Maurice Saatchi: These are our values

Lord Saatchi restates the values of the Centre for Policy Studies as it celebrates its 35th anniversary.

Two in every three voters gave their allegiance to “None of the above” at the recent EU elections. As we know, confidence in the political process has been replaced by disilluionsment and cynicism.

It need not be like this. There is an alternative. As Lady Thatcher is fond of saying, “Circumstances change, values endure”. So on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of its founding by Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph, the Centre for Policy Studies is proud to declare its values.

• A rising tide lifts all ships.

• A bigger cake means a bigger slice for everyone.  But first you have to create the wealth to make the cake bigger.

• Caring that works costs cash – the Good Samaritan shows that first you need to money in order to do the good works.

• Lower tax is good – for moral reasons, because it means more freedom and choice for individuals; and for economic reasons, because lower tax rates can mean higher tax revenues and more wealth creation.

• A smaller state is required; the Government is already far too big.

• A man or woman has a right to spend what he or she earns, to own property, to have the State as servant and not as master; that these are the essence of a free country and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.

• People are not numbers in a State computer; they should be seen as individuals. 

• Everyone has the right to be unequal.  No one, thank heaven, is quite like anyone else.

• The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

• The essence of mankind is the power of choice; the glory and dignity of man is that it is he who chooses, and is not chosen for.

• Human dignity resides in independence, individuality, self-determination.

• The greatest restriction on the liberty of the citizen is a complete absence of money.

• It is wrong that the majority of people in Britain are financially beholden to the State. This makes the State the master; the complicated tax and benefit system the chief instrument of its power.

• A paternalist government, based on the benevolence of a ruler who treats his subjects as dependent children, is the greatest conceivable despotism and destroys all freedom.

• When a man or a woman stands up for an ideal or strikes out against injustice, people are filled with hope; which is why idealism is more satisfying than pragmatism.

• People have been tortured and died for these principles which, so at any rate they believed, were universal and binding on all men; part of the human essence in virtue of which men were rightly called men. 

• We cannot break these principles, without feeling that we had forfeited all rights to human respect.  We could not betray them and face ourselves or others.

To explore the new world that is opening up, the Centre for Policy Studies is now hunting for real ideas with the zeal of a prospector hunting gold. If you agree with these aspirations and want to play a part, then please visit us at www.cps.org.uk.