving aside many technical critiques and nuances.

First, the inflation target that Brown gives to the Bank of England is flawed, is widely accepted to be flawed, and is only not reformed because of Brown's notional commitment eventually to join the euro. We should openly criticize this and propose an alternative. The current target, a 2% annual rise in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), was introduced when Gordon Brown announced that his five tests for euro membership had not been met. It was explicitly introduced in order to promote convergence between the UK and Eurozone economies - they use the same consumer prices index (usually called the "Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices" (HICP)).

About one fifth of household costs in the UK are housing costs, but the CPI has no housing costs component. This is not because there is some argument against having a housing costs component. It is simply because there are technical statistical difficulties in formulating a common way to account for housing costs that will work across the whole Eurozone. These would not apply to a UK-only measure. The only reason it isn't done is because of Brown's notional commitment eventually to joing the euro. This commitment is damaging UK monetary policy, and everyone knows it.

Andrew Lilico: The Difference between a modern Conservative and a Blairite

Why are you a Conservative?  How are your views different from those of a New Labour supporter?  How do you believe that your views are better than those of a New Labour supporter?  I’ll tell you how I think matters lie.

New Labour is the current manifestation of one of the oldest and longest-serving political programmes still active: Catholic Collectivism.  Catholic Collectivism was the major political doctrine enacted during the middle ages, and has evolved and found new expression in each new age - as all vibrant political philosophies must.  It is a coherent, attractive and powerful foe.  Earlier this century its major expression was Corporatism, a programme explicitly inspired by two Catholic encyclicals - Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931).  New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ is its most recent form.

Catholic Collectivism advocates close co-operation between employers and workers over working conditions, wages and prices, production and exchange, with the state as overseer. It aims to promote social justice and order by substituting collective considerations in the place of competition and the price mechanism.  Catholic Collectivism has always promoted a pan-European hierachy, and still does.  New Labour’s philosophy adds a populist side, with a collectivist notion of democracy.  For New Labour, democracy is something we do collectively.  It is how we ‘rule ourselves’.

For New Labour the People’s Will is sovereign.  Focus groups and opinion polls are not mere marketing devices, as some naive Conservatives suppose.  They are how New Labour’s policies find their moral legitimacy.  New Labour wants to reflect the People’s Will, so that those who oppose it are automatically wrong — they oppose the People.

What today’s Conservativism offers — as reflected in its intellectuals and in the instincts of its members, albeit not in the programmes offered by our leadership for the past seventeen years — is quite different.  It is a somewhat newer philosophy than Labour’s, but it has a good pedigree.  Modern Conservatism reflects closely its Whiggish tradition.  The Whigs were the dominant party for most of the eighteenth century.  Famous Whigs of this period include Walpole, the two Pitts, and Burke.

Towards the end of that century the party split into two factions - the Pittites and the Foxites.  Over time the Pittite faction came to be called ‘Tories’ (though they had had nothing to do with the seventeenth century party of that name).  This faction went on to form the Conservative Party in about 1830.  During the 1830s many members of the Foxite faction (now called ‘Whigs’) defected to the Conservative Party, including Edward Stanley, later a Conservative Prime Minister as Lord Derby. The remains of the Whig Party defected to the Conservatives in the 1880s on the Irish Question.  The Conservative Party is thus the inheritor of the entire eighteenth-century Whiggish tradition, and modern Conservatism reflects this tradition very closely.

In modern Conservatism we can identify four key Whiggish principles — a New Whig Agenda around which our future policies could be formed.  These principles are:

• favouring Parliament over the Executive
• favouring the interests of small traders over concentrated wealth
• favouring toleration of non-conformists
• promoting ordered liberty against the arbitrary powers of the State

In short, the New Whig is the champion of the individual and the underdog.

Andrew Lilico: House of Electors

The Labour government is committed to further reform of the House of Lords.  The Conservative Party’s main position (albeit on a free vote) appears to be to favour a substantial measure of election.  I have previously set out why I think this should be a whipped issue, and why I disagree with having an elected Upper Chamber.  In this article I wish to set out what I would propose, instead.

The proper order is to understand what the Upper Chamber is for, and then to specify a membership that meets that purpose.  My previous article specified its key legislative purpose and powers.  To summarize, this purpose is to provide a block on the democratic chamber and an alternative source of action from it, in respect of non-money matters of order and liberty, in order to preserve and promote ordered liberty.  Thus its powers would be equal to the Commons in respect of non-money bills (it could not be over-ridden and would have equal power of initiative), whilst it would not consider money bills at all.  (The Speakers of Commons and Electors would determine, and in case of dispute, the monarch would be the final authority upon, what did and did not constitute a money bill.)  As discussed last week, another purpose I would see for it would be to select the new Monarch upon the death of the previous monarch — hence my proposal of the name: “House of Electors”.

Andrew Lilico: Should we care about the demise of the constitutional monarchy?

Certain elements of Gordon Brown’s proposed constitutional reforms have received extensive discussion — in particular the abolitions of the royal prerogative in respect of war and in respect of the ratification of international treaties.  However, the two most important elements did not even merit a mention in the BBC’s coverage: the power to request the dissolution of Parliament and the power over recall of Parliament.  To be fair to Gordon Brown his speech on the matter gave these elements due prominence, but subsequent discussion has been almost absent.

These proposals have been spun as "returning power to Parliament" — as if it were the royal prerogative, rather than the excessive use of whipping and guillotines, announcement of key measures in newspapers rather than Parliament, the majority of legislation passing through European institutions and UK regulators and for which MPs are rubber-stampers at best, and so on were the true complaint of those regretting Parliament’s loss of status.  But be that as it may, I wish to focus on these measures as they are, rather than to dismiss them as a cosmetic distraction.  For though their intention might be cosmetic, their effect would be profound.  In particular, removing the power of the monarch to request the dissolution of Parliament and the power over recall of Parliament would eliminate two of the key elements of the constitutional monarchy, leaving only the power to appoint ministers and the power to withhold assent to legislation (as well as some limited role in resolving constitutional crises — though without the power to dissolve Parliament, the monarch’s ability to force such as resolution would be limited).

Andrew Lilico: The value of choice for those that don't choose

“Choice” is a buzz-word in many policy debates. Politicians from all parties now talk about expanding choice in public services such as health and education. Osborne has attempted to paint our point of disagreement with Brown as being about "choice versus voice". Yet promoting choice remains controversial for many, and even those in favour often seem confused about who should be choosing what, and why.

The most common argument against the extension of choice usually runs something like this: extra choice is all very well for those that have the time and resources to research what is available, or those that have sufficient wealth to choose widely. In contrast, ordinary people do not want choices — they just want reliable, high-quality services in their neighbourhood.

Behind this argument lies the assumption that the only people to benefit from choice are the ones who actually choose. So if well-informed parents choose to send their children to a better school, all those left behind won’t gain anything. Or if a minority of patients choose to be treated at a shiny new hospital in the next town, the majority using the local hospital will be stuck with the same poor service. Extra choice seems to benefit the middle-class or the savvy, but is of little help (or even harm) to those that are poorer, less well informed or more vulnerable.